For a movement so young Syndicalism has had a peculiarly expansive literature, written by professors and journalists of the bourgeois class, who live on respectable streets, receive you in comfortable drawing-rooms, and from their upholstered ease display a fine zeal for the oppressed proletariat.[25] It is not easy to classify Syndicalism, for it refuses to be called Anarchism, repudiates the leadership of Socialism, and scorns to be merely trade-unionism. The following are its principal characteristics: 1. It is disheartened with Socialism because, it says, Socialists have lost their ideals in the race for political power. Law-making is useless, because no laws can emancipate the workingmen. It therefore despises governments and abjures parliaments. But its ideals are Socialistic; it believes "in reorganizing society on a communistic basis, so that, with a minimum of productive effort, the maximum of well-being will be obtained."[26] 2. But repudiating governments and parliaments, they say, does not make them Anarchists. Syndicalists believe in local or communal government. Their state is a glorified trade union whose activities are confined to economic functions, their nation is a collection of federated communal trade societies. When I went among them they were especially solicitous that they should not be regarded as "mere Anarchists." 3. Syndicalism is not trade-unionism pure and simple, because its method is violence and its ideal the industrial unit, not the trade or craft unit. The weapon of Syndicalism is the general strike. A circular issued by the executive committee in 1898 defined the general strike as "the cessation of work, which would place the country in the rigor of death, whose terrible and incalculable consequences would force the government to capitulate at once. If it refused, the proletariat, in revolt from one end of France to the other, would be able to compel it." Sorel says that "revolutionary Syndicalism nourishes in the masses the desire to strike, and it can thrive only in places where great strikes, occupied with acts of violence, have taken place."[27] The strike committee of the C.G.T. in 1899 proclaimed the general strike as "the only practical method through which the working class can fully liberate itself from the capitalistic and governmental yoke." The general strike includes the boycott, _sabotage_, and all kindred forms of violence.[28] 4. Syndicalism revives the old revolutionary methods of conspiracy, of a dominant minority swinging the masses into line; "a conscious minority, which, through its example, sets the masses in motion and drives them on."[29] There are plots, underground manoeuvers, and sudden outbursts. An air of mystery pervades their spectacular uprisings. In order to accomplish their purpose there must be a solidarity of labor. But this unity is the result of the energy of the "conscious few," not of the assertive many.