majority of American workingmen during the
last decade. It is true, as Mr. Gompers replied, that the hours have
become somewhat less, and that therefore the amount of real wages
received _per hour of work_ has slightly increased, though there are few
working people who will count themselves very fortunate in a decrease of
hours if it is paid for _even in a part_ by a decrease of the real wages
received at the end of the day. And even if we compare _the early_
nineties with the _last years_ of the recent decade, we find that the
slight increase in the purchasing power of the total wages received
(_i.e._ real wages) amounted at the most to no more than two or three
per cent in these fifteen years. In a word, the disproportion between
the prosperity of the wage earning and capitalist classes has in the
past two decades become much greater than ever before.

The basis of the Socialist economic criticism of existing society--and
one that appeals to the majority of the world's labor unionists also--is
that while the proportion of the population that consists of wage
earners is everywhere increasing, the share of the national income that
goes to wages is everywhere growing less. There is no more striking,
easily demonstrable, or generally admitted fact in modern life. The
whole purpose of Socialism--in so far as it can be expressed in terms of
income, is to reverse this tendency and to keep it reversed until
private capital is reduced to impotence, as far as the control of
industry is concerned.

Contrast with the position of Gompers and Mitchell the chief official of
the German unions, Karl Legien, a relatively conservative representative
of Continental unionism.

"The unions," he says, "are based on the conviction that there is
an unbridgeable gulf between capital and labor. This does not mean
that the capitalists and laborers may not, as men, find points of
contact; it means only that the accumulation of capital, resting as
it does on keeping from the laborer a part of the products of his
labor, forces a propertyless proletariat to sell its labor at any
price it can get. Between those who wish to maintain these
conditions and the propertyless laborers there is a wall which can
be done away with only by the abolition of wage labor. Here the
views prevailing in the unions are at one with those of the Social
Democratic Party."

"The unions are chiefly occupied