ollow the line
of least resistance in raising standards of wages and of status as
well will be the work of many years and of many minds. Even today
there are some general indications of how the workers are going to
settle their own problems.

Some foreign critics and some critics at home are very severe upon the
backwardness of the labor movement in the United States, and in
these criticisms there is a large element of truth. Yet there is one
difficulty under which we labor on this continent, which these critics
do not take into consideration. That is the primal one of the immense
size of the country, along with all the secondary difficulties
involved in this first one. There has never been any other country
even attempting a task so stupendous as ours--to organize, to make
one, to obtain good conditions for today, to insure as good and better
conditions for tomorrow, for the wage-earning ones out of a population
of over ninety millions spread over three million square miles. And
with these millions of human beings of so many different races, with
no common history and often no common language, this particular task
has fallen to the lot of no other nation on the face of this earth.
Efforts at organization of the people and by the people, are
perpetually being undermined. Capitalism is nationally fairly well
organized, so that there has been all the time more and more agreement
among the great lords of finance, not to trespass on one another's
preserves. But it is not so with the workers. Even in trades where
there exists a formal national organization, there will be towns and
states where it will either be non-existent or extremely weak, so that
workers, especially the unskilled, as they drift from town to town in
search of work, tend to pass out of, rather than into, the union of
their trade. And thus members of every trade organization live in
dread of the inroad into their city or their state of crowds of
unorganized competitors for their particular kind of employment. Why,
if it were Great Britain or Germany, by the time we had organized one
state, we should have organized a whole country.

But the big country is ours, and the big task must be shouldered.

It is only natural that trade-union organization should have
progressed furthest in those occupations which, as industries, are the
most highly developed. The handicrafts of old, the weaving and the
carving and the pottery, have through a thousand inventions be