And yet, every year there are thousands of strikes and lock-outs in Europe and America—­the most severe and protracted contests being, as a rule, the so-called “sympathy strikes,” which are entered upon to support locked-out comrades or to maintain the rights of the unions.  And while a portion of the Press is prone to explain strikes by “intimidation,” those who have lived among strikers speak with admiration of the mutual aid and support which are constantly practised by them.  Every one has heard of the colossal amount of work which was done by volunteer workers for organizing relief during the London dock-labourers’ strike; of the miners who, after having themselves been idle for many weeks, paid a levy of four shillings a week to the strike fund when they resumed work; of the miner widow who, during the Yorkshire labour war of 1894, brought her husband’s life-savings to the strike-fund; of the last loaf of bread being always shared with neighbours; of the Radstock miners, favoured with larger kitchen-gardens, who invited four hundred Bristol miners to take their share of cabbage and potatoes, and so on.  All newspaper correspondents, during the great strike of miners in Yorkshire in 1894, knew heaps of such facts, although not all of them could report such “irrelevant” matters to their respective papers.(10)

Unionism is not, however, the only form in which the worker’s need of mutual support finds its expression.  There are, besides, the political associations, whose activity many workers consider as more conducive to general welfare than the trade-unions, limited as they are now in their purposes.  Of course the mere fact of belonging to a political body cannot be taken as a manifestation of the mutual-aid tendency.  We all know that politics are the field in which the purely egotistic elements of society enter into the most entangled combinations with altruistic aspirations.  But every experienced politician knows that all great political movements were fought upon large and often distant issues, and that those of them were the strongest which provoked most disinterested enthusiasm.  All great historical movements have had this character, and for our own generation Socialism stands in that case.  “Paid agitators” is, no doubt, the favourite refrain of those who know nothing about it.  The truth, however, is that—­to speak only of what I know personally—­if I had kept a diary for the last twenty-four years and inscribed in it all the devotion and self-sacrifice which I came across in the Socialist movement, the reader of such a diary would have had the word “heroism” constantly on his lips.  But the men I would have spoken of were not heroes; they were average men, inspired by a grand idea.  Every Socialist newspaper—­ and there are hundreds of them in Europe alone—­has the same history of years of sacrifice without any hope of reward, and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, even without any personal ambition.  I have seen families living without knowing what would