The Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance was patterned very closely after the Knights of Labor. Wm. E. Trautmann called it "a duodecimo edition of the K. of L."[62] "It had the same district alliances with the same intellectuals as leaders: the same local craft organizations and the same mixed locals [as well as] the same centralized autocracy at headquarters...." He concludes that "the most fatal weakness of all was the political union of the S. T. & L. A. with the S. L. P."[63] The Alliance was, after all, a revolutionary socialist trade union rather than an industrial union. It differed from the American Labor Union and other forerunners mentioned above in this lack of industrial structure as well as in the emphasis it laid on the need of rallying to the support of the Socialist Labor party, with which organization it stood in the most intimate relations and to which most of its members belonged. It was actually sceptical about the efficacy of purely economic action. In common with I. W. W. later on, and in spite of the fact that its own locals were virtually trade or craft locals, it nourished an almost bitter hatred of the craft unions. "We simply have to go at them," said one of its members, "and smash them from top to bottom...."[64] Its animus was directed, however, at their conservatism and not so much at their craft structure. In its "Declaration of Principles" the Alliance asserted that the methods and spirit of labor organization are absolutely impotent to resist the aggressions of concentrated capital ...; that the economic power of the capitalist class ... rests upon institutions, essentially political, which ... cannot be radically changed ... except through the _direct action of the working people themselves_, economically and politically united as a class. This Declaration concludes with the following statement of the chief object of the Alliance: The summary ending of that barbarous [class] struggle at the earliest possible time by the abolition of classes, the restoration of the land and of all the means of production, transportation and distribution to the people as a collective body, and the substitution of the coöperative commonwealth for the present state of planless production, industrial war and social disorder; a commonwealth in which every worker shall have the free exercise and full benefit of his faculties, multiplied by all the modern factors of civilization.[65] In the body of its constitution the objects of the Alliance are set forth more explicitly. They are declared to be to bring about the adoption of its principles