"I'll tell you what he is, Yetta," Mabel volunteered. "He's a—"
"No, I'll tell her myself," Walter interrupted. "If you want it in one word, I'm a syndicaliste. We haven't any English word for it."
"He believes in a general strike," Mabel explained, "although not one trade strike in ten really succeeds."
"Exactly and because," Walter assented emphatically.
"He believes," Braun supplemented, "that although the working people haven't enough class consciousness to vote together we can ask them to fight together."
"Exactly and once more exactly! I hate to talk, Yetta, because—as I confessed to you before these two noble examples of self-sacrifice came in—I haven't the nerve to practise my beliefs. I hate to talk, and I've never done anything else. But I've got just as definite a creed as Isadore.
"A general strike has more hope of success than a dozen little strikes, because it's a strike for liberty—and that's the only thing that interests all the working class. The trade strikes are for a few extra pennies. And when one of them does succeed, it's because of some bigger enthusiasm than was written in their demands. You went right to the heart of the matter last night when you said you had been striking so as not to be slaves. I'll bet you've seen it when you talked to the other unions. Which of your demands interested them most? Dollars to doughnuts it was 'recognition of the union.' They all have demands of their own about wages and hours. But when you say 'union' to them, you're saying liberty. You're appealing to something bigger than considerations of pay—to their very love of life.
"The basis of a General Strike must be an ideal which is shared by every working-man. The simon-pure unionists, the A. F. of L., the Woman's Trade Union League, are fighting for little shop improvements, different in every trade. Sometimes—often—one set of demands is in conflict with another. The one thing that holds the movement of the workers closer together is this brilliant idea of union. And the leaders are busily preaching disunion.
"Read any history of labor and you'll see. First it was every man for himself. Then shop unions and each shop for itself. Then all the workmen of one town. Now, its national trade-unions. To-morrow it will be industrial unions. The change has already begun. We already have the Allied Building Trades. Mabel's keen on allying the various branches of garment workers. The miners have gone further. They have a real industrial union. That's the next step. We'll have the typesetters, pressmen, folders, newsboys, all in one big newspaper union. Engineers, switchmen, firemen, conductors, roundhouse and repair-shop men all in a big brotherhood of railroad men. Twenty gigantic industrial unions in place of the hundreds of impotent little trade organizations. No one can look the facts in the face and deny either the need of the change or the actual progress towards it.