taken it in hand. The entire practice of these new agitators, he tells us, is "a mere child's disease of the labor union." The most withering censure which Socialists can bestow is to call anything "bourgeois," yet Kautsky finds this word aptly descriptive. Both the theory and practice of Syndicalism "are the expression of the bourgeois spirit which has not been able to adapt itself to modern industrial conditions." He connects the activities in France, where Syndicalism was born, with the undeveloped conditions of labor unions. He thinks Austrian socialists have already got the best of the plague and other European countries will soon be free of it.
That Europe will free herself so easily from this "child's disease" is open to question, but we in this country shall not escape its discipline. The very spirit with which we fight it will, for a long time, help it. We have already added immeasurably to its strength by the use of tactics as little defensible as the practice of the I. W. W. itself. For the gravity of the movement in this country, I shall not offer general or theoretic proofs. The theory, or "philosophy," of the movement will be given, but main stress will be placed upon the practical experience of Syndicalism as it has expressed itself in the last few years.
For some weeks in Europe, I watched one of the first general strikes consciously animated by the syndicalist spirit. It was very dumfounding at that time to hear well-known socialists and trade union veterans both classed as "parasites" and "fakers." It was a violent "sympathetic strike quite in the ordinary style but one to which the name "general"
