ompetition," so far as it concerned the wage-earner,
the man who had only his labor to sell; to those on top, the exploiters,
it appeared very differently, of course--there were few of them, and
they could combine and dominate, and their power would be unbreakable.
And so all over the world two classes were forming, with an unbridged
chasm between them--the capitalist class, with its enormous fortunes,
and the proletariat, bound into slavery by unseen chains. The latter
were a thousand to one in numbers, but they were ignorant and helpless,
and they would remain at the mercy of their exploiters until they were
organized--until they had become "class-conscious." It was a slow
and weary process, but it would go on--it was like the movement of a
glacier, once it was started it could never be stopped. Every
Socialist did his share, and lived upon the vision of the "good time
coming,"--when the working class should go to the polls and seize the
powers of government, and put an end to private property in the means
of production. No matter how poor a man was, or how much he suffered, he
could never be really unhappy while he knew of that future; even if he
did not live to see it himself, his children would, and, to a Socialist,
the victory of his class was his victory. Also he had always the
progress to encourage him; here in Chicago, for instance, the movement
was growing by leaps and bounds. Chicago was the industrial center
of the country, and nowhere else were the unions so strong; but their
organizations did the workers little good, for the employers were
organized, also; and so the strikes generally failed, and as fast as the
unions were broken up the men were coming over to the Socialists.

Ostrinski explained the organization of the party, the machinery by
which the proletariat was educating itself. There were "locals" in every
big city and town, and they were being organized rapidly in the smaller
places; a local had anywhere from six to a thousand members, and there
were fourteen hundred of them in all, with a total of about twenty-five
thousand members, who paid dues to support the organization. "Local Cook
County," as the city organization was called, had eighty branch locals,
and it alone was spending several thousand dollars in the campaign. It
published a weekly in English, and one each in Bohemian and German; also
there was a monthly published in Chicago, and a cooperative publishing
house, that issued a million