dangers more than sufficient to make responsible leaders pause. The
causes reside once more in the form of government, also in the general
nature of American politics, and in political history and tradition. To
begin with, labor would have to fight not on one front, but on
forty-nine different fronts.[107]

Congress and the States have power to legislate on labor matters; also,
in each, power is divided between an executive and the two houses of the
legislature. Decidedly, government in America was built not for strength
but for weakness. The splitting up of sovereignty does not especially
interfere with the purposes of a conservative party, but to a party of
social and industrial reform it offers a disheartening obstacle. A labor
party, to be effective, would be obliged to capture all the diffused
bits of sovereignty at the same time. A partial gain is of little avail,
since it is likely to be lost at the next election even simultaneously
with a new gain. But we have assumed here that the labor party had
reached the point where its trials are the trials of a party in power or
nearing power. In reality, American labor parties are spared this sort
of trouble by trials of an anterior order residing in the nature of
American politics.

The American political party system antedates the formation of modern
economic classes, especially the class alignment of labor and capital.
Each of the old parties represents, at least in theory, the entire
American community regardless of class. Party differences are considered
differences of opinion or of judgment on matters of public policy, not
differences of class interest. The wage earner in America, who never had
to fight for his suffrage but received it as a free gift from the
Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democratic movements and who did not
therefore develop the political class consciousness which was stamped
into the workers in Europe by the feeling of revolt against an upper
ruling class, is prone to adopt the same view of politics. Class parties
in America have always been effectively countered by the old established
parties with the charge that they tend to incite class against class.

But the old parties had on numerous occasions, as we saw, an even more
effective weapon. No sooner did a labor party gain a foothold, than the
old party politician, the "friend of labor," did appear and start a
rival attraction by a more or less verbal adherence to one or more
planks of the risi