in the effort to use their power
to shape the labor contract in their favor, and do not consider it
as their task to propagate this view, but holds the propaganda as
being the task rather of the Social Democratic Party and its
organizations."

Even the struggle for higher wages and shorter hours carried on by the
unions, Legien says, is fought in the consciousness that it will make
labor "more capable of the final solution of the social problem." He
reminds us that the overwhelming majority of the German unionists are
Socialists, and says that the labor conflict itself must have led to
this result, though he does not want the unions to support the party as
unions. In other countries of the Continent, unionists go even farther.
In Austria, Belgium, and elsewhere the two organizations act as a single
body, and in France, not satisfied with working for Socialism as members
of the party, unionists also make it a declared end of their unions,
independently of all political action, and shape their everyday policies
accordingly.

It is only when we come to Great Britain that we find the unions in a
conciliatory relation with employers such as has hitherto prevailed in
the United States. The relation between the unions and capitalistic
"State Socialists" of Great Britain has been friendly. As I have already
noted, the enthusiasm of the British unions for the social reforms of
the Liberal Party and government has hitherto been so great that they
consented that the increase of the taxation needed to pay for these
reforms should fall on their shoulders, while the wealthy classes made
the world ring with epithets of "revolution" because a burden of almost
exactly the same weight was placed on them to pay for the Dreadnoughts
they demanded, and because land was nationally taxed for the first time,
Mr. Churchill himself conceded that his social reform budget "draws
nearly as much from the taxation of tobacco and spirits, which are the
luxuries of the working classes, who pay their share with silence and
dignity, as it does from those wealthy classes upon whose behalf such
heart-rending outcry is made."[249]

Perhaps the fact that the labor unions of Great Britain _up to 1910_
spent less than a tenth part of their income on strikes was a still
stronger ground for Mr. Churchill's admiration, since he had to deal
with the strikers as President of the Board of Trade. While the national
income of the country has b