een increasing enormously in the past two
decades, and the higher or taxed incomes have more than doubled (which
is a rate of increase far greater than the rise in prices), the income
even of unionized workers has not kept up with this rise. In a word, the
propertied classes are getting a larger and larger share of the national
income (see Mr. Churchill's language in preceding chapter). Now should
the unions continue in the moderation of their demands,--or even should
they obtain a 10 or 20 per cent increase (as some have done since the
railway and seamen's strike of 1911),--_the propertied classes would
still have been getting a larger and larger share of the national
income_. From 1890 to 1899 prices in England are estimated to have
fallen 5 per cent, while wages _of organized working-men_ rose 2 per
cent; from 1900 to 1908 prices rose 6 per cent, while these wages fell 1
per cent. A 7 per cent improvement in the first decade was followed by a
7 per cent retrogression in the second--_among organized workers_.[250]
There is then no probability that the British unions will check the
constant decrease in the share of the total wealth of the country that
goes to the wage earner, until they have completed the reversal of older
policies now in progress. That this may soon occur is indicated by the
great strikes of 1911 (which I shall consider in the next chapter).

The American unions also are beginning to take a more radical and
Socialistic attitude. At its Convention at Columbus, Ohio (January,
1911), the United Mine Workers, after prolonged discussion, passed by a
large majority an amendment to their constitution, forbidding their
officers from acting as members of the Civic Federation. This resolution
was confessedly aimed at Mr. John Mitchell, as Vice President of the
Civic Federation, and resulted in his resignation from that body. It
marks a crisis in the American Labor movement. The Miners' Union had
already indorsed Socialism, its Vice President is a party Socialist, and
its present as well as its former President vote the Socialist ticket.
Having forced the Federation of Labor to admit the revolutionary Western
Federation of Miners into the Federation of Labor Congresses, the
element opposed to Mr. Gompers and Mr. Mitchell's conservative tactics
has, for the first time, become formidable, embracing one third of the
delegates, and is likely to bring about great changes within a few
years, both as to the Federation's