Page:My Further Disillusionment In Russia.djvu/129

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SALESMEN OF THE REVOLUTION
103

within the existing conservative trade union bodies. The very people who a year ago had issued the famous Bull of twenty-one points, they who had excommunicated every heretic unwilling to submit to the orders of the Holy See—the Third International—and who had applied every invective to labour in the 2nd and the 2½ Internationals, were now making overtures to the most reactionary labour organizations and "resoluting" against the best efforts of the revolutionary pioneers in the Trade Union movement of every country.

Here again the American delegates proved themselves worthy of their hire. Most of them had sprung from the Industrial Workers of the World; had indeed arisen to "fame and glory" on the shoulders of that militant American labour body. Some of the delegates had valiantly escaped to safety, unselfishly preferring the Hôtel de Luxe to Leavenworth Penitentiary, leaving their comrades behind in American prisons and their friends to refund the bonds they had heroically forfeited. While Industrial Workers continued to suffer persecution in capitalistic America, the renegade I. W. W.'s living in comfort and safety in Moscow maligned and attacked their former comrades and schemed to