blindly the general strike, direct action,
and sabotage."[14] Vliegen, the Dutch leader, went even further when he
declared at the previous congress, at Amsterdam (1904), that it is not
the representatives of the strong organizations of England, Germany, and
Denmark who wish the general strike; it is the representatives of
France, Russia, and Holland, where the trade-union organization is
feeble or does not exist.[15]

Still another factor forces the French trade unions to rely upon
violence, and that is their poverty. The trade-unionists in the Latin
countries dislike to pay dues, and the whole organized labor movement as
a result lives constantly from hand to mouth. "The fundamental condition
which determines the policy of direct action," says Dr. Louis Levine in
his excellent monograph on "The Labor Movement in France," "is the
poverty of French syndicalism. Except for the _Federation du Livre_,
only a very few federations pay a more or less regular strike benefit;
the rest have barely means enough to provide for their administrative
and organizing expenses and cannot collect any strike funds worth
mentioning.... The French workingmen, therefore, are forced to fall back
on other means during strikes. Quick action, intimidation, sabotage, are
then suggested to them by their very situation and by their desire to
win."[16] That this is an accurate analysis is, I think, proved by the
fact that the biggest strikes and the most unruly are invariably to be
found at the very beginning of the attempts to organize trade unions.
That is certainly true of England, and in our own country the great
strikes of the seventies were the birth-signs of trade unionism. In
France, Italy, and Spain, where trade unionism is still in its infancy,
we find that strikes are more unruly and violent than in other
countries. It is a mistake to believe that riots, sabotage, and crime
are the result of organization, or the product of a philosophy of
action. They are the acts of the weak and the desperate; the product of
a mob psychology that seems to be roused to action whenever and wherever
the workers first begin to realize the faintest glimmering of
solidarity. History clearly proves that turbulence in strikes tends to
disappear as the workers develop organized strength. In most countries
violence has been frankly recognized as a weakness, and tremendous
efforts have been made by the workers themselves to render violence
unnecessary by developing