Page:American Syndicalism (Brooks 1913).djvu/139

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THE GENERAL STRIKE
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yond the capitalist and bourgeois classes; it appeared sullenly in the labor ranks. Several thousand agriculturists had been organized, but they could not be kept from furnishing food to the public, because they saw the greater number of their neighbors (who were not organized) making good money. The man on the land would not recognize his interests as one with city labor.

Even within the city, as the little shops stopped credit and the promised funds from foreign trade unions proved pitiably inadequate, a large labor contingent began to grumble. Their families were already on the verge of suffering.

It is known that the industrial world generally lives from hand to mouth; that all our available food supplies would vanish in a few weeks if production were actually to stop. Every trade union, no matter how imposing a figure its funds have reached, sees these accumulations disappear with shocking rapidity when its main membership lays down its tools. This lesson came with gloomy surprise in the Swedish city.

Seven years before, a purely political strike against gross irregularities in the suffrage had left a tradition of hope in favor of the "general economic strike." The analogy proved deceptive. The "strike," moreover, became largely a lockout against claims set up by the younger and more radical "socialist league." Syndicalists may get this crumb of comfort from the failure of this strike. It seems to have produced a considerable anti-trade union and anti-political movement, because it failed. They now have their daily paper and a fighting organization.

There is not a practical use to which one of these