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146 an impressionable following, whose hopes all the revolutionary' governments appear to have done much to encourage. It is not to be wondered at if the conditions that developed were often weird in the extreme.

In the textile mills, for example, syndicates set out on an ambitious program the most remarkable thing about which, considering the character of the elements from which it received its support, is not that it has not worked with any marked degree of success but that it had the measure of success it did achieve. The unions forced from the mill owners successive increases of pay, they put pressure on the workers that made them all join the syndicate. They succeeded in unionizing shops with remarkable rapidity. They established resistance funds by levy on the income of each man, which were used not only for carrying on the fight against the local employer, but even in aiding the strikes of fellow workmen in other cities—witness the support furnished by the workmen of the Rio Blanco Mills to those of Puebla in 1918.

The extreme methods of class warfare were common. Sabotage by cutting of cloth in the textile mills was frequent. Theft of yarn and cloth reached a point never before approached. Inspection was ineffectual because inspectors were intimidated. The guilty caught in the act could not be convicted, because the laborers controlled the courts. In the old days the workers declared they were nothing in the government and the employers were everything. Now the shoe was on the other foot.

Neither the leadership of these movements nor their methods deserve approval. Neither could have had