Of all the folds ready to receive the unfortunates driven out of their unions by the trusts, which is the one least likely to prove dangerous to the state? This question does not seem to concern the trusts at all. They consider all these "isms" as equally vile, impractical, and obnoxious. Yet, if they would only give to this matter one-half the attention that they give to their business affairs, they could not fail to see that every union they crush raises for them a crop of political enemies who, if they show as much ability in political organization as they have shown in economic organization—and there is no reason why they should not—cannot but eventually secure a large majority in our legislatures. When they have done this; when they have the writing of a new constitution; when the police, the militia, the army, and the law courts are on their side, is it not better that this majority be intelligent and educated, as it might if Socialism were rightly understood, and not uneducated and violent, as it will certainly be if Socialism is not rightly understood? The conclusion to which we seem to be driven is that, so long as labor struggles with capital on the economic field through strikes, boycotts, and litigation, it is bound to be beaten; but that every victory of capital on the economic field shortens its reign; for it drives labor to abandon the economic field, where it is weak, for the political field, where it is strong; and that the evidence of constructive ability and self-restraint exhibited by labor in the organization and administration of the unions, indicates that that same ability exercised in the political field will make it invincible there:
"We are many; they are few."
If this be so, then capital can no longer afford to disregard or misrepresent the political aspirations of the army of labor. It may indeed turn out in the words of the Cumæan Sybil:
"Via prima salutis
Quâ minime reris Graia pandetur ab urbe."
Our way of safety may be—not in the defeat of labor—but in its enlightenment.
We have before us two alternatives: We can continue to fight labor; to crush it; to create unemployment one day and wring our hands over it the next; to arm labor, educate it, and force it to organize an army of discontent that will eventually outvote capital and, with little or no preparation for its task, seize the reins of government. Or we can leave the fighting of labor to the trusts from which the whole public suffers as well as the workingman, and ourselves join in a reorganization of political forces that will make the legitimate demands of the disinherited our own, and at last lay the foundations of the Democracy that Lincoln through the smoke of the Civil War dimly foresaw.
FOOTNOTES:
[78] Since writing this I see that Jaurès makes exactly the same observation in Van Norden's Magazine, August, 1909.
[79] The metronymic tribes were tribes in which there was practically no paternal relation. The mother was the head of the family and the offspring took her name. This condition of things prevailed for some time in ancient Egypt.