above, it is trying to organize itself. Slowly and painfully it is trying its limbs and exercising hitherto unused functions. Within a few months that portion of the population which has been regarded with scorn and which has been considered unworthy of recognition by the regular organized trades has made McKees Rocks, Spokane, Lawrence, Little Falls, Canadian Northern, Paterson, Mesaba Iron Range, Fresno and Everett historic names in the American labor movement. The Industrial Workers of the World may be regarded as the first definite step in the organization of the real proletariat.
With the advent of the unskilled into the ranks of organized labor there can be no further blinking or obscuring of the real point at issue between the capitalist and the laborer.
The unskilled laborer knows without any telling that he is exploited at the point of production. No question of taxes can help him, municipalization or nationalization is no remedy for his ills, no scheme of municipal or other reforms can meet the circumstances of his case.
He challenges the whole structure of modern society at its base, the contract of employment. He matches his no-property against all the property of the dominant class, his no-law against the law of the industrial and commercial masters, his ability to starve against all the resources of civilization.
When the unskilled laborer enters the fight he drags the rest of the crafts after him. They must take up his fight. Even the respectable petit-bourgeois socialist must dance to his tune, as is seen in the French chamber where the Socialist representatives vigorously took up the cudgels for Durand, the syndicalist, unjustly sentenced for the killing of a scab.
What is still more remarkable he, by means of the industrial union, builds up a society within society, an "imperium in imperio." He consolidates and harmonizes every branch of wage labor in the industry, until should he declare the present owners expropriated the industry
