Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - Socialism and Politics (1903).djvu/11

 Rh direct pressure exercised by the Labour agitation on the other.

Such a study would have been deeply interesting. Not that we should attribute to this legislation more importance than it deserves. We have often proved that any such law, even if it introduces some partial improvement; always lays upon the worker some new chain, forged by the middle-class State. We prefer the ameliorations which have been imposed by the workers upon their masters in a direct struggle: they are less spurious. However, it is also easy to prove that even those little and always poisoned concessions which have been made by the middle classes to the workers, and which are now represented as the very essence of "practical, scientific" Socialism, stand in no relation to the numerical forces of the political Socialist parties. Such concessions as the limitation of the hours of labour, or of child labour, whenever they represent something real, have always been achieved by the action of the trade-unions—by strikes, by labour revolts, or by menaces of a labour war. They are labour victories—not political victories.

If there was a work in which the conditions of labour and the recent labour legislation were given for each country, it would have been easy to prove the above assertion by a crushing evidence of data. But no such work exists, and consequently we have to mention but a few striking facts.

Our readers will see on another page what a substantial reduction of the hours of labour in the mines was achieved by the great miners' strike of Pennsylvania, and, by the way, the effect which the strike has had upon other branches of American industry. That such long hours as twelve hours, every day of the week (including Sundays), should have existed in Pennsylvania, we need not wonder when we are reminded that every year the Eastern States receive thousands of fresh immigrant miners from Germany and Austria, where, notwithstanding the presence of so many Democrat-Socialists in Parliament, the hours of labour are outrageously long. But precisely because there are no such political go-betweens in the United States the Pennsylvania strike could last long enough to end in a