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of the workers for their rights would take precedence “over wars between nations in which working men have no cause.” He knew and stated in another context that a general strike was “impossible in the current stage of organized labour”; nevertheless he too felt sure of a “deep seated resolve” among his class to refuse to take military duty’s last step of shooting down their fellow workers. The spirit of the international trade-union congresses where delegates talked and broke bread together would, he wrote, spread back through their reports to all organized workers, who would understand and refuse to kill each other. “Even the unorganized” would read the accounts and listen to the returning delegates and take up this spirit of refusal. Statesmen knew very well that their next order, “To the front!” would be followed by “mass demonstrations for peace”—Gompers did not venture to say mass disobedience. “It is the general consensus of opinion,” he concluded, “that the final obstacle to a war of nations in Europe today is the determined adverse attitude of the workers in the different countries.”

Gompers was as practical and toughminded as any man who ever lived, but the age he lived in was sentimental. That, like Jaurès, he could believe in a final Halt! accomplished by “mass demonstrations” showed the extent to which the idea of the working class as Hero had taken hold.

His purpose in coming to Europe was to affiliate the AF of L with the International Federation of Trade Unions. If any action by organized labour was to make itself felt against war, this was the only body which could supply it, supposing it possessed both the will and the means. It had neither. Founded in 1903 at the suggestion of English and French unions but opposed by the Germans, it represented twenty-seven federations of trades or industries with a membership of over seven million in nineteen countries. The figures were more imposing than its real functions, which were chiefly secretarial. It kept member unions informed of trade conditions and did its best to frustrate employers’ efforts to recruit foreign strikebreakers. To conciliate the large and well-financed German unions, its headquarters were in Germany and Carl Legien, chief of the German National Federation of Trade Unions, was its Secretary. At its biennial Congresses, political and social questions, usually brought forward by the French, were not welcomed. In 1909 the Federation raised a strike aid fund of $643,000 for the Swedish general strike, most of it coming from the German and Scandinavian unions and very little from the British, French or American. Solidarity was less than total. With German influence strong and with a non-political orientation, it was not a body to interest itself in ideas of an international general strike.

One of its strongest units was the International Transportworkers’ Federation of seamen, dockers and railwaymen. Founded in 1896, it represented forty-two unions in sixteen countries with a membership of 468,000. It was on the ITF that Keir Hardie, who like Jaurès had become primarily concerned with the problem of war, rested his hopes of an international strike in the event of war. If the transport workers alone, or together with the miners’ International, downed tools, he believed they could stop a war. Here again the problem was simultaneous action in all countries, but Hardie’s fervor carried him over that and he brought his proposal forward at the next Socialist Congress, held in Copenhagen in August, 1910.

As host city to the International in 1910 Copenhagen was a symbol of the importance Socialism had reached. The Danish Socialist Party, one of the strongest of the small countries, controlled the municipal government of the capital. The committee, determined to impress the world by its organization and efficiency, gave magnificent receptions and a Socialist mayor delivered the address of welcome. Replying in a voice of “ripe sonority which makes hearts vibrate,” Vandervelde expressed the delegates’ sense of a great occasion when “a free people, masters