rosperous years, yet in that time more
than 300,000 men added themselves to the ranks of the revolutionists,
flinging their defiance in the teeth of bourgeois society and taking
their stand under the blood-red banner. In the state of the writer,
California, one man in twelve is an avowed and registered revolutionist.

One thing must be clearly understood. This is no spontaneous and vague
uprising of a large mass of discontented and miserable people--a blind
and instinctive recoil from hurt. On the contrary, the propaganda is
intellectual; the movement is based upon economic necessity and is in
line with social evolution; while the miserable people have not yet
revolted. The revolutionist is no starved and diseased slave in the
shambles at the bottom of the social pit, but is, in the main, a hearty,
well-fed working-man, who sees the shambles waiting for him and his
children and recoils from the descent. The very miserable people are too
helpless to help themselves. But they are being helped, and the day is
not far distant when their numbers will go to swell the ranks of the
revolutionists.

Another thing must be clearly understood. In spite of the fact that
middle-class men and professional men are interested in the movement, it
is nevertheless a distinctly working-class revolt. The world over, it is
a working-class revolt. The workers of the world, as a class, are
fighting the capitalists of the world, as a class. The so-called great
middle class is a growing anomaly in the social struggle. It is a
perishing class (wily statisticians to the contrary), and its historic
mission of buffer between the capitalist and working-classes has just
about been fulfilled. Little remains for it but to wail as it passes
into oblivion, as it has already begun to wail in accents Populistic and
Jeffersonian-Democratic. The fight is on. The revolution is here now,
and it is the world's workers that are in revolt.

Naturally the question arises: Why is this so? No mere whim of the
spirit can give rise to a world-revolution. Whim does not conduce to
unanimity. There must be a deep-seated cause to make 7,000,000 men of
the one mind, to make them cast off allegiance to the bourgeois gods and
lose faith in so fine a thing as patriotism. There are many counts of
the indictment which the revolutionists bring against the capitalist
class, but for present use only one need be stated, and it is a count to
which capital has never