Nevertheless, the American socialist and labor movement is making headway, and the day is not far distant when it will exercise the power its strength merits. Although somewhat more belated, the various elements of the working class are coming closer and closer together, and it cannot be long until there will be perfect harmony throughout the entire movement. In many other countries this harmony already exists. The trade-union, cooeperative, and socialist movements are so closely tied together that they move in every industrial, political, and commercial conflict in complete accord. So far as the immediate aims of labor are concerned, they may be said to be almost identical in all countries. Professor Werner Sombart, who for years has watched the world movement more carefully perhaps than anyone else, has pointed out that there is a strong tendency to uniformity in all countries--a "tendency," in his own words, "of the movement in all lands toward socialism."[1] Indeed, nothing so much astonishes careful observers of the labor movement as the extraordinary rapidity with which the whole world of labor is becoming unified, in its program of principles, in its form of organization, and in its methods of action. The books of Marx and Engels are now translated into every important language and are read with eagerness in all parts of the world. The Communist Manifesto of 1847 is issued by the socialist parties of all countries as the text-book of the movement. Indeed, it is not uncommon nowadays to see a socialist book translated immediately into all the chief languages and circulated by millions of copies. And, if one will take up the political programs of the party in the twenty chief nations of the world, he will find them reading almost word for word alike. For these various reasons no informed person to-day questions the claims of the socialist as to the international, world-wide character of the movement.