"class warfare" makes this issue of probable violence hardly worth discussion.[1]
It is a damaging objection to any body of principles which carries with it as practical necessities so much approved destruction as "direct action" and sabotage imply. Economic and cultural benefits which the race has thus far garnered are not to be dealt with after the jaunty manner of the I. W. W. It may have the frankest admission, that these social accumulations have grown up through every imperfection known to human cunning. Private appropriation has assumed excesses of inequality that now threaten us as insidiously as any other disease. We have learned that a large part of this inequality is artificial and unnecessary. There is no higher statesmanship in the world than that which now sees this, admits it, and aims constructively to correct it. But the crude simplicity of methods which assume violence is childishly incompetent for the task put upon it. No section of society would suffer from it as the weak would suffer. Whatever place Syndicalism makes for itself in the coöperative service of reform, its ways must be supplemented and controlled by those to whom experience has brought some enlightened sense of what society is and what so-
- ↑ In the New Review, Jan. 18, Mr. English Walling says: "Violence also is usually condoned on the unconsciously humorous ground that if the police and militia were not present, there would be little violence. No unions advocate violence, but none surrender to the law those among their members who succumb to temptation under critical or exceptional circumstances, and it is rarely that they do not furnish defense funds. Even the I. W. W. does not advocate violence, but it is more frank in its attitude towards it than the older unions."
