law schools, oratorical orgies, sensational trials, dramatic strikes or any other of the thousand and one devices contrived by editors and party leaders and lecturers at attract the crowd and bring in business. We should go straight to the real job. We should say to ourselves--"the first thing we must do is to get out of this condition of dependence; for, if we prize free speech so highly"-- and most highly it should be prized--"until we become economically independent free speech we cannot have.

* * *

The article I am criticizing and have taken as my text asserts that history does not go backward. It is a lie, for there are long periods of reaction, and we in this country are struggling to emerge from one of them. It speeches of "further progress" and that is a most gigantic lie, concocted and friendly upheld by men of the Gompers class, who would have us believe that their organizations have been an impregnable bulwark of protection to the workers; whereas they are, in reality, a washed out levee though which the flood of monopoly poured long ago, drowning the former independence of the American workingman and converting him into the hapless driftwood that he is today. It talks of the stubborn resistance of a class-conscious proletariat, and the resistance reminds me of the spectacle I once witnessed in New York, when several thousand striking, and starving, cloakmakers scattered like chaff before the winnowing of some half-a-dozen policemen's clubs. We are not advancing, as the writers of such articles would have us believe, along with the smooth and easy highway of reform, but are being hurried, against our will, to the dangerous rapids of Social Revolution. We can shoot them safely if we steer straight for the one landing point--economic independence. If we pull aimlessly, as we have been pulling hitherto, a frightful smash awaits us.

* * *

In all warfare it is necessary, from time to time, to run desperate chances and take part in what is known as a "forlorn hope." But such "forlorn hopes" should never be undertaken except to capture some absolutely-essential point, and it seems to me that it behooves the revolutionist who has some grip of fundamental facts, to say, ___ firmly: "If you are going to be hung, let it not be for the scraggy end of an insignificant lamb chop but for a good, fat, juicy sheep. If you strike, in the face of ___ and clubs, let it be for something worth the ____. If you must go to war, go to war for something ___ and permanently effective; not for better treatment from the boss, but for elimination of the boss, by conquering your economic freedom. Strike for the full, the individual and the equal RIGHT TO LIFE. Strike for free access to and equal ownership of nature's great factor, the earth. Write on your banner "Land and Liberty," and resolve to win; not by wild words which merely exhaust your strength, but by the well-directed blow which proves that you have studies the game and discovered the enemy's vital spot. et us win the economic fight, in its basic fundamentals. Free speech, with all the other blessings to which our civilization should entitle us, will then come as naturally as comes the herbage with the winter rains.

* * *

Grinding poverty, blind ignorance, crime, suicide, insanity and all the frightful evils that beset society on every side, have a tap root which lies far deeper than the temporary class distinctions social war develops. It is to be found in our denial of the individual claim to life; in our stubborn refusal to acknowledge that every child of man has a right to the free and equal use of this world, into which he has been born without his asking. When that right has been theoretically acknowledge, and won by actual struggle--as eventually it must be--we shall rise, unconsciously and as a race, to heights of which today we can but dream. We shall be free individuals, and by that very fact we shall be co-operators on a scale the magnificence of which we of this generation cannot sense, for each of us will stand on his own feet, able to lend all his emancipated powers to the advancement of civilization's common task. At present we live under a vast system of co-operation, which is wearisomely complicated and hideously oppressive by the very fact that it is conducted under conditions of slavery, which deny the equal right to life. It is the co-operation of dependent, in a thousand grades of varying dependence but none of them free men; none of them able, without personal sacrifice, to speak out bravely what he or she actually thinks, and therefore, none of them able to contribute his or her just share to that swelling flood of knowledge on which depends Man's future. We must get out of slavery at any cost; for freedom beats it, in the furtherance of human happiness, all to pieces. Hence the necessity of a deep-cutting revolution. Hence the necessity for encouraging such a struggle for the fundamental right to Life as that in which Mexico's disinherited are now engaged, against the blind force of monopoly and privilege. The road ahead of us is long and