If the quickest way for the American people to get a decent world—a world we want to do business in, is to whip German militarism in industry, and if the quickest way to whip German militarism abroad is to whip it at home, why is it we are not everywhere opening up our factories, calling in our money and our men and settling down to work?
What is it that is scaring capital and labor away and holding back money and men?
The fear of the United States Senate.
The fear and coma of war in all nations, among the men who furnish money and men who furnish labor, while awaiting for the United States Senate and other governments not to be afraid of war.
The first item on the business schedule of every nation to-day is to stop this fear.
The first way to stop this fear we have of other nations abroad is to stop our fear of one another at home, is to watch people we know all about us, at desks, at benches and machines on every side, who all day every day are making peace work between classes, better than war does. Making democracy work in business is the first condition, for America and the world of having any business.
It is not merely in behalf of other nations, but in behalf of ourselves, that I am advocating the direct action of the people welded together into one mass organization, to secure by the direct daily action of the three classes together the rights of industrial democracy for each of them. The Air Line League is proposed not as a bearing-on organization but as a standing-by or big-brother organization guarding the free initiative, the voluntary self-control of labor and capital and the public, the team work and mutual self-expression and self-fulfillment of all classes.
The whole issue is all folded up in this one issue of industrial democracy—in proving to people by advertising it to them and by dramatizing it to them that industrial democracy works.
It is because the Germans believe that men who have been forced against their wills to do team work, are more efficient, can produce more and compete more successfully than enthusiastic and voluntary men doing team work because they understand and want to, that Germany is a second-class nation and that the German people have had to put up for forty years with being second-class human beings. They have a ruling majority of second-class human beings in Germany because they have the most complete and most exhaustive arrangements any nation has ever dreamed of, for making second-class human beings out of practically anybody—arrangements for howling down to people, for telling people what they have got to do as a substitute for the slower, deeper, more productive course of making them want to do it.
Taking the line of least resistance—the mechanical course in dealing with human nature, makes America's being a second-class nation a matter of course.