If the wage-earning class consisted of fully trained American citizens, the situation would be clearer. It is complicated by the fact that for many years the Republic has received an enormous number of immigrants from the less-advanced countries of eastern and southern Europe, and has the very difficult task of raising them to its own high standard of citizenship. The general result is that America is confronted with the vast problem, which socialism has undertaken to solve, in its most formidable form. Between a highly organised and gigantic capitalism and a continually increasing labour class which is largely composed of new immigrants, and is only partially organised, a wide gulf is fixed. A growing chasm threatens to divide the commonwealth in two. This rent is made manifest in the strikes, which degenerate into private war and even into civil war. Socialists maintain that they have been repressed with a severity and brutality known in Russia alone. As yet the organised socialism has made only moderate progress. In 1902, however, a resolution in favour of socialism obtained about half the votes at the congress of the American Federation of Labour, which numbered over 2,000,000 members. At the presidential election of 1904 the socialist candidate Eugène V. Debs received 408,000 votes, in 1908 he had 500,000 votes. It was widely recognised that the presidential election of 1908 turned on the vote of organised labour. The Republican and Democratic candidates both made special appeal to organised labour and made a special effort to gain its vote. It is obvious that the gigantic growth of the trust system in America has quickened inquiry into the most fundamental questions of industrial and social order. The programme of the Knights of Labour was for many years the nearest approach to socialism made by any great labour combination in America. But there can be no doubt now that America contains all the elements which favour the growth of socialism, and especially of the labour organisations which make for socialism.