Page:American Syndicalism (Brooks 1913).djvu/133

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE GENERAL STRIKE
121

back alley and into all work that is hardest and most dangerous. Society forgets it. The trade unions that should befriend it forget it too. Now comes the I. W. W. with the first bold and brotherly cry which these ignored masses have ever heard."

With no fussy qualifications, this must be granted to the I. W. W. No violence of speech or deed can honorably deprive them of this stirring element in their entreaty. As will be shown later, it is with this that we must learn to coöperate or fail miserably in social duty, and in the best uses of our social experience.

It is again only when we recognize this saving element in the propaganda that we can understand why leaders succeed in making a kind of religion of the general strike. It is because they connect it by intimate association with this over-arching thought of a world brotherhood. As intimately, too, they connect it with the world's waking desire to stop the consenting butcheries of war. Nowhere can we read more uplifting passages against these inhumanities than in syndicalist literature and in the possibility that international brotherhoods of labor may sometime so universally lay down their tools before the threat of war, as to startle the world into some great action against the war infamy.

All this is beyond and above criticism, but these fair dreams are not peculiar to I. W. W. They are shared by millions who bear other names.

Our practical concern is also and largely with things prosaic: with the ways and means through which we are to get possession of the new and regenerated world. Hundreds of differing methods are thrust upon