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A HISTORY OF DISAPPOINTMENT
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this socialist criticism and arousing possible. The city and industrial center have gathered the workers where they can be reached by the new method. These centers have made organization possible. A thousand socialist papers and an enormous pamphlet literature are in active circulation.

Whatever else may be said of this literature, it stimulates belief in possible social changes that shall enlarge opportunity and distribute economic values with more equal hand. But Socialism will have to pay the same penalty that those have always paid who promise too much. The deepest causes of Syndicalism are economic, but its more obvious and proximate origin lies in these frustrated hopes. It is the child of disillusionment. Those who began it had been over-promised or had come to expect of politics, of the trade union, and of the Socialism then in vogue, far more than each or all of them could deliver.

Out of the chagrin, hopes that no defeat can extinguish in the heart of youth took another flight. The goal toward which it turns is much the same, but the route and the means through which the journey must be made differ from those of politics, of trade unions and of Socialism, as these have hitherto been known. Yet in studying Syndicalism, we are still dealing with labor organization, though it has changed its emphasis and form. We are still occupied with politics, though its whole basis of representation is transformed. Neither are we quite cut loose from Socialism.

What most concerns us in this study and what is at the same time most beset with perplexity is suffi-