of Labor, were heard. This body restored again the more localized power in the trade union.
The Knights of Labor had in its Constitution for Local Assemblies lines calling for "the grand union of all who toil, regardless of sex, of creed, or of color," in the exact vein of Mr. Haywood's latest speech. This had an emotional value like that of a new religion, until the stress of an actual strike revealed the real intensities of local self-interest as against that sublime but shadowy vision,—"the brotherhood of labor as wide as the world, as linked as a chain, with no enemy but the master class."
This level, horizontal identification of labor interests as against all others, deified into a principle of action, wrecked the Knights of Labor, as it will wreck any conceivable body which attempts its application to the bread and butter tasks of daily life. The wage scale of labor in the world varies from at least six dollars a day to five cents a day. Groups of turbaned and dusky creatures from the far East who received in India less than ten cents daily, now work (timidly because always in risk of their lives) up and down the Pacific Coast. With the swift mobilities of steam navigation this contact between a ten-cent standard and a two-or-three-dollar standard has in it more fatalities of enraged enmity than any which exist between "capital and labor." I have seen negroes working in the lower South for sixty cents daily, and this during less than half the days of the year. What "solidarity" is there between these and Butte miners? What acknowledged "solidarity" was there at the Lawrence strike between the lower polyglot workers
