of solidarity that strengthens month by month as it awakens to the nature of its task. It is an awakening immeasurably stimulated by critical and intensive studies that have become the best stock in trade for a dozen magazines and weeklies of the highest class. These disclosures of things sick and sickening among capitalistic disorders pour their steady current into every socialistic sheet. One of them has it, "We Socialists could discredit the present business and political system if we did nothing but re-edit and popularize what the big magazines are saying. They get a lot of better stuff than we can get."
The fateful note in the Lawrence strike was not in that distracted city. It was in the impression made upon almost every outside investigator. It was in the throb of fellow feeling, not for manager or for stockholder, but for strikers deprived of organization. In more than eighty articles in every variety of publication, from the Atlantic Monthly to the great dailies, this sympathy appeared. To my certain knowledge three persons with large possessions stood ready to help these strikers, if the case had gone too far against them.
I am not here defending this sympathy. I do not pass upon it as fair or even intelligent, I point to it solely as a fact: a fact very momentous because it has become an increasing part of labor's awakening and entry into politics.
All this has brought a new atmosphere with changed perspective, both in its lights and shadows. It is an atmosphere extremely favorable to the growth of socialism. The fear of the word is obviously passing.
