Page:The Social General Strike - Arnold Roller (1912).djvu/10

 being torn up and to save the signal-boxes and water-tanks from destruction; and this again would require a large number of soldiers, as the lines are hundreds of miles long.

It would also be necessary to use soldiers to watch the telegraph and telephone lines, and to keep up the postal service. Soldiers would be put in factories, workshops, gas works, and bakeries to produce the necessary provisions. Soldiers would also be needed to protect the blacklegs from the fury of the masses. Before every factory, every warehouse, threatened by the mob, they would have to station military guards.

This, of course, would not only be in large cities; necessarily it would have to be expected that the same thing was going on in the centres of industry in the country, in the mines, smelteries, woollen mills, etc. The Socialistic agitation has carried the idea of expropriation to the remotest centres of industry, and the working men there, having mastered this theory, might begin expropriation of the bourgeois, by taking possession of the warehouses and means of production without the sanction of the dictators of the Labour movement. In the country districts the success of the General Strike would not be merely a Utopia, because the immense expansion of large farming enterprises, as many cases in Hungary, Galicia, Russia, Italy, and Spain have shown, makes it possible to-day to inaugurate immense strikes of farm workers.

Nothing is so contagious and suggestive as rebellion. The farm workers and the poor farmers might imitate the workers of the cities and seize the possessions of great landowners. In recent years it has happened quite frequently that the striking working men marched out into the country, in the villages near the cities, enlightened the farmers and won them by saying to them: "You don't need to pay any more taxes to the State, nor more rent to the landlord, nor more interest to the loan sharks or to the owners of your mortgages—we just burn up all those papers. Your sons do not need to join the army; they can stay at home and help you in the fields; those fields, which are the fruits of your labour, belong to you. Do not fear the soldiers; they have all they can do in the cities, at the railways; they have no time to help the landlords; they can't harm you." In this way order and the safety of property could also be threatened in the country.

It would be an immense task for the army to prevent all this and to protect not only the political, but what is far more difficult, the economic power of the ruling classes.

In this way it would be impossible to centralise the soldiers of the whole country, and send 100,000 well-armed men against a few thousand rebels, because the soldiers would have to maintain order all over the whole country—in the most remote villages as well as in the centres of industry and along all the railway lines.

Probably the idea would then strike the rulers to issue a call for the reserve troops. But they would soon find out that they were faced with a terrible dilemma, because calling in the reserves would be nothing else but calling the striking working men from their comrades to give them guns in their hands?