eptional among Socialists. Mr. Gompers visited Europe in 1909, spoke
at length in Paris and Berlin, and was viewed by the majority of the
European Socialists and unionists almost exactly as he is by Mr. Debs.
Among other things he said there, was that the very kernel of the
difference between the European and the American labor movement and the
reason why the wages are so much better in America than in Europe was
the _friendlier_ relations between the government and the working people
in this country--this after all the recent court decisions against the
unions, decisions which, even when outwardly milder, have precisely the
same effect as the hostile legislation and administration of the
Continent. Mr. Gompers, while in Europe, said that it was unnecessary
that governments and the working people should misunderstand one
another, and asked, "Is there not for us all the common ground of the
fatherland, of common interest and the wish that we feel to make our
people more prosperous, happier and freer?" "I do not know what I will
see there [in Hungary]," he continued, "but this much I will say, that I
know that nothing will convince me that this readiness of the workingmen
to fight against the government and of the government to fight against
the workingmen can bring anything good to either side."[247]

Such expressions naturally aroused the European Socialist and Labor
press, and Kautsky even devoted a special article to Gompers in the
_Neue Zeit_.[248] It was not necessary in a Socialist periodical to say
anything against Gompers's preaching of the common interests of capital
and labor, since there is practically no Socialist who would not agree
that such a belief amounts to a total blindness to industrial and
political conditions. But Kautsky feared that the German workingmen
might give some credit to Gompers's claim that the non-Socialist policy
of the American unions was responsible for the relatively greater
prosperity of the working people in America. "The workingmen," he
explained, referring to this country, "have not won their higher wages
in the last decade, but have inherited them from their forefathers. They
were principally a result of the presence of splendid lands from which
every man who wanted to become independent got as much as he needed."

Then he proceeded to show by the statistics of the Department of Labor
that daily real wages, measured in terms of what they would buy, had
actually decreased for the