of the workers that they might use them to gain their objects far more directly than through the tedious ways of politics.[1]
The very right to organize had been withheld as late as 1884. When permission came, unions burst into such efflorescence that in ten years, more than two thousand active organizations were a part of the industrial and political life of the nation. The very attempt to crib them had turned them over to socialist influence. This meant political action. They captured towns by the score. Besides mayors and local officials, they sent their own men to the Chamber of Deputies and were the first in Europe to count Socialists among the Ministers of State.
Ten years ago, I visited several of these communes under socialist administration, hearing from Socialists for the first time the pique and irritation because their officials were doing so little for the cause. I have seen no socialist city with even six months' experience in the United States, where this same precocious complaint could not be heard. It is shallow and unfair criticism, but it shows us the sources of Syndicalism.
Two or three years later it was written: "We Socialists in ninety Communes have benches full of Deputies and two Members of the Government, but what have they done for Socialism? They are busy, most of them, explaining why they can do nothing. One critic said, 'The only talent they had developed was "le talent de s'execuser"; it is all talk, talk.'" Thus out of the sorrow or the rage of disappointment
- ↑ The word syndicalism is the counterpart of our own term trade unionism,
