Between six and seven hundred battles a year, called trade disputes, are fought; and the number of days of work lost to the nation by them sometimes totals up to ten millions and more. If the matter were not so serious for all of us one could laugh at the silly way in which people talk of the spread of Socialism when what is really threatening them is the spread of Capitalism. The moment the propertyless workers refuse to see the finger of God in their poverty, and begin organizing themselves in unions to make the most money they can out of their labor exactly as they find the landlord doing with his land, the capitalist with his capital, the employer with his knowledge of business, and the financier with his art of promotion, the industry of the country, on which we all depend for our existence, begins rolling faster and faster down two opposite slopes, at the bottom of which there will be a disastrous collision which will bring it to a standstill until either Property drives Labor by main force into undisguised and unwilling slavery, or Labor gains the upper hand, and the long series of changes by which the mastery of the situation has already passed from the landlord-capitalist to the individual employer, from the individual employer to the joint stock company, from the joint stock company to the Trust, and finally from the industrialists in general to the financiers, will culminate in its passing to capitalized Labor. The battle for this supremacy is joined; and here we are in the thick of it, our country ravaged by strikes and lock-outs, a huge army of unemployed billeted upon us, the ladies and gentlemen declaring that it is all the fault of the workers, and the workers either declaring that it is all the fault of the ladies and gentlemen, or else, more sensibly, concluding that it is the fault of the Capitalist system, and taking to Socialism not so much because they understand it as because it promises a way out. When this open war was first declared, the employers used their command of Parliament to have it punished as a crime. The unions were classed as conspiracies; and anybody who joined one was held to be a conspirator and punished accordingly. This did not prevent the unions: it only “drove them underground”: that is, made secret societies of them, and thereby put them into the hands of more determined and less law-abiding leaders. The Government at last found it impossible to go on with such coercion; for the few cases in which the law could be carried out had the effect of martyrdoms, producing noisy popular agitations, and stimulating Trade Unionism instead of suppressing it.