classes to employ private armies, thugs,
and assassins; and no other country makes such an effort to prevent the
working classes from acting peaceably and legally. While nearly
everywhere else the unions may strike, picket, and boycott, in America
there are laws to prevent both picketing and boycotting, and even some
forms of strikes. The most extraordinary despotic judicial powers are
exercised to crush the unions, to break strikes, and to imprison union
men. And, if paid professional armies of detectives deal with the
unions, so paid professional armies of politicians deal with the
socialists. By every form of debauchery, lawlessness, and corruption
they are beaten back, and, although it is absolutely incredible, not a
single representative of a great party polling nearly a million votes
sits in the Congress of the United States.

Nevertheless, the American socialist and labor movement is making
headway, and the day is not far distant when it will exercise the power
its strength merits. Although somewhat more belated, the various
elements of the working class are coming closer and closer together, and
it cannot be long until there will be perfect harmony throughout the
entire movement. In many other countries this harmony already exists.
The trade-union, cooeperative, and socialist movements are so closely
tied together that they move in every industrial, political, and
commercial conflict in complete accord. So far as the immediate aims of
labor are concerned, they may be said to be almost identical in all
countries. Professor Werner Sombart, who for years has watched the world
movement more carefully perhaps than anyone else, has pointed out that
there is a strong tendency to uniformity in all countries--a "tendency,"
in his own words, "of the movement in all lands toward socialism."[1]
Indeed, nothing so much astonishes careful observers of the labor
movement as the extraordinary rapidity with which the whole world of
labor is becoming unified, in its program of principles, in its form of
organization, and in its methods of action. The books of Marx and
Engels are now translated into every important language and are read
with eagerness in all parts of the world. The Communist Manifesto of
1847 is issued by the socialist parties of all countries as the
text-book of the movement. Indeed, it is not uncommon nowadays to see a
socialist book translated immediately into all the chief languages and
circulated by millions