138 FARMERS' UNION AND FEDERATION 



Back of the long retention of unneeded soldiers on the 

 pay rolls and continual increased wages to union labor is 

 the fear of them becoming Bolsheviks if not well provided 

 for. Governments must remember that this menacing red 

 army is partly composed of farmers who have been forced 

 below the danger line of poverty by manipulators of their 

 products, and if other classes are to be subsidized by higher 

 wages to turn a deaf ear to agents of the Bolsheviki, farmers 

 must be also through better wages and improved living con- 

 ditions by a higher range of prices for their products. 



It would appear that our government should encourage 

 the farmers to unionize to enforce a living wage through the 

 minimum price system, that they may act as a stabilizing 

 power to the government against the ever increasing de- 

 mands of unionized labor which aims at the absolute control 

 of all industry through the Russian Soviet form of govern- 

 ment, according to Mr. Upton Sinclair, who says of it in the 

 following excerpts : 



" . . . No, said the syndicalist, the Parliament which is to con- 

 trol industry must be chosen, not geographically, but industrially. It 

 must be a Parliament of the workers, organized according to the work 

 they do. ... 



"And that is what a Soviet is. Soviet is simply the Russian word 

 for union. The Soviet government of Russia is simply a government 

 by the trade unions of that country. . . . 



"All over England the beginnings of industrial democracy have been 

 made, and it needs only the pressure of a few big strikes to force a com- 

 plete system of labor union control. These strikes may come in Eng- 

 land any day, and when they do come there will be Soviet government 

 in England. . . . 



"If those things are ever tried again in America, we shall wake up 

 some fine day, just as the Russians did, to find a Syndicalist govern- 

 ment in full control; the mines for the miners, the railways for the 

 railway men, and so on." 



Union labor does not recognize farmers as laborers, but 

 class them as bourgeoisie, or middle class, as distinguished 

 from the- proletariat, their class. This latter class is now in 



