Extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionaries apparently will have to be carried and supported by society, kept on as it were on the spiritual town farm or under surveillance, or in the workhouse or slave pen of thinking they prefer, until they can come out and listen and treat the rest of us as fellow human beings.
On the same principle of time economy and of being fair to all, the Put-Through Clan will find itself coming to its decisions and giving its backing to people—to capital groups and labor groups in proportion as they are spirited.
The people who give the most return on the investment—the people who give the most quick thorough and spirited response—in the general interests of a world that is waiting to be decent must be the ones who shall be waited on first.
I have never been able to see why it is so generally supposed that people who have so little spiritual power that they cannot even summon up enough spirit not to be ugly, should be spoken of as spirited.
I would define spirited labor as labor which uses its imagination, labor which thinks and tries to understand how to get what it wants instead of merely indulging in wild destructive self-expression and worship of its own emotion about what it does not want.
Spirited labor is inventive and constructive toward those with whom it disagrees and wants to come to terms.
Revolutionaries and reactionaries are tired and automatic, tumtytumming people—who do not want to think.
I am not saying that spiritually tired people are to blame for being tired. I am pointing out a fact to be acted on.
Tired people always want the same thing. They want a thing to stay as it is—or they want it to stay just as it is—upside down. The same inefficiency, fear and weakness, meanness—merely another set of people running the inefficiency and trying to make fear, weakness, meanness work.