Vol. XLV

No. 8

W

HAT is this religion they speak about? They tell you it is something given by a God. Humbug! Where was that God when you were tramping these snow-piled streets last winter? Where was that God when the biting winds tore through your rags as you slept on these benches? If there was a God, why didn't He feed and clothe you? If there was a religion, why didn't its ministers give you a place to sleep? They may bluff you with humbug about God and religion, but let me tell you the truth. God can't feed you. Religion can't warm you. Ministers won't clothe you. Your only chance is to act. The things you need are all around you. Go get them. If they use guns to keep us away, 'we can use bombs to force our way. There is your hope."

This is a sample of the new religion of dynamite. You can obtain other samples, some bolder, others less inflamed, any time you happen to pass through Union Square, New York. For it is there that one hears the orators of the Industrial Workers of the World fighting for control of the working classes. It is not without reason that we say they are fighting for control of the workers. For over yonder, in the same square, you can see on another soap-box the Socialistic orator haranguing the crowd in strident tones and con

demning most vigorously the principles of the I. W. W. Just to the left you find the labor-union representative voicing his appeal to the masses and crying down the radicalism of the other two organizations. And still they come! For on the same square, surrounded by another crowd, you see the witty, selfconfident anti-Socialist propagandist winning the audience with his humorous diagnosis of the I. W. W. and Socialistic difficulties. These oratorical tilts have resulted, on several occasions, in violent clashes between the different parties, clashes that have always given the police cause for quick action and the hospital internes extra work. So there is reason for asserting that the Industrial Workers of the World are fighting, oratorically and otherwise, for control over the masses.

This is the New York situation and there is no special reason for making New York an exception. San Francisco has felt the force of I. W. W. activity. The Western mining towns are scarred and blackened from the results of the I. W. W. campaign. They stirred Colorado as it had never been stirred before. Chicago has heard them and is bound to meet them again in the future. Steubenville and Akron, Ohio, trembled before them. Where is the manufacturing or mining town of any importance that has not listened to the I. W. W.'s passionate protest against

the exploitation of the working classes, against the continued enriching of the rich and the further pauperizing of the poor? And still, while so many have a nodding acquaintance with the tactics of this I. W. W., there are very few who have really understood the interplay of forces that is driving it on, the lamentable social conditions in which it has found root and the wide horizon of tolerance which it overshadows.

Go back again to one of these meetings, one of these open-air gatherings. Just think of the different sentiments with which that gathering is viewed by different people. Analyze them psychologically, and you have the shades of tolerance or intolerance of the general run of the country's citizens.

The opposition of the Socialists to the I. W. W, has been intimated in the op

position of their orators. It is an amusing antagonism, because both moveinents trace their origin to a common philosophy. Marx is the scientific background for both systems, and each aims at an amelioration of human misery through a more universal distribution. of the world's goods. The margin of difference is found, theoretically at least, in the different plans by which the different systems hope to reach a common goal. Socialists are content to educate the masses to an understanding of their movement: they are satisfied to carry on an active propaganda and to win their success through the ballot-box. This propaganda is not always logical, sometimes it is untruthful, but it is professedly peaceable. The I. W. W. plan of battle is essentially one of direct action. The present order of things, ac

cording to them, is so unbearable that tolerance and temporizing tactics are cut of the question. With the Socialists, they agree that the abuses of the capitalistic system can be removed only by the removal of capitalism. But they disagree with the procrastinating program of Socialism, and insist that relief must come to the poor, not through legislation and its concomitant delays, but through the direct action of the poor themselves. This is the principle which spurs them on to those acts deemed by every one they class as conservatives to be subversive of all political, social and religious peace.

The opposition of the labor unions to the Industrial Workers of the World

is even more bitter, but more easily understood. The principles around which the American Federation of Labor is built are not socialistic. The federation aims to assist the individual workman, to raise his wages, to shorten his working hours, to improve the working environment, to elevate his home by uniting the individual workmen and meeting the more powerful position of the employer with the united bargaining ability of the whole working class. The union label, the black-list, the lockout and the strike are powerful sanctions of unionism, but they are not socialistic. This is a theoretical resumé of Unionism based on the principles of the movement. As a matter of fact, so