they pass, as if caught in rapids that cannot be stemmed, to the most revolutionary limit, as "Class Consciousness" for example passes into "Class War." Our own labor history is here illuminating.
As the Knights of Labor began to totter and the Federation of Labor took shape, the extremists of the "class-war" type formed the "Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance," pitted both against the Federation of Labor and the Knights of Labor. Every difference, every enmity toward the employing class and toward unionism "pure and simple" got more thumping emphasis.
In its later stages, the Knights of Labor were swept by this more revolutionary emotion. This temper has now passed to an order with another lettering—the I. W. W. It has much of the liturgy of the Knights of Labor; much of its more indiscriminate working-class inclusiveness. It has also much of which the Knights of Labor consciously knew little. This consists chiefly in sharpening the fighting edge of every revolutionary weapon in the socialist armory. An hundred Knights of Labor strikes practised sabotage, but they knew not the word, much less had they any philosophy about it. The new warfare has passed the fig-leaf innocencies and consciously clothes itself in pragmatic habits. It has its metaphysic and chooses for expositor, one of the most brilliant among modern philosophers who is thought to dignify and sanction our simpler and more direct activities. No less fateful is it that Syndicalism comes among us at a time when the general atmosphere is electric with rude and querulous discontent; when censure of our main
