Syndicalist developments, under the organization of the Confédération Générale du Travail. First came her Postal Strike, with undelivered letters estimated at eleven millions, and Paris threatened by famine. Then, in 1910, came the great French Railway Strike. the details of which are too well known to need recalling. In Sweden we have the most complete example of the general strike yet achieved by federated labor. The Swedish conflict began, be it noted, in a sectional trade dispute of two textile trades. But, as in Parma in the previous year, the sectional strike rapidly developed into the general strike-and the Swedes are not an inflammatory people. All labor was withdrawn from transport, and street traffic, and lighting. No vehicles were to be allowed in Stockholm unless by permits from the Strike Committee (such permits flew in the streets of London, it will be remembered, a few months ago). Gas and electric light, wood, and coal were ordered to be withdrawn. The printers struck, in violation of agreements, and no newspapers would have been issued but for the work of the editorial staffs. "There was no one even to bury the dead, or to convey the sick to hospital." Then the social sense of the Swedes awoke. The means of life of every dweller in Stockholm, wage-earner and capitalist alike, were threatened by the action of Trade Unions representing two-thirds of the organized labor of Sweden. The remaining third, a non-political organization of workmen, known as the Swedish Workers' Association, when the political assault on the whole social fabric became apparent, withdrew all its members from solidarity with the Strike Committee. With the Swedish Workers' Association stood every inhabitant of the upper and middle classes of Stockholm capable of taking a hand in the work of the community. The combined classes drove cabs, did am

bulance work, stoked steamers, ran the gas, water, and electric works, unloaded ships, acted as tram conductors. The wreckers of the State were defeated by a solidarity based on sounder principles than that of Syndicalist Unionism; the noble solidarity of a united community, working zealously in the interests of all, and therefore in the interests of each.

The essential marks of Syndicalism, then, are an ardent faith in the Class War; the fomenting of multiplied strikes, leading, through the sympathetic strike, up to the general strike; and direct action, whether violent or peaceful, by the workman. The movement is mainly French in origin, but has spread throughout the Continent; has appeared in America and in the British Colonies; and has been, for at least two years, actively propagated in England. That the seeds so assiduously sown by the English preachers of Syndicalism or "Industrial Unionism" have germinated with startling rapidity, in the soil prepared for them by the connivance of the nation at the insufficient wage of its workers, appears from the slightest comparison of Syndicalist doctrine and the events of the past year.

The Syndicalist preaches increasing recourse to the strike, sectional, sympathetic, and general. By November, 1910, English industry was apparently ripe for its first Syndicalist or "Industrial Unionist" Conference, held at Manchester, and attended by 198 delegates from the Unions of the Miners, Engineers, Railway and Transport Workers, Firemen, Telephonists, Gasworkers, Clerks, Bricklayers, Carpenters, and other trades. It is claimed by the "Industrialists" that some 60,000 workers were represented. Within six months an unparalleled outbreak of sectional strikes was experienced; and the country was faced with the possibility of all the horrors of a general

bor world. In view of our own experiences in 1911, and of the recent industrial records of France, Sweden, America, Italy, and Australia, it is pertinent to inquire how the English Syndicalist is "getting ready." The answer is, by working at the capture of the Trade Unions. Just as the trade unionists of France are led by the numerically small, but active, fighting force of the French Syndicalists, just as our own Trade Unions were captured, ten years ago, by political Socialism, so now the new force in the labor world is zealously at work on the capture of the English Trade Unions in 1912. The very first number of the Industrial Syndicalist, issued in July, 1910, by Mr. Tom Mann, makes this evident: "The right course to pursue is to make clear what it [Unionism] ought to be, the real class conscious fighting machinery for the overthrow of Capitalism." Here Mr. Tom Mann and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald are in agreement, for Mr. Macdonald declared last November, "I have always taken the view that Trade Unions are the fighting forces of Labor." 22 This aim of the English Syndicalists to achieve the capture of the Trade Unions is reiterated: "For the present we appeal directly to the Trade Unionists";-“I say to the Syndicalist Leagues, 'Visit the Unions and get them converted,' circulate literature everywhere"; "the Unions must exist for preparing to take over, own, and control the whole of industry." A resolution, moved by a Syndicalist speaker, in favor of Industrial Unionism or Federation, was accepted by a large majority at the Trade Union Congress of 1910.

Such is the organized propaganda by which the English working man is unwittingly being led into a social war, the leaders of which aim, deliberately, at the isolation and industrial suprem

22 The Socialist Review," November, 1911, p. 185.

acy of a single class. The goal of the Syndicalist is that "the workers will become citizens of the industry in which they are employed, rather than subjects of the State in which they reside"; and again, "we shall unite all the workers in any one industry, and unite all industries. We will build a 'State within a State.'" When the household of the State is thus divided against itself, for how long shall that household stand? And this supreme class is to win its ultimate separate existence by the Class War, seductively preached as an immediate means of raising wages, and relieving the hours of labor. The British working man does not want the Class War, the expropriation of owners, the "State within a State," the Social Revolution. But he does want, and he rightly wants, a living wage. As the strikers of Leven declared in December, "We are not out against property, but against starvation." As the London dockers said last August, when the overcrowded pawnshops could take no more pledges, "it is better to starve quickly than to starve by inches." And if no other remedy is offered to the workman save that offered, daily and weekly, by the persuasive tongue of the Syndicalist, who shall blame him if he tries it? What wonder if he follows the only leaders who promise him speedy redress, worked by his own hands, if he is intoxicated by the heady arguments supplied to him? And if a strike secures some immediate benefit, as it often does, the validity of these arguments seems to him incontestable. The English working man knows, to our shame be it said, what is meant by keeping a home together on twenty shillings a week. He knows the excessive hours, and the speeding up, which make overdrafts on his phy

23 See the weekly columns of the Labor Press for announcements of Syndicalist meetings throughout the industrial centres of the country.

sical strength, already undermined by the insufficiency of his food. He experiences daily the pinch resulting from the rise in food prices, the halfempty grate due to an increase of 33 per cent. in the cost of coal. He can appreciate the truth of the warning promulgated twenty years ago, that "it is neither just nor human so to grind men down with excessive labor, as to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies." John Bull is the father of a large industrial family. These children of his work hard; they have helped to build up a great Empire, a world-wide commerce. And what is his care of them? In a typical English city one-seventh of the wage-earners, all loafers being excepted, were recently receiving wages insufficient to keep them in bare physical efficiency, that is, for bare housing, bare clothing, bare food.24 In the capital of the Empire thirty per cent. of London working men receive wages below the subsistence level. Beguiled in his distress, in his stupefied brain and underfed body, by false leaders, the working man is at last embarking on the only prompt measures offered to his hand-the strike, the multiplied strike, the general strike. The Fortnightly Review.

And what did our humane and intelligent Press say, last summer, to this his desperate experiment? "Crazy fanaticism," commented The Times. "Nervous excitement brought on by the excessively hot weather," suggested the Daily Chronicle. "A whiff of grape shot," cried the Morning Post. The English working man asks for bread, and the Morning Post offers him a bullet. Conciliation Boards sitting in Whitehall? All such industrial treaties presupposed industrial war. Conciliation Boards are at best palliatives. The sick member of the body politic needs a better remedy than palliatives, and he needs it now. There is no finer material in the world than the British working man. At the present moment we are starving his body on wages insufficient for healthy subsistence, and leaving his mind an easy prey to the fierce international contagion of Syndicalism. It is time that the nation remembered that "the capital of money and the capital of strength and skill must be united together, or we can have no production, and no progress." The question for 1912 is by what means this true Industrial Unionism shall be attained.

G.

It is when one takes pen in hand to write of Dickens, especially when faced by an occasion such as the Centenary of his birth, that the true praise of him emerges. Detraction's voice has been heard; and so ruthlessly that no detail has escaped attention. His pathos has been dismissed as maudlin; his characterization has been called grotesque and exaggerated; his style has been derided as no style at all in the cant meaning of the word, as

24 R. Seebohm Rowntree, "Poverty," ed. 1910, p. 111.

shapeless and frameless, degenerating often into an uneasy sing-song of halting metre; his craft, for all the care of his scheming, has been scoffed at; his art has been put aside as untrue to life; and even his humor, that which of all things one would have thought would have been left to him, has been called rudimentary and crude. It is not difficult to see, in each particular criticism, what is meant: and to see a criticism is to admit its justice, given its point of view. But criticism is the faultiest of all instruments. For it is

the function of criticism to be analytical; and there is no one thing in the world that cannot be analyzed to its degradation. Analysis is too often the coward's subterfuge for escaping the responsibility of manly judgment. Such judgment proceeds, not by way of analysis, but by vision, which is the preception of a synthesis. And it is conceivable that one might find no virtue, or little virtue, in any detail of a work of art, of an achievement of the creating imagination, and yet find oneself strangely thrilled by the whole and total effect. It is certainly almost impossible to decide what contribution any one detail, good or bad, makes to the total effect that is the only thing that, in the end, matters.

For example, it is lamented that Wordsworth had not the critical faculty to see what was good in his work, and what was bad; so that he might have suppressed the bad, and left the good in all its pure loveliness. Criticism (that has always seen so well what is good and what bad in Literature and the High Arts) has declared that to Wordsworth all was of the same value in his work: that he put out a bad poem with all the solemnity and sense of its importance as a good poem. And, in that, Criticism has spoken better than it thought. For to Wordsworth (or to Blake, for that matter) each poem was indeed of the same solemn value; because each poem was regarded as a separate contribution to that more important synthesis that he struggled to fill-in and complete. He was not, like Herrick, so much concerned with the making of separate poems as with the delivery of a vision; and in the utterance of that vision each poem was important. This Wordsworth felt; and, did we truly examine ourselves, we would find that we do so also. The Wordsworth of the Complete Works takes his place in the front rank of English poets, with Shakes

peare, Milton, and Shelley for companions. The Wordsworth of Matthew Arnold's selection falls back behind Keats and even Byron.

Thus it is always necessary to be assured that one has seen a man's vision, or that one has perceived the particular quality of his artistic attempt, before it is even possible to speak of the faults of his workmanship; for it may so happen that what may, on its own merits, appear to be a grave fault may be a necessary adjunct to the attainment of that vision or that artistic attempt. It is this that the mind perceives in the case of Dickens, even as it is this that enables us to discover the true praise of him. It has, for example, been laid to his charge that his characters, in the main, have no semblance to reality; that they are grotesque and exaggerated. It would be interesting to contrast this assertion with the constant exclamation that one meets in daily life that certain people and certain actions are typically "Dickensian"; as though he were the court of appeal for life, instead of life being the court of appeal for him. Yet on its own merits the criticism is found to be illuminating. It is meant to be destructive; but one suddenly recalls that all the great characters of the world's literature are either grotesque or exaggerated. Bumble be overdrawn as a workhouse official, he is not more overdrawn than the immortal Shallow as a Justice of the Peace. If Samuel Pickwick, Esq., be grotesque as a wandering merchant, he is at least not so grotesque as the inimitable Don Quixote as a wandering knight. We do not remember Sancho Panza or Panurge or the Antient Pistol because they are imitations of Life, but because they are grotesque examples of what Life can give us out of its exceeding riches. We do not admire Achilles or Hamlet or Falstaff, each in his own way, because he is like the thin thing all round us that we are

If