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332 VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
societies number approximately three million.* Throughout
all
Europe, through cooperative effort, there have
been erected hundreds of splendid "Houses of the People,"
"Labor Temples," and similar places of meeting
and recreation. The entire labor, socialist, and cooperative
press, numbering many thousands of monthly and
weekly journals, and hundreds of daily papers, is also
usually owned cooperatively. Unfortunately, the statistics
dealing with this phase of the labor movement have
never been gathered with any idea of completeness, and
there is little use in trying even to estimate the immense
wealth that is now owned by these organizations of workingmen.
America lags somewhat behind the other countries,
but nowhere else have such difficulties faced the labor
movement. With a working class made up of many races,
nationalities, and creeds, trade-union organization
is excessively
difficult.
Moreover, where the railroads secretly
rebate certain industries and help to destroy the competitors
of those industries, and where the trusts exercise
enormous power, a cooperative movement is well-nigh
impossible. Furthermore, where vast numbers of the
working class are still disfranchised, and where elections
are notoriously corrupt and more or less under the control
of a hireling class of professional political manipulators,
an independent political
movement faces almost insurmountable
obstacles. Nor is this all. No other
country allows its ruling classes to employ private armies,
thugs, and assassins and no other
;
country makes such an
effort to prevent the working classes from acting peaceably
and legally. While nearly everywhere else the
unions may strike, picket, and boycott, in America there
* Above data taken from International News Letter of National
Trade Union Centers, Berlin, May 30, 1913.