Amid every
variety of shop grievance, and with the widest possible difference
in race, language and customs, they shared two disadvantageous
conditions: industrially they were oppressed, and socially they were
subject races. Therefore they were one people, in spite of their nine
nationalities. These two conditions acted and reacted upon one another
complicating and intensifying the struggle. But because of this very
intensity it has been easier for the onlooker to separate out the real
questions at issue, easier for the sympathetic American to come into
wholesome and human relationship with this large body of his brothers
and sisters. To him they could be one group, for their interests
were one, and they had been too long separated from him and from one
another by the accidents of birth and speech.
So the searchlight turned on then on the sewing trades has since cast
its enlightening beams on industrial conditions in other trades, in
which, too, one race is perpetually played off against another with
the unfailing result of cuts in wages and lowering of standards of
living.
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