Syndicalism was born. It was only a more concrete and acute form of that chagrin at the failure of parliaments and legislatures which the people of many countries have come to feel, and none more rebelliously than we in the United States.
It is thus not alone the revelation that politics and trade unions work so feebly and so tardily, Socialism also brought its own discouragements, to those who are now Syndicalists. Socialism is long enough in the field to have furnished its own "history of disappointment."
Socialism has democratized hope, and it is nobly to its credit that it has done this; but it will also be one of its most enduring and exacting disciplines. If it incites lively anticipations, they must be satisfied. The socialist impeachment has smeared the existing order as with pitch, and at the same time fixed all eyes on its own radiant picture of the world that is to be when "land and the tools are restored to those who labor."
In nothing is Socialism more useful than that it has carried new ardors of expectation and faith to the huddled masses lower in the scale. It has done this at the very time when these masses refuse longer to be put off with other worldly substitutes. That we have come so near accepting poverty, unemployment, prostitution and sweated wages as practical fatalities which must always abide with us, has as little moral excuse as to take small pox or dirty milk as fatalities. Socialism, as much as any other single influence, has forced on the coming war against these immemorial dishonors. These with economic changes have made
