The great general strike of September, 1904, which resulted in practically putting an end, for five days, to all kinds of business industries in the city of Milan, was provoked by the state police firing upon some peasants who were holding a meeting to pay their shares and take their lots in an agricultural coöperative society.
I have attempted to describe at some length the character of the Socialistic movement as I found it in Hungary and Italy, because it represents on the whole the movement of the masses at the bottom of life in Europe. Through this party, for the first time, millions of human beings who have had no voice in and no definite ideas in respect to the Government under which they lived are learning to think and to give expression to their wants.
Few people, I venture to say, have any definite notion to what extent the most remote parts of Europe, from which the majority of our immigrants now come, have been penetrated by the ideas and the sentiments of the Socialistic party. There are, for example, some five or six different branches of the party in Bohemia. Socialism, I learn, has made its way even into such countries as Roumania, Servia, Bulgaria, and Dalmatia, where perhaps three fourths of the population are engaged in agriculture.
There are, however, as I discovered, various kinds and types of Socialism. I think I saw during my journey across Europe as many different kinds of Socialists as I did kinds of Jews, which is saying a good deal. In Denmark and Italy, for example, I met men of the very highest type who were members of the Socialist party. In Copenhagen I was entertained by the editors of the Socialistic paper, _The Politiken_, which is perhaps the most ably edited and influential paper in Denmark. In Italy many of the most patriotic as well as the most brilliant men in the country, writers, students, and teachers, are members of the Socialist party.
In Poland, on the other hand, I met other Socialists who had taken an active part in the revolution in Russia and who, for aught I know, were members of that group of desperate men who are said even now to be plotting from Cracow, Austria, a new revolutionary movement among the agricultural classes in Russia.