has value.  As a stimulus to a programme or ethical generalization, it is the cause of vast inaccuracy and sad injustice.  American syndicalism is not a scheming group dominated by an unconventional and destructive social philosophy.  It is merely a commonplace attitude—­not such a state of mind as Machiavelli or Robespierre possessed, but one stamped by the lowest, most miserable labor-conditions and outlook which American industrialism produces.  To those who have seen at first-hand the life of the western casual laborer, any reflections on his gratitude or spiritual buoyancy seem ironical humor.

“An altogether unwarranted importance has been given to the syndicalist philosophy of the I.W.W.  A few leaders use its phraseology.  Of these few, not half a dozen know the meaning of French syndicalism or English guild socialism.  To the great wandering rank and file, the I.W.W. is simply the only social break in the harsh search for work that they have ever had; its headquarters the only competitor of the saloon in which they are welcome. . . .

“It is a conventional economic truism that American industrialism is guaranteeing to some half of the forty millions of our industrial population a life of such limited happiness, of such restrictions on personal development, and of such misery and desolation when sickness or accident comes, that we should be childish political scientists not to see that from such an environment little self-sacrificing love of country, little of ethics, little of gratitude could come.  It is unfortunate that the scientific findings of our social condition must use words which sound strangely like the phraseology of the Socialists.  This similarity, however, should logically be embarrassing to the critics of these findings, not to the scientists.  Those who have investigated and studied the lower strata of American labor have long recognized the I.W.W. as purely a symptom of a certain distressing state of affairs.  The casual migratory laborers are the finished product of an economic environment which seems cruelly efficient in turning out human beings modeled after all the standards which society abhors.  The history of the migratory workers shows that, starting with the long hours and dreary winters on the farms they ran away from, or the sour-smelling bunk-house in a coal village, through their character-debasing experience with the drifting ‘hire and fire’ life in the industries, on to the vicious social and economic life of the winter unemployed, their training predetermined but one outcome, and the environment produced its type.

“The I.W.W. has importance only as an illustration of a stable American economic process.  Its pitiful syndicalism, its street-corner opposition to the war, are the inconsequential trimmings.  Its strike alone, faithful as it is to the American type, is an illuminating thing.  The I.W.W., like the Grangers, the Knights of Labor, the Farmers’ Alliance, the Progressive Party, is but a phenomenon of revolt.  The cure lies in taking care of its psychic antecedents; the stability of our Republic depends on the degree of courage and wisdom with which we move to the task.”