Page:Sanzō Nosaka - A Brief Review of the Labour Movement in Japan (1921).pdf/13

 and threats of the possessing classes. A few of them fled to foreign countries, and a few went over to enemy.

This is but the path through which all social martyrs had to and shall pass boforebefore [sic] their final goal could be attained. One thing, however, is regretful to the utmost,—they died, before they were able to attract the working masses to their Red banner, and before the masses would experience such a proletarian revolutionary rehearsal as the Russian workers experienced in 1905, the French in 1871, the British in Chartist movement. But nobody can blame our earlier Socialists by this reason when taking into consideration the economic and political conditions of the time, which were far from being ripe for social revolution.

At any rate, from 1910 to 1918, the whole Socialist movement went underground. Not a single protest against the capitalist robbery was heard. And the whole of the oppressed classes seemed to be thrown into the whirlpool of bourgeois Social-bettermentism or Class-harmonism.

Not less than a decade after the wholesale collapse of the Trade Unions under one blow of the Police Law of 1900, and only two years after the massacre of leading Socialists and Anarchists, a new glimmer was thrown on the dark world of labour, not by Socialist, but by petit-bourgeois Reformers—that is, the formation of the „Yuai-kai“ (August 1912) by B. Suzuki as the President and a handful of workers in Tokyo, principally for the purpose of educating the working peoples.