"You people seem to think," he challenged them, "that Yetta's principal job is to organize the garment workers."
"Well, isn't it?" Mabel asked.
"No! And I hope she won't let you two bluff her into thinking it is. Her main job for the next few years is study. The garment workers will be organized and reorganized fifty times before they get a definite formation. She's only one opportunity to form her intellect. It must last her all her life. It's more important than this work you talk about because it's to be the basis of the bigger jobs to come. All the time she's going to be torn by what looks like conflicting duties. Every day she'll wake up with the feeling that there's something she can do which would or might help in this immediate campaign. The temptation to give all her time to the union work is the worst one she'll have to face. If she yields to it, she'll regret it all her life. Three years hence the work she did in the mornings will look very small indeed and the study she neglected will look very, very big.
"When you talk about 'sweat-shops,' Mabel, you curse the bosses for robbing the girls of leisure and all chance of culture. Watch out that you don't 'sweat' Yetta, that you don't let her 'sweat' herself. It's criminal nonsense to talk work, work, work. Plenty of people will be saying that to her. I think she's got sense enough to keep her head, but you who are her friends ought to be telling her study, study, study."
"You're right, Walter," Mabel said with unusual humility.
"What we ought to do," he went on, "is to outline a course of study for her. What do you suggest, Isadore?"
"We've just published a new pamphlet which outlines a course of reading," he said. "It's called 'What to read on Socialism.'"
"That's a fine idea of a liberal education." Mabel snorted. "She isn't going to be a Socialist spellbinder. Her job's with the unions. The Webbs' Industrial Democracy would help her a lot more than your Socialist tracts."
"It's just as iniquitous to sweat her intellect as her body," Longman groaned. "Can't you two blithering idiots realize that before you read any of these books you read hundreds of others, studied for years? I hope she won't specialize—in her study—on Socialism or trade-unions, either, for several years. She needs to keep her mind open and absorb a background. She ought to read Westermarck's History of Human Marriage before she tackles Bebel's Woman. She ought to read Lecky and Gibbon and John Fiske and Michelet and a lot of astronomy and geology and physics and biology—a person's an ignoramus to-day who hasn't a broad knowledge of biology—and she ought to know something about psychology before she tackles the Webbs. She ought to put in some time on pure literature. You people are thinking about Yetta Rayefsky, the labor organizer of the next few years. Well, I hope she's going to live still three score years and more than ten. It's going to do her more good to read Marcus Aurelius than Marx and Engels. She wants to know something of the traditions of the race, the great men of the past, Homer and Shakespeare and Rabelais and Swift. And above all she needs to know the ideas of our own times, Ibsen and Tolstoi, Shaw and Anatole France. She'll pick up the Socialist and trade-union dope as she goes along. It's the background we, her friends, can give her."
And so for an hour or more they squabbled over a large sheet of paper and at last evolved a course of reading for her. There were to be two mornings a week to natural science, two to history, two to social science and psychology, and one to literature. Yetta sat back and listened to it all, very much impressed by the way these three intellectual giants hurled at each other's heads the titles of books of which she had never heard. There was indeed very much for her to learn. Mabel generally concurred in Walter's suggestions, but Isadore doggedly insisted that more Socialist matter should be included. He was especially rabid on the question of history.