But whether or no, even though it was nothing but loyalty to the established brotherhoods of the A.F.L. or a deeper loyalty to his own ideas of the case, the rock-steady influence of Tom Moore at the conventions was the one biggest hope of the indirect action element winning out. He was not opposed to Socialism. He has to work with Socialists--of many sorts. The whole basic idea of the Federation of Labour is a degree of Socialism. But it was the Marxian brand of Socialism born in Germany and transplanted to Russia to which Moore was opposed. He saw no field for this in Canada. He believed that Canada had a right to freedom of action. At least if it came to a choice between authority from the Gompers organization in the United States, and the Lenine tyranny in Russia, the course was clear. Time and time again he was bombarded and machine-gunned by the Red elements in Congress and Convention. As often he solidly stood his ground, based upon the older idea of labour getting its rights through negotiation and later through the ballot.
"Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast, The rapids are near----"
But the daylight was not yet past for this Tom Moore. He could see ahead.
"I have seen Moore," says a close observer of him for two years, "faced by labour opponents in a number of Western cities. In all the howling he has never lost his temper or his dignity."
It would have been so much easier for this man to lose his temper, except that he knew it would be harder at the end when he had to face his own steady rank and file accusing him of poor chieftainship. It would have been so much easier to compromise with the preachers of glittering formulae, except that in the settling up he would have to justify himself to those who suspected him of defection.
Moore stuck to the commonplace business of wages and hours and agreements. He had no head for the poetry of Utopias. He knew, as he knows, that wages are the chief item of cost in all commodities, and that no matter what form of capitalism you choose, whether embodied in a Soviet or in a close corporation of dividends, wages of labour must be paid. He knows that prices of living and of labour are almost convertible. Amid all the howling and paeaning for a better day, for the new life, for the heaven upon earth, for the glorification of the proletariat, he could stand hard and fast by the common necessity of sticking to an agreement and as fast as possible bettering conditions.