ing business system never was more triumphant or unrepentant. Never did it strip labor closer to the bone. Never did it lug away to private vaults so large a share of that wealth wrung from the toil and sweat of those who labor. From its inner kingdom of finance, its cunning devices of "underwriting" and control of credit, marketing securities, overcapitalization, and such like juggleries, the powers of capitalism so control the final dividing of products as to get absolutely and relatively an increasing pillage for their share. In these round terms of condemnation Syndicalists speak to us of discredited social and economic reform alike. It has no more fundamental characteristic than this.
No man believing this could escape the syndicalist logic. If for nearly three generations, all the stupendous energies to curb the competitive spirit working through capitalism, have come to nothing; if these energies, working through local and parliamentary activities have left us relatively more enfeebled than ever before the tyrannies of private capital, why should further appeal to politics and "reforms" inspire a spark of hope?
Syndicalism represents this "army of the disillusioned." As one of them writes—"In good faith we asked elected officials to get redress through new laws only to find that, one by one, each spouting coward lost himself body and soul to the real interests of the proletariat. When we had seen John Burns, Millerand, Viviani Briand and scores of lesser socialist officials yield to the tawdry fopperies of bourgeois entertainers and official ceremonies, we got onto
