Third, the deliberate and long-standing policy of the most influential of the general leaders of the labor organizations--Mr. Samuel Gompers for the most conspicuous example--of keeping those organizations free from the entanglements and distractions of party politics, definitely preventing their acting as a political unit; by intention confining their activities to the industrial, the economic field. This alone, without regard to the fact that the higher-grade unions (using that expression solely with reference to skill) seldom see their interests to be common, so far as the ballot box is concerned. The radical agitation for the establishment of “One Big Union,” to include all classes of laborers as distinguished from capitalists, while it contemplates chiefly the exercise of industrial and economic power, includes the intention to concentrate political power as well. Fourth, and most important, the fact that “labor,” in the sense in which most politicians, and virtually all of the public, use the term, means chiefly the _unskilled_ workers who contribute _muscle_ to industry. These are to a great extent unorganized, without any conscious unity of interest or purpose; their approach to both industry and political action is as individuals--individuals of more or less shifting residence and comparatively little feeling of political responsibility. Moreover, it is a matter of common knowledge that the great industrial concerns have fostered the existence of masses of unskilled labor, in excess of the actual needs of industry, in order to maintain an “overstocked” labor supply, for the purpose of constant wage-competition to keep down costs. This competition has the inevitable effect of discouraging united action of any kind. And, still further, we have found[162] that the unskilled laborer of foreign birth, on the average, is not available for political activity because he is not naturalized. This body of the unskilled, industrially indispensable, but politically unassimilated, inarticulate, and unwholesome, consists almost entirely now, and must consist increasingly, of immigrants. Like any other mass of material in an organism, potentially digestible and useful but actually undigested and in the circumstances indigestible, it has clogged the process of assimilation and is infecting the body politic with dangerous toxins. The wonder is that we have got along with it so well. One of the reasons may be the very fact that its influences are not in the ordinary sense _political_.