Free The Coal War by Upton Sinclair Page B

gambling-palaces of the Riviera. Having declared a strike, and been shot down by their own brothers and sons in army uniform, the laborers had put the funds of their union into the purchase of an estate, which they worked co-operatively. When the next harvest season came, and labor must be had at all hazards, there was plenty of labor for this co-operative crop—and a strike against the adjoining landlords! After a few seasons of such double-edged warfare, the landlords were glad to sell out for anything they could get; and thus step by step, the degraded peasantry of Southern Italy were raising themselves to the status of citizens in industry. And a prosperous industry, with modern machinery and unimpeachable credit—an industry founded upon the rock of labor solidarity!
    This was the most interesting thing in all Italy to Hal. In a little office in the business part of Naples were men from whom, with the help of an interpreter, he could get the full story of this revolution, with picturesque details of the strife. Why was not this enormously important story known in America? What power had been able to keep it from the knowledge of a press that boasted of enterprise, from magazine-editors who ransacked the world for “live” material?
    They went to Milan, and there Hal found that the glass-blowers had made the same discovery as the farm-hands, and were conquering the industry with this new double-edged weapon. Could anything be more fascinating, to a young man who, only a year ago, had been watching Italian workingmen ground up in Peter Harrigan’s profit-mill? Here was Jerry Minetti’s own home city; and here were artisans, proud, erect, masters of their own product and their own destiny, with the light of human brotherhood shining in their eyes!
    Hal’s revolutionary thinking had so far been conducted under Socialist auspices; and when you explained the Socialist scheme of things to a business-man, you always met one objection: to turn over industry to the control of politicians! To be sure, the Socialist argued that he meant to put into office a new kind of politician; but the American system of graft was so firmly established, it was hard for the man in the street to believe that people elected to political office could ever run any business but retail liquor.
    And now, here was a new method of bringing about the change; and not a matter of theory, but of fact—going on whether your theories allowed it or not! The person to run the industry was not the politician, who had never been inside a shop; it was the man who had worked in the shop all his life, who had done the real job of building it up! Co-operative ownership and democratic control in business! Local self-government in the factory, with representation in an assembly of the trade, and a congress of delegates from all the industries of the country to regulate terms of exchange among them!
    Such was the solution of the Syndicalist. Why, he asked, should the management of industry be committed to a legislature, elected upon a basis of geographical location? In a great city you might live all your life without knowing the people in the next apartment. But you never failed to know the men who worked in the shop with you! You knew who was honest, who was competent, who was really on his job! So there, in the democracy of toil, was the unit upon which to build the industrial republic, just as the political republic had been built upon the town-meeting.

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    Mrs. Arthur and her party moved on to Paris, and here again Hal found that the word of the hour was Syndicalism. The French workers had tried electing politicians; they had had soul-stirring revolutionary speeches made to them, but when it came to a big strike, the revolutionary politicians ordered out the military, just as the bourgeois politicians had done. To be sure, the Socialists repudiated those who had committed this crime; they put up new candidates, who made fresh