d preventing non-unionists from obtaining employment--by means of a
special "trade" organization or federation that cuts across the various
"industrial" unions or federations. All this, indeed, is provided for in
the plans of the "industrial unionists," in the idea of gradually
reorganizing the present loose Federation of Labor into "a union of
unions," or, as they express it, "One Big Union." This last term also is
not very fortunate, for it is by no means proposed to form one
absolutely centralized organization, like the former Knights of Labor,
but to preserve a considerable measure of autonomy for the constituent
industrial unions. Neither does the new unionism require, as some of its
exponents allege, the abolition of the older _trade_ unions, either
local or national, but only that all unions shall be democratically
organized and open to unskilled labor, and that the general
organization, of which they are all a part, shall be the first
consideration, and the local groupings whether by trade or industry only
secondary.

The principle of the new union policy is exactly the same translated
into terms of economic action, as the principle of revolutionary
Socialism as conceived by Marx, and hitherto applied by Socialists
chiefly on the political field. In the Communist Manifesto Marx says
that the chief thing that distinguishes the Socialists from the other
working-class parties is that the former "always and everywhere
represent the interests of the movement as a whole." So while the older
unions represented the economic struggle of certain more or less
extensive parts of the working class, the industrial unionists aim at a
unionism that represents the whole of the working class, and, since the
ranks of labor are always open, all non-capitalist humanity. A closely
organized federation of all the unions will rely very strongly upon
numbers and embrace a large proportion of unskilled workers. It will,
therefore, be forced to fight the cause of the common man. But this can
only be done by fighting against every form of oppression and
privilege--all of which bear on the men at the bottom.

The industrial policy idea has received its most remarkable indorsement
in the great British railway strike of 1911. Before showing what lay
behind this epoch-making movement, let me refer to the great change in
the British Union world that preceded it.

In 1910 there occurred an unprecedented series of strikes in the four
larges in