Some foreign critics and some critics at home are very severe upon the backwardness of the labor movement in the United States, and in these criticisms there is a large element of truth.  Yet there is one difficulty under which we labor on this continent, which these critics do not take into consideration.  That is the primal one of the immense size of the country, along with all the secondary difficulties involved in this first one.  There has never been any other country even attempting a task so stupendous as ours—­to organize, to make one, to obtain good conditions for today, to insure as good and better conditions for tomorrow, for the wage-earning ones out of a population of over ninety millions spread over three million square miles.  And with these millions of human beings of so many different races, with no common history and often no common language, this particular task has fallen to the lot of no other nation on the face of this earth.  Efforts at organization of the people and by the people, are perpetually being undermined.  Capitalism is nationally fairly well organized, so that there has been all the time more and more agreement among the great lords of finance, not to trespass on one another’s preserves.  But it is not so with the workers.  Even in trades where there exists a formal national organization, there will be towns and states where it will either be non-existent or extremely weak, so that workers, especially the unskilled, as they drift from town to town in search of work, tend to pass out of, rather than into, the union of their trade.  And thus members of every trade organization live in dread of the inroad into their city or their state of crowds of unorganized competitors for their particular kind of employment.  Why, if it were Great Britain or Germany, by the time we had organized one state, we should have organized a whole country.

But the big country is ours, and the big task must be shouldered.

It is only natural that trade-union organization should have progressed furthest in those occupations which, as industries, are the most highly developed.  The handicrafts of old, the weaving and the carving and the pottery, have through a thousand inventions become specialized, and the work of the single operative has been divided up into a hundred processes.  These are the conditions, and this the environment under which the workers most frequently organize.  The operations have become more or less defined and standardized, and the operatives are more readily grouped and classified.  Also, even amid all the noise and clatter of the factory, they have opportunity for becoming acquainted, sometimes while working together, or at the noon hour, or when going to or coming from work.  There are still few enough women engaged in factory work who have come into trade unions, but the path has at least been cleared, both by the numbers of men who have shown the way, and by the increasing independence of women themselves.  Similar reasoning