ds since its inception, but this total never
constituted its membership at any given time, for no more fluctuating
group ever existed. When the I.W.W. fosters a strike of considerable
proportions, the membership rapidly swells, only to shrink again when
the strike is over. This temporary membership consists mostly of foreign
workmen who are recent immigrants. What may be termed the permanent
membership is difficult to estimate. In 1913 there were about 14,000
members. In 1917 the membership was estimated at 75,000. Though this is
probably a maximum rather than an average, nevertheless the members are
mostly young men whose revolutionary ardor counterbalances their want in
numbers. It is, moreover, an organization that has a wide penumbra. It
readily attracts the discontented, the unemployed, the man without a
horizon. In an instant it can lay a fire and put an entire police force
on the qui vive.

The organization has always been in financial straits. The source of its
power is to be sought elsewhere. Financially bankrupt and numerically
unstable, the I.W.W. relies upon the brazen cupidity of its stratagems
and the habitual timorousness of society for its power. It is this
self-seeking disregard of constituted authority that has given a handful
of bold and crafty leaders such prominence in the recent literature of
fear. And the members of this industrial Ku Klux Klan, these American
Bolsheviki, assume to be the "conscious minority" which is to lead the
ranks of labor into the Canaan of industrial bliss.

CHAPTER X. LABOR AND POLITICS

In a democracy it is possible for organized labor to extend its
influence far beyond the confines of a mere trade policy. It can move
the political mechanism directly in proportion to its capacity to enlist
public opinion. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that labor
is eager to take part in politics or that labor parties were early
organized. They were, however, doomed to failure, for no workingman's
party can succeed, except in isolated localities, without the
cooperation of other social and political forces. Standing alone as a
political entity, labor has met only rebuff and defeat at the hands of
the American voter.

The earlier attempts at direct political action were local. In
Philadelphia a workingman's party was organized in 1828 as a result of
the disappointment of the Mechanics' Union at its failure to achieve
its ambitions by strikes. At a public meeting it was re