Page:American Syndicalism (Brooks 1913).djvu/51

Rh A good second to the question about the scab, concerns the strike itself. It is so incessant; reaches, year after year, in a dozen countries so many millions of people and shows no sign of abating.

What explanation have we of this? In the twitter of the drawing-room it is "perversity," "ignorance," "wickedness," "ingratitude," and with the angered business man, it is oftenest "labor poisoned and misguided by the agitator."

That, at this date, puerilities like these should have influence with rational folk is as strange as it is ominous. Here, as in moving pictures before us, are events involving on any calendar day far more bitterness than the sharp agonies on the down-going Titanic. In that year in the world's workhouse more than four hundred thousand men were out on long strikes and more than a million and a half in lesser ones. With their families this stands for a population like that of a larger state. Nor is there any outer fate of compulsion like that of the Titanic disaster.

The determining majority of these strikers, according to their own law, deliberately took up the burden, the weight of which they know far better than any or all others. The unvoiced misery of a long strike is always in the background. It is among the wives, the weaker workers, the more timid, those that have saved no money, those that have passed their prime, and those in debt or with mortgaged homes. It is among such as these that the main tragedy goes on, and for the thousandth time, it is entered upon. It is these who live in the tradition of defeat and suffering caused by strikes. Veterans are always there to