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234 VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
upon the services of labor, what could be more simple
than for labor to cease to serve society until its rights
are assured Thus argued the French trade unionists,
and the strike was adopted as the supreme war measure.
Partial strikes were to broaden into industrial strikes,
and industrial strikes into general strikes. The struggle
between the classes was to take the form of two hostile
camps, firmly resolved upon a war that would finish only
when the one or the other of the antagonists had been
utterly crushed. When John Brown marched with his
little band to attack the slave-owning aristocracy of the
South, he became the forerunner of our terrible Civil
War. It was the same spirit that moved the French
weak in numbers and
trade unionists. Although pitiably
poor in funds, they decided to stop all parleyings with
the enemy and to fire the first gun.
The socialist congress in London was held in July,
and the French trade-union congress at Tours was held
in September of the same year. The anarchists were out
in their full strength, prepared to make reprisals on the
socialists. It was after declaring "The conquest of political
power is a chimera," (4) that Guerard : launched
forth in his fiery argument for the revolutionary general
strike: "The partial strikes fail because the workingmen
become demoralized and succumb under the intimidation
of the employers, protected by the government.
The general strike will last a short while, and its repression
will be impossible ;
as to intimidation,
it is still less
to be feared. The necessity of defending the factories,
workshops, manufactories, stores, etc., will scatter and
disperse the . . .
army. And then, in the fear that
the strikers may damage the railways, the signals, the
works of art, the government will be obliged to protect
the 39,000 kilometers of railroad lines by drawing up the