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GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
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that game. Now we know where to look. What is to be done will be done directly by ourselves, the working class, and we will forge the weapons to do it."

This bitterness of disappointment had wide expression in France before any "philosopher" (Sorel, Berth, Lagardelle or the supposed succor of Professor Henri Bergson) had given it more oracular expression. In the United States it is the same. Several years before our "intellectuals" furnished a literary ritual to the I. W. W., hundreds of soap-box evangelists had been telling their listeners to turn their backs both upon political reform and upon the whole "scavenger brood of trade union cormorants." "Until the working class turns to itself, every day is lost." As these disappointments gain in volume, literary organs, East and West, spring up to give them voice. From men of university training, we hear that "the proletariat is losing ground actually and relatively." "Against labor, capitalism is more and more holding its own." It grows more and more powerful. It does this because it has affiliations, economic and political, which give it such strategic pliancy that it can shift its ground, adapt itself to hostile legislation, to trade unions—which it honestly thinks a scourge and a nuisance; to costly welfare adjuncts, even to city and state ownership, without losing an atom of its essential dominance.

Mr. English Walling's able book Socialism As It Is, is filled with convictions and evidence on this point. When Col. Roosevelt gave out his program at Chicago (August, 1912), it was attacked from many quarters as "Socialistic." Socialist papers twitted him with