The essential point in its program is self-discipline and any discipline there may be for others will wait until it is asked for and will be a by-product of the discipline we are giving ourselves.
In the operation of the Clan there are certain persons and types of persons to whom the Clan is always going to be distinctly partial. It is never going to treat people alike. People are not—for the time being—alike and are going to be treated as they are.
Democracy is impossible as long as people are not treated with discrimination—as long as people cannot feel and do not like to feel that what they are, makes a difference in what they get.
It is obvious that to begin with that the Put-Through Clan, composed as it is to be of the leading people in all groups—the people whose time has a premium placed on it in their own private business, will have a regular practice of giving the most attention and giving the most power, approval and backing to those persons with whom the least time brings the greatest return.
This means automatically extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionists in industry in getting what they want through the Put-Through Clan, will have to stand further down the queue than others.
I am only speaking for myself of course, as one person, as representative—possibly more possibly less of others in the Clan. Any scintilla or fleck of truth I can pick off from a revolutionary, I take but I will not take him. The same is true of a standpatter or reactionary. I want to know all he knows. If I take his truth I can use it, if I take him I will find him cumbersome. Life is too short to spend ten hours on him when ten minutes would do as much with some one who could listen or converse or with whom one could exchange thoughts and actions instead of papal bulls, orders and explosions.
People who do not listen—extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionists, really ought, in getting the attention and the backing they want in the Put-Through Clan, to have what comes last and what is left over from the day's work.
It is only fair that people should get attention in proportion as a little attention goes a great way.
If people do not listen it takes too much time to deal with them. Besides which, of course, giving what they want to people who do not listen—to people who in the very face of it, cannot be trusted to notice or consider others—people who are always getting up and going out, who move in an idle thoughtless rut of ultimatums, is dangerous.
People who are in the mood and the habit of ultimatums will naturally be picked out by the Put-Through Clan as the last people they will hurry with.