And all this time, how many hearts really beat as one in the labor world?

Indeed, the situation would clear up with more rapidity if we went to the other extreme and thought of labor always as thirty million separate individuals. We would be nearer the truth than to consider them as this one great like-minded mass, all yearning for the same spiritual freedom; all eager for the downfall of capitalism.

What can one individual know of the hopes and desires of thirty millions? Indeed, it is a rare situation where one person can speak honestly and intelligently for one hundred others. Most of us know precious little about ourselves. We understand still less concerning anyone else. In a very general way, everyone in the nation wants the same things. That is a good point to remember, for those who would exaggerate group distinctions. In a particular way, no two people function exactly alike, have the same ambitions, same capacities.

There is, indeed, no great like-minded mass of laborers. Instead we have millions of workers split into countless small groups, whose group interests in the great majority of cases loom larger on the horizon than any hold the labor movement, as such, might have on them. Such interests, for instance, as family, nationality, religion, politics. Besides, there is the division which sex interests and rivalries make—the conflict, too, between youth and age.

Yet for the sake of a working efficiency we must do a minimum of classifying. Thirty million is too large a number to handle separately. There seems to be a justification for a division of labor, industrially considered, into three groups, realizing the division is a very loose one:

The great problem of the immediate future is to get groups 1 and 3 into Group 2. The more idealistic problem of the more distant future is to turn a great industrially conscious group into a socially conscious group.

By the first group, the labor or class-conscious group, is meant the members of the American Federation of Labor, Industrial Workers of the World, four railroad Brotherhoods, Amalgamated Clothing Workers, socialist and communist organizations—workers whose affiliations with certain bodies tend to make them ultraconscious of the fact that they are wage workers and against the capitalist system. Class antagonism is fostered. There is much use of the word “exploited.” In their press and on their platforms such expressions are emphasized as “profits for the lazy who exploit the workers.” Everything possible is done to paint labor white, the employer black, forgetting that no side has the monopoly in any shade.

To those who from sympathy or antagonism would picture at least organized labor as like-minded, it must be pointed out that for the great part the several millions represented by Group 1 are perhaps more often warring in their aims and desires than acting as one. Never have they acted as one. Organized labor represents but a fraction of labor as a whole. Some more or less spectacular action on the part of capital against labor always tends to solidify the organized workers. They are potentially like-minded in specific instances. Otherwise the interests of the carpenters' union tends to overshadow the interests of the A. F. of L. as a whole; the interests of the A. F. of L. tend most decidedly to overshadow the interests of organized labor as a whole. Socialists bark at communists. Charges of capitalist tendencies are made against the four Brotherhoods. The women's unions feel legislated against in the affairs of labor. Indeed, only utter stupidity on the part of capital ever could weld organized labor into enough solidarity to get society or anyone else agitated for long. Much of the “open shop” fight borders on such stupidity.

Group 2 is at present but an infinitesimal fraction of labor. It comprises those workers whose background has been fortunate enough, as to both heredity and environment, to allow of their main industrial interests centering around the doing of their particular job well for the sake of their industry as a whole, to which a sentiment of loyalty has been aroused and held. There is no feeling of class antagonism, no assurance that the interests of labor are forever inimical to those of the employer, and vice versa. Where such an attitude exists on the part of workers it presupposes an employer of unusual breadth of understanding or a deep love for his fellow-man. As co-operation in industry can be shown to pay socially and financially, so may this type of employer come more and more to supersede the old-fashioned “boss.”