creasing prosperity of labor. Both have risen, but the well-to-do have gained relatively far more than the wage earner. In the United States, the distance between the large incomes and the small ones seems to have grown steadily through the century. The wage earner's contention that he should have a relatively larger share in wealth-production is justified. As he has had to fight for this in the past, he will fight for it in the future. Socialism puts a new weapon into his hands. To the old weapon of the trade union, it now adds an instrument that cuts deeper and has a longer thrust. That the masses are to use this weapon with all the force and cunning at their command is now a certainty that we need not question. Largely on account of the extent and rawness of our immigration, nowhere will they use it more ruthlessly than in the United States. No nation offers such an arena. The material advantages we put at the disposal of labor; all the stalking laxities that pass for liberty,[1] every easy facility for the widest scattering of revolutionary literature, are illustrations of the field and the occasion we open to this socialistic insurgency as it overflows into new and threatening shapes.
(II)
Especially among our more prosperous folk, if a "quiz" could be held on the causes and nature of the
- ↑ I have seen strikes in which extreme violence lasted for weeks with much shooting, and yet guns and pistols were allowed the freest selling and the saloons faithfully kept open, though they were the direct occasion of brawls, resulting in some of the most brutal cases with which the local court was plagued.
