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AMERICAN SYNDICALISM

are to have "collective efficiency, in helping themselves." To be sure, this mass-method does not lend itself to the convenience of the superior class as in the older ways of charity, but self-reliance may be the gainer.

The fervors that bring great masses of labor together, quenching for the time all pettiness and bickering, consuming mean enmities among leaders, are priceless. By the help of this deepened "class consciousness" trade unionism in the world has built itself into a tower of strength. It has made "collective bargaining" possible. It is this enlarged and quickened sense of brotherhood that has won every memorable strike in history, like that of the London dockers of 1886, and that of our miners in 1903. It is the same uplifting that has won the political triumphs of completer suffrage (as in Austria and Belgium) against the "vote of property."

It is difficult to state too strongly the strategic and informing value of the class-conscious appeal, for immediate and practical purposes. But this is not all the story. To pass from these conceded uses to the idea of a "class struggle," over-stimulated and enforced as an unflinching principle, in the manner of the I. W. W., has in it the logic of social dissolution. From long and hard experience, some of the ablest men that Socialism has produced no longer make this mistake. They have learned a far larger thought of interests that infold not "labor" alone, but the whole stumbling, yet climbing race of men and women in the world. They have learned that "interests" bind us up and down, perpendicu-