XVII
SOME EFFECTS OF RESPONSIBILITY
The larger world area, from which Syndicalism sprang, on which it has developed and now acts, must be studied, not merely for its origins, but to learn what fate has befallen it; what internal and external difficulties have appeared.
This natural history of the movement in very different countries will enable us to make a closer estimate of its possible destinies in the United States. That a very few years of revolutionary activity in France, for example, should produce an inner schism in which radical and conservative Syndicalists confront each other as in opposing camps instructs us because we see the same beginnings and the same tendency already among our I. W. W. The explanation is almost too simple to be stated. In any large gathering of bread winners, many are married, others want to be; some are well paid and have continuous work, others are ill paid for fitful and uncertain jobs, some are sceptical of revolutionary methods, others are so far satisfied with their wages as to prefer them to doubtful chances. These actual and temperamental differences inevitably come to the surface. Those who are permanently led by the power of a distant and uncertain ideal are few, while those are many who, soon or late, yield to the pressure of the nearer need. This conflict in the estimate of
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