own capacity for clear thinking; you are lacking in the essentials of sturdy manhood. Many of you have become satisfied to blindly follow where others lead; and so you are often deceived, betraved; and when the smoke of battle clears away you find yourselves defeated and out of jobs. You have often felt disheartened; you have quit the union in despair and disgust, and some of you have turned into scabs.
Thousands who once belonged to unions have become not only non-union men, but scabs and strike-breakers, and in their desperation have turned upon the union and become its most bitter enemies. If you will call the roll of the strike-breakers who gather here in Chicago and elsewhere when union workers are out on strike, you will find that nearly all of them are ex-union men; men who once wore the badge of union labor, believed in it, and marched proudly beneath the union banner.
What do you think of a unionism that creates an army for its own overthrow? There is something fundamentally wrong with that kind of unionism.
Long since, and after years of study and experience, I became convinced that the old unions were not fit to cope successfully with the enemy of the working class, and that a new organization was an imperative necessity.
In the Industrial Workers we have a union large enough to embrace us all: a union organized upon democratic principles recognizing the equal rights of all and extending its benefits equally to all.
Industrial unionism is the principle upon which the Industrial Workers is organized. This means actual unity of purpose and action. It means the economic solidarity of our class.
