Of course this is physically inconvenient, but it would pay hundreds of times over to conduct a national campaign of having laborers bring other laborers into line and of having employers shame other employers into competence.
The best substitute for this national demonstration, this national physical getting together like this, is as I have said before, a book read by all, by employers and employees looking over each other's shoulders, each conscious as he reads that the other knows he reads, knows what he knows and is reading what he knows.
X
TECHNIQUE FOR CAPITAL IN GETTING ITS WAY
I should hate to see Capital, in the form of a National Manufacturers' Association, realizing the desperateness of the labor situation and that something has got to be done at last which goes to the bottom, slinking off privately and confessing its sins to God.
I would rather see a confession of the sins of Capital toward Labor for the last forty years and of its sins to-day made by Capital in person to Labor.
God will get it anyway—the confession—and it will mean ten times as much to Him and to everybody if He overhears it being given to Labor.
Of course Labor has been doing of late wrong things that it is highly desirable should be confessed and naturally Capital thinks that a good way to open the exercises would be with a confession from Labor to Capital to the effect that Labor admits that Labor like the Trusts before it had had moments or seizures in which it has held up the country, broken its word, betrayed the people and acted the part the people hate to believe of it—of the bully and the liar.
Not only the Capital Group but the Public Group feel that a confession from Labor before we go on to arrange things better is highly to be desired.