Page:George Soule - The Intellectual and the Labor Movement.djvu/5



It is now many years ago that Prince Peter Kropotkin wrote his famous appeal to young "intellectuals" to cast in their lot with the labor movement—to the poets, the painters, the sculptors, the musicians, who understood that their "true mission and the very interests of art itself" were with labor; to the physicians, who had become convinced that the causes of disease must be uprooted; to the lovers of pure science, to all "who possessed knowledge, talent, capacity, industry."

"And remember," declared Kropotkin, "if you do come, that you come not as masters but as comrades in the struggle; that you come not to govern but to gain strength for yourselves in a new life which sweeps upwards to the conquest of the future; that you come less to teach than to grasp the aspirations of the many; to divine them, to give them shape, and then to work without rest and without haste, with all the fire of youth and all the judgment of age, to realize them in actual life. Then and then only will you lead a complete, a noble, a rational existence. Then you will see that your every effort on this path bears with it fruit in abundance, and this sublime harmony once established between your actions and the dictates of your conscience will give you powers you never dreamt lay dormant in yourselves.

"The never-ceasing struggle for truth, justice and equality among the people, whose gratitude you will earn—what nobler career can the youth of all nations desire than this?"

This and similar appeals made before and since, and, most of all, the great, crying need of the times have, during the last hundred years, irresistibly aligned men and women of keen mind and fine idealism on the side of labor. A host of them we find in Europe alone—Ibsen, Shaw, Hauptmann, Maeterlinck, Galsworthy, Carpenter, Masefield, among the dramatists and poets; Tolstoi, Zola, Hugo, Turgieneff, France, Gorky, Wells, Rolland, Barbusse, among the novelists; John Stuart Mill, Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, Sorel, Lagardelle, Place, Lenin, the Webbs, the Hobsons, Gide, Cole, Kautsky, Hilferding, among the economists; Ruskin, Morris, Crane, Millet, Meunier, Wagner, among the artists and musicians; Alfred Russel Wallace, Lombroso, Ferri, Labriola, Frederic Harrison, Grant Allen, Bertrand Russel, Albert Einstein, among the scientists and philosophers; Lassalle, Jaures, Mazzini, Adler, the Liebknechts, Snowden, Vandervelde, Trotsky, Macdonald, Branting, Longuet, among the orators and the parliamentarians; Robert Owen, St. Simon and Fourier, among the Utopian writers; and men and women of rare attainments in every line of intellectual endeavor.

The great majority of these "traders in ideas," as Barbusse has it, have not only had a passionate desire to serve labor in its immediate struggles, but to assist the worker in his age long battle toward a worthier status—toward a higher order of industrial society.