mbered more
than the troops that Washington was able to place in the field at any
one time during the War of Independence.

Most of these strikes have been strikes of unorganized workers, who
did not know even of the existence of a union till after they had gone
out, and therefore with no idea of appealing to an organization for
even moral support. In Chicago the strikers belonged to nine different
nationalities, speaking as many different languages, so it is clear
that the pressure must have been indeed irresistible that forced so
many thousands with apparently no common meeting-ground or even common
means of communication out of the shops into the street. When
the organized strike, they know why. When the unorganized of one
nationality and one tongue strike, they can tell one another why. Yet
these people struck in spots all over the city almost simultaneously,
although in most cases without any knowledge by one group that other
groups were also resisting oppression and making a last stand against
any further degradation of their poor standards of living. Amid every
variety of shop grievance, and with the widest possible difference
in race, language and customs, they shared two disadvantageous
conditions: industrially they were oppressed, and socially they were
subject races. Therefore they were one people, in spite of their nine
nationalities. These two conditions acted and reacted upon one another
complicating and intensifying the struggle. But because of this very
intensity it has been easier for the onlooker to separate out the real
questions at issue, easier for the sympathetic American to come into
wholesome and human relationship with this large body of his brothers
and sisters. To him they could be one group, for their interests
were one, and they had been too long separated from him and from one
another by the accidents of birth and speech.

So the searchlight turned on then on the sewing trades has since cast
its enlightening beams on industrial conditions in other trades, in
which, too, one race is perpetually played off against another with
the unfailing result of cuts in wages and lowering of standards of
living.

All tests of admission to secure some measure of selection among new
arrivals are but experiments in an untried field. We have no tests but
rough-and-ready ones, and even these are often inconsistent with one
another. For instance, for a good many years now the immigration
inspectors have ta