Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/9



been under the necessity of observing the Bolshevist movement from close quarters for many years. I have had to contend with it almost daily long before it seized the power in Russia in the name of Communism and Soviet. Trotzky is only one of the Bolshevist leaders who long sojourned in this country to plague the American labor movement. And the few thousands who have returned to Soviet Russia represent but a small part of the forces of revolutionary mania in America. These forces are not strong enough seriously to threaten American labor—provided they are isolated and understood. But they must be understood and isolated.

While the labor movement of the world is gradually but steadily shaking itself free of the illusion that the Soviets are a workingmen's government—the first workingmen's government—conservative powers are beginning to give them commercial and political support and a part of the press is engaged in finding virtuous reasons for this policy. The pace was set by the British-Soviet trade agreement and by Lloyd George's speech in Parliament in which he contended, with an intentional paradox but still quite seriously, that the Bolshevists had suddenly become moderates. The work of labor in repudiating Bolshevism has thus become more difficult. Certain conservatives and reactionaries pretend—for motives of their own—that they no longer have much objection to