attain depth, it may be safely assumed that either one or the other of the old parties or a faction therein will seek to divert its driving force into its own particular party channel.  Should the labor party still persist, the old party politicians, whose bailiwick it will have particularly invaded, will take care to encourage, by means not always ethical but nearly always effective, strife in its ranks.  Should that fail, the old parties will in the end “fuse” against the upstart rival.  If they are able to stay “fused” during enough elections and also win them, the fidelity of the adherent of the third party is certain to be put to a hard and unsuccessful test.  To the outsider these conclusions may appear novel, but labor in America learned these lessons through a long experience, which began when the first workingmen’s parties were attempted in 1828-1832.  The limited potentialities of labor legislation together with the apparent hopelessness of labor party politics compelled the American labor movement to develop a sort of non-partisan political action with limited objectives thoroughly characteristic of American conditions.  Labor needs protection from interference by the courts in the exercise of its economic weapons, the strike and the boycott, upon which it is obviously obliged to place especial reliance.  In other words, though labor may refuse to be drawn into the vortex of politics for the sake of positive attainments, or, that is to say, labor legislation, it is compelled to do so for the sake of a negative gain—­a judicial laissez-faire.  That labor does by pursuing a policy of “reward your friends” and “punish your enemies” in the sphere of politics.  The method itself is an old one in the labor movement; we saw it practiced by George Henry Evans and the land reformers of the forties as well as by Steward and the advocates of the eight-hour day by law in the sixties.  The American Federation of Labor merely puts it to use in connection with a new objective, namely, freedom from court interference.  Although the labor vote is largely “undeliverable,” still where the parties are more or less evenly matched in strength, that portion of the labor vote which is politically conscious of its economic interests may swing the election to whichever side it turns.  Under certain conditions[108] labor has been known even to attain through such indirection in excess of what it might have won had it come to share in power as a labor party.

The controversy around labor in politics brings up in the last analysis the whole problem of leadership in labor organizations, or to be specific, the role of the intellectual in the movement.  In America his role has been remarkably restricted.  For a half century or more the educated classes had no connection with the labor movement, for in the forties and fifties, when the Brook Farm enthusiasts and their associates took up with fervor the social question, they were really alone in the field, since the protracted