stem this tide of revolution? What
has it to offer? What does it offer? Employers' associations,
injunctions, civil suits for plundering of the treasuries of the
labour-unions, clamour and combination for the open shop, bitter and
shameless opposition to the eight-hour day, strong efforts to defeat all
reform, child-labour bills, graft in every municipal council, strong
lobbies and bribery in every legislature for the purchase of capitalist
legislation, bayonets, machine-guns, policemen's clubs, professional
strike-breakers and armed Pinkertons--these are the things the capitalist
class is dumping in front of the tide of revolution, as though, forsooth,
to hold it back.

The capitalist class is as blind to-day to the menace of the revolution
as it was blind in the past to its own God-given opportunity. It cannot
see how precarious is its position, cannot comprehend the power and the
portent of the revolution. It goes on its placid way, prattling sweet
ideals and dear moralities, and scrambling sordidly for material
benefits.

No overthrown ruler or class in the past ever considered the revolution
that overthrew it, and so with the capitalist class of to-day. Instead
of compromising, instead of lengthening its lease of life by conciliation
and by removal of some of the harsher oppressions of the working-class,
it antagonizes the working-class, drives the working-class into
revolution. Every broken strike in recent years, every legally plundered
trades-union treasury, every closed shop made into an open shop, has
driven the members of the working-class directly hurt over to socialism
by hundreds and thousands. Show a working-man that his union fails, and
he becomes a revolutionist. Break a strike with an injunction or
bankrupt a union with a civil suit, and the working-men hurt thereby
listen to the siren song of the socialist and are lost for ever to the
_political capitalist_ parties.

Antagonism never lulled revolution, and antagonism is about all the
capitalist class offers. It is true, it offers some few antiquated
notions which were very efficacious in the past, but which are no longer
efficacious. Fourth-of-July liberty in terms of the Declaration of
Independence and of the French Encyclopaedists is scarcely apposite
to-day. It does not appeal to the working-man who has had his head
broken by a policeman's club, his union treasury bankrupted by a court
decision, or his job taken away from him by a l