Page:American Syndicalism (Brooks 1913).djvu/15

Rh socialism in its more revolutionary character is from now on to have its most fruitful field in the United States. The conditions and the mechanism through which it develops are in many ways more favorable here than in any country of Europe. Our prosperities, our higher wages, the mobility of the labor class, the immediate effect of our freer ways upon the incoming peasant all work to this end. Armies of these simple folk pass violently to the tense and unwonted excitements of city life or to industrial centers charged with hostilities between capital and labor. There is no saving transition between the habits and traditions which they bring and the new life to which they come. Of all that is deepest in these habits and traditions, our own ignorance is so elaborate and complete as to constitute a danger no less threatening. We have long sought comfort in thinking of our country as immune from really serious social agitations. German socialism used to be accounted for as "a reaction against the monarchy." English "landlord monopoly" was given as an explanation of the collectivist uprising in that country. But France is a republic and her land is largely in the hands of small farmers, yet socialists sit in her cabinet and a socialist has been Prime Minister. Denmark is a nation of small farmers who own most of the land and are not oppressed by their monarch, but there has developed there one of the most powerful socialist parties in Europe. In the North of Italy (as in the regions round about Mantua) there is a vigorous and growing socialism among agricultural workers quite as aggressive as any that the towns can show.