Late in 1919 Professor Gordon S. Watkins of the University of Illinois, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, set the membership of the Socialist party at 39,000, of the Communist Labor party at from 10,000 to 30,000, and of the Communist party at from 30,000 to 60,000. In other words, according to this estimate, the Communists could muster at the most hardly more than one-tenth of one per cent of the adult population of the country; and the three parties together—the majority of whose members were probably content to work for their ends by lawful means—brought the proportion to hardly more than
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