If "power" represented by the I. W. W. is to be used, as they warn us, "to any extent necessary to its purpose" and if capitalism still possesses a fraction of the strength which these adventurers ascribe to it, nothing short of violence in some form can deprive it of its possessions. Legal and political reforms and all the resources of taxation are excluded. To subdue capitalism by the strike, direct action and sabotage can have no meaning apart from the strategic uses which violence and intimidation offer.
Among the reasons why these vigors will fail, is that a most powerful section of the working classes will oppose them to a man. So obvious a fact seems not yet to have the least recognition.
It is true that among prosperous folk, there is much specious canting about the stupendous treasures which labor has stored in savings banks and such like institutions, but the cant of those who insist that labor has nothing, or nothing worth speaking about, is quite as offensive in its distortion.
The truth is that the accumulated savings of very humble people have helped to build every shop and mill and railroad in the land. Hundreds of millions of savings bank deposits and insurance funds are invested in the "machinery of production." It is a small part compared to ownership by the richer classes, but the man with a hundred dollars in the bank is as tenacious of his small savings as the rich are of their greater savings. Our revolutionists think this argument funny and preposterous, but it stands for a fact with which they will have to reckon in every first and last attempt "to take over" the
