Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - Socialism and Politics (1903).djvu/10

 10 of Europe and America which has not yielded to political corruption. It is the labour movement, so far as it has hitherto remained strange to the race for seats in Parliament. It may be that here and there the workers belonging to this movement give support to this or that candidate for a seat in a parliament or in a municipalily—but there are already scores of thousands of working men in Spain, in Italy, in France, in Holland, and probably in England too, who quire consciously refuse to take any part, even for fun, in the political struggle. Their main work lies in quite another direction. With an admirable tenacity they organise their unions, within each nation and internationally, and with a still more admirable ardour they prepare the great coining struggle of Labour against Capital: the coming of the international general strike.

One may judge of the terror which this movement, unostensibly prepared by the workers, inspires in the middle classes, by the terrible prosecutions—which have not stopped even at torture—which they have carried on against the revolutionary trade unions in Spain. One may judge of that terror by the infamous repression of the Milan insurrection which was ordered by King Humbert, or by the measures which were going to be taken against railway strikers in Holland. These measures, as is known, were prevented by the splendid act of international solidarity accomplished by the British Dock Labourers' Union, and immediately followed by the menacing declarations of the General Union of the French Syndicates. It hardly need be said that all the Parliamentary Socialists of France, Germany, Spain, &c, headed by the famous Millerand and Jaurès (one year ago this last, was for the general strike—now he writes long articles against it), bitterly oppose this idea of a general strike. But the movement spreads every month, and every month it gains new support and wins new sympathies.

Our first intention was to conclude this series of articles by a general review of the so-called Labour-protecting legislation in different countries, and to show how tar this legislation is due to the Socialist politicians on the one side, and to the