Bolshevism is unthinkable in America, because, even if by some
imaginable accident the government were overthrown and a labor
dictatorship declared, it could never "stay put." No one who knows the
American business class will even dream that it would under any
circumstances surrender to a revolution perpetrated by a minority, or
that it would wait for foreign intervention before starting hostilities.
A Bolshevist _coup d'?tat_ in America would mean a civil war to the
bitter end, and a war in which the numerous class of farmers would join
the capitalists in the defense of the institution of private
property.[110]
But it is not only because the preponderance of social power in the
United States is so decisively with private property that America is
proof against a social upheaval like the Russian one. Another and
perhaps as important a guarantee of her social stability is found in her
four million organized trade unionists. For, however unjustly they may
feel to have been treated by the employers or the government; however
slow they may find the realization of their ideals of collective
bargaining in industry; their stakes in the existing order, both
spiritual and material, are too big to reconcile them to revolution.
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