During the twenty years that elapsed between the Homestead and Pullman strikes and the beginning of the world war, the pages of American industrial history are crowded with stories of the labor conflict--on an ever vaster and vaster scale, between nationally organized employers, using the power of the police, the courts and, where necessary, the army; and the nationally organized workers, backed by some show of public sentiment, and armed with the strength of numbers. Although the bulk of the workers was still unorganized, and although those who were organized thought and acted within the lines of their crafts, considering themselves as railway trainmen or as carpenters first, and as workers afterward, there was not wanting a new spirit--sometimes called the spirit of industrial unionism--emphasizing labor solidarity and speaking most loudly through the propaganda, first of the Socialist Labor Party and later of the I. W. W. The old culture was joining battle with the new. "America is the land of opportunity. It was good enough for my father: it is good enough for me" was the slogan of the capitalists. "The world for the workers," answered the vanguard of the exploited masses. The advocate of a labor state is as unpopular in a capitalist society as the abolitionist was in the Carolinas before the Civil War. He sees a vision that the stalwarts of the existing order do not care to see; he speaks a language that they cannot comprehend; he represents an interest that is as hateful to them as it is alien to their privileges. V. At the outset, while the old order is still relatively strong, and the new relatively weak, the spokesmen of the old order can afford to ignore the champions of the new. But as the established order grows more senile and the new order more vigorous, the defenders of the old order, by force or by guile, set themselves to root out the new, even though they should be compelled to destroy themselves in the process. Then there ensues a savage struggle in which wits are matched against wits and force against force. Families are divided; the community is split into factions; civil war rages; society is torn to its foundations. At times the struggle reaches the military phase, but for the most part it instills itself into the lives of the people until it becomes an accepted part of the day's work. Then it is that the real test comes between the old world and the new. The old world holds power--economic, social, political. It holds in its hands income, respectability and preferment, with which it seeks first to buy, and later to destroy all who oppose its will. Buying is the easiest, the safest, and in the long run the cheapest method of gaining the desired end.