"The consolidated miners and the reunited I. W. W.," he said, "would draw to themselves all the trade unions with industrial tendencies, and thus would the reactionary federation of craft unions [A. F. of L.] be transformed from both within and without, into a revolutionary industrial organization."[661] In the same article Debs advocated a reunion of the Socialist and Socialist Labor parties, and William English Walling in commenting on Debs' proposal for uniting the W. F. M. and the U. M. W. says that such an outcome "if not immediately probable, is decidedly possible."[662]
The ninth I. W. W. convention, which met in Chicago, Sept. 21, 1914, as not an important one. It was in session less than a week and there were not more than twenty-five delegates present.[663] The writer attended the sessions of September 22, 23 and 24. On the 22nd he counted ten delegates actually present, and about the same number of spectators. The next morning there were sixteen delegates on hand, and on the 27th, seventeen. No stenographic report of the proceedings--indeed, no complete report of any kind whatsoever--has ever been issued. A very brief account was printed in _Solidarity_, which emphasized the fact that all the delegates were "typical specimens of the working class rank and file, with some contempt for empty theorizing and a marked preference for action."[664] On the 23rd, resolutions were presented asking for a reduction in the amount of dues payable to the national office and proposing to limit convention delegates to one vote each irrespective of the size of the locals which they represented. Both were lost. The latter resolution was supported by a militant minority which very naturally believed that the majority is sluggish--always behind time--and therefore nearly always wrong. They insisted that the new and fruitful ideas always come from the minority and that it should, therefore, be given representation rather according to its (assumed) revolutionary initiative than according to its numerical strength. Their attitude was primarily the result of the difficulty they experienced both in and out of the organization in getting their militant ideas "across" to the large majority. In a lesser degree they were stimulated by the example set them by their fellow syndicalists in France where the "militant minorities" in the small unions of the C. G. T. are given the same representation and voting power as the large unions of that body. For this reason small groups which make up the "extreme left" in the C. G. T. have more influence than similar groups in this country.[665]