about three hundred inhabitants. It has thirty rooms without windows."
Elementary sanitary protection is imperilled because "it is almost impossible for them to keep clean and healthy in the miserable, over-crowded tenements which they occupy here."
This far pulsing strike in a neighboring town makes men read this indictment. It opens the mind to evidence that otherwise would have no hearing. It is pitiful enough that such wrecking disturbances should be required even to make us look these evils in the face. But until we learn a new solicitude for things that shame us, this sharp surgery of revolt is to be welcomed.
It is directly to a threatening and rebuking Socialism that Europe owes much of its most effective social legislation. It literally scared society into some of its most elementary duties. Until we can act without threats, threats are our salvation—yes, even the threats of the I. W. W. This service they render, and it is not a mean one. They are telling plain truths to many sections of our community. They are challenging some of our old trade unions,—telling them of their lust for monopoly power: of their tendency to exclusiveness and snobbery toward the unskilled and less fortunate among the laborers. A trade union like some in the glass industry may develop every monopoly vice that capitalism shows at its worst. It may have the same hard complacency, the same indifference, the same need to be convicted of sin that is socially true of us all. I asked one of the oldest and best of our social settlement workers what, in order of demerit, was our chief sin. She said, "The sleep of
