622 THE CLASS STRUGGLE EDITORIALS 623 gretted, for men of, their caliber would have laid a good foundation for the more numerous socialist Congressional delegations of the future.
The Assembly delegation at Albany was cut down from 10 to and has lost its best timber. Let us hope that the two comrades Claessens and Solomon will understand the spirit of our times and not fritter away their energy with the promulgation of meaningless petty reforms.
The world is aflame, and is burning up all that is old and obsolete, all that is rotten and miserable in the human race.
Ours cannot be the role of the fireman who vainly tries to save unimportant and insignificant rubbish at the risk of his life. The world demands from us greater and bigger work.
EUGENE DEBS In this vast country, with its tremendous distances and its one hundred million population, a national leadership is not easily won. The West and the East, the South and the North, each develop their own leaders according to their own more or less clannish ideals and movements. The labor movement of this country has been no exception to this rule. On the Pacific coast new men have arisen from time to time to prominence and influence who remained almost unknown in the East. The big men of the East have been without influence in the other regions of the United States. This tendency has made itself felt even in the Socialist movement where, on account of its international character, territorial differences have made themselves felt to a far lesser degree. Morris Hillquit was the acknowledged Leader of the East, Victor Berger and Seymour Stedman held the Middle West, while Job Harriman ruled the Pacific Coast. Not even Eugene Debs, who on account of his prominence in the Labor movement and his extended and frequent tours through the country, became better known than any of the others, could obtain the influence in big party questions throughout the national movement that was justly his due. The various sections of the country were often strongly moved by sectional influences, not so much because they desired to serve regional interests and needs, as from the natural variation in viewpoint that must arise where men and women live under such widely diversified conditions. The difference in attitude on the and the of on prohibition, on the Negro question, on the Non Partisan League and on the war are illustrations of this condition.
This has been considerably changed during the last year, by the persecution that set in against the socialist movement as soon as the war broke out. All sections of the country have been hit, and no matter how cautious and careful our more moderately inclined comrades expressed their criticisms, they were indicted just as quickly, and sentenced just as mercilessly as their more temperamental and more radical comrades. It is a fact that the first socialist victims of the Espionage Law were comrades holding extremely moderate views who, at St. Louis were with that winglet that was strongly in favor of striking a war bargain with the government. The open warfare that was declared by the government on all Socialists aroused the Party to a white heat of indignation that has welded all its elements. The trials became the rallying points of the movement, and the opposition to the petty and brutal policy of governmental oppression and suppression grew in leaps and bounds.
But in all of these trials something was lacking. While our comrades defended themselves against the indictments, while they showed that they had committed no crime, they never were bold enough to become the accusers of the policy of the government. Friedrich Adler glorious example in justifying his act found no followers in the United States.
But then a prosecuting attorney blundered. Eugene Debs was indicted. He sounded the clarion call for which the whole movement had been waiting. Standing before the bar