Now the I. W. W. is no mere labor union; the A. F. of L. is enough. Giovannitti is no mere poet of labor; we have had plenty of such. He is not singing of labor alone. He is not prating of the dignity of work—you can’t find it in the situation the I. W. W. faces. He is no aristocrat of handiwork, like the A. F. of L. He sings the people behind the work—active or idle, skilled or not—“Plebs, Populace, People, Rabble, Mob, Proletariat.” He cries the awakening of that great mass of mankind that has always been typified as Labor because earning its bread in the sweat of its brow was its one common attribute—the primordial curse. He looks beyond work to emancipation: Think! If your brain will but extend As far as what your hands have done, If but your reason will descend As deep as where your feet have gone, The walls of ignorance shall fall That stood between you and your world…. Aye, think! While breaks in you the dawn, Crouched at your feet the world lies still— It has no power but your brawn, It knows no wisdom but your will. Behind your flesh, and mind, and blood, Nothing there is to live and do, There is no man, there is no god, There is not anything but you. Against him Giovannitti finds the world—the world even of his own kind, bound in the chains of the past. The police, the law, the Church, another age shackling this, he has met them all in Massachusetts, arrayed against even the first steps toward his industrial democracy. The business of his verse is to destroy. In _The Cage_—the prisoner’s pen in which he stood for murder—he deals with the mummy of authority. In _The Walker_ he has painted the prison as no man, not even Wilde, has done. And the Church—even the Christ whom so many socialists are confessing that they may be numbered with the sheep—that also he denies. Christ, the heavy-laden carpenter, was still a man of peace. Giovannitti has his own sermon, “The Sermon on the Common”: “Blessed are the strong in freedom’s spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of the earth.” Materialistic—like all these socialists? Giovannitti has his answer ready for you: “While happiness be not our goal, but simply the way to get there.” Neither materialism nor happiness is likely to trouble the average American. What bothers him is “violence.” And there is no disguising the fact that violence is an essential part of the I. W. W. and its faith. Love is as great a part, of course; but hate must spring just as quickly from the cruelty of the world of the few as love from the brotherhood of the world of the many. Giovannitti and his friends want something and they want it badly. They are ready to take it peaceably: Giovannitti pictures the spirit of Helen Keller as the Christ of loving forgiveness—the only true Christ—offering peace to the grinder of the faces of the poor. But, if love and forgiveness fail, there is another savior waiting, and a violent savior: