It cannot be done by one man getting up all alone and saying he will get on with half a profit or half a wage when he sees everybody about him getting on with twice as much.
The only way it can be done is by organizing, by arranging machines for mutual frank expression, confession and coöperation—mutual confession and coöperation by the men in each industry saying, "I will if you will," until we cover the nation.
This is one of the first things anti-Bolshevik capital and anti-Bolshevik labor are going to stand for—the organizing and advertising in their own industry of a voluntary understanding and professional producing among men who produce.
The men who are increasing the cost of flour by having too high wages in flour mills, will say to men who are increasing the cost of cotton by too high wages in cotton mills, "We will make cheaper cotton for you, if you will make cheaper flour for us."
It is not a matter of meanness in American human nature we are dealing with, it is a matter of agreement between men—hundreds and thousands and millions of men, who do not feel mean or want to be mean and who are trying to slink out of it.
The thing cannot be done without mutual agreement and the agreement probably cannot be made without voluntary contagious publicity, without organizing a national "I will if you will" between capital and labor. The men who produce with their minds will say to those who work with their hands, "We will agree to take less profits and reduce the prices that you pay for goods, if you will agree to take less wages and produce more."
Capital will say to labor, "If you will produce ten per cent more, we will scale down prices, make your dollar buy twenty per cent more. For every sacrifice by which you make a dollar buy more, we will make twice the sacrifice."
Having a larger margin and more time to think things out than men who work with their hands have to think things out, many employers are going to feel that it is up to them not to ask their men to do anything they do not do twice as much of themselves. They will have machinery for being confidential with the men and for letting the men see they are doing it.
Instead of having everybody rushing wildly around organizing to say "I won't if you won't" we will arrange to have a hundred thousand picked capitalists and picked laboring men in ten thousand cities, who will set going everywhere a huge public voluntary national "I WILL IF YOU WILL."
Instead of proceeding from now on to assume that we are a mean people in America, and making larger and more handsome arrangements for being meaner than ever, still mightier engines for bracing against each other, we will turn to all together and make in the next four years a machine together that will express our better natures as well as our present one does our worst ones.