Strikes are a favourite weapon of the Socialists when they are seeking to force some political measure through parliament. Until a few years ago it seemed that the "general strike," in which all the labourers of a city or several cities, by suddenly laying down their tools and refusing to return to their work, sought to force some concession by the Government, was the means by which the Socialists proposed to overturn all the existing governments in Europe. Since the failure of the revolution in Russia and of similar movements on a smaller scale in Italy and elsewhere, this form of strike seems to have fallen into disrepute. The most novel and interesting form of labour insurrection which I found while I was in Europe was the "strike of the agricultural labourers." In both Hungary and Italy the agricultural labourers have for some years past been organized into more or less secret societies, and the outbreaks which have been fomented by these secret societies have been, I understand, the most bloody and the most far-reaching in influence of any labour strikes in Europe. The possibility that farm hands might be organized into labour unions, and make use of this form of organization in order to compel landowners to raise wages, had never occurred to me, and I took some pains to learn the conditions in Hungary and Italy under which these organizations have grown up. I found that while the situation of the farm hands in Hungary differs from that of the farm hands in Italy in many ways, there are two important respects in which the situation of each is the same: First, a large part of the land of both countries is held in large estates; second, farm labourers, as a rule, particularly in Hungary, do not live, as is the case in America, on the land. On the contrary, they dwell apart in villages, so that they are hardly any more attached to the soil they cultivate than the factory hand is attached to the factory in which he is employed. In Hungary, for example, it is the custom for a group of labourers to enter, during the spring and summer, into a contract with a landowner to harvest his crop in the fall. A contractor, who either represents or employs the farm hands, will look over the field and bargain with the owner to do the work for a certain per cent. of the crop. At the harvest time the contractor will arrive with his labourers just as he would come with a gang of men to build a house or dig a ditch. While the work is going on the labourers, men and women together, practically camp in the fields, sleeping sometimes in the open or in such scant shelter as they are able to find.