The Consumers' League has been a useful, suggestive institution, and has done work of value (as it would doubtless say itself) in a more or less nagging and sporadic way, but it has had no national militant vision or sense of thoroughness in what it could do because it lacked the advertising clinch, the advertising willfulness and irresistibleness that puts things through.
The new organizations—as a super-consumers' league, a super-advertising club—will converge these two ideas into a huge momentum, into a national organized drive or vision of making men see together and act together, until we work out social democracy in every man's business, in every man's store, and the daily work of every man's life. Programs which have merely been yearned at before, which have been sleazily groped at and generalized over and guessed at before, will be gathered up, articulated, melted into a huge common national action by men who have the consuming passion and genius for touching the imaginations of others. The selection and articulation of these men in all communities is all that is necessary. Everything is waiting and ready. First we will get the men together who have the fire. Then we will put fire under the boilers of the nation and turn the drive-wheels of a world.
XX
UP TO THE PEOPLE
There are several reasons which, as it seems to me, show that my plan is not visionary, and that the skilled consumers who organize their skill in the way I have outlined, are bound to succeed in doing what now most needs to be done for high production and team-work in the industries of the country.
1. The consumer class is practically everybody.
2. The consumer class is the most disinterested, and is identified with both capital and labor. It is the natural umpire between them. Its line of least resistance is to act fairly.
3. The interests of the consumer class lead it not only to act fairly but to act energetically. The consumer class as a class will want to pay extra for as few quarrels between the people it is paying to make things for it as possible. The consumer always pays for all quarrels, and anything that is good for the employers and employees in the long run can not but be good for the consumer in the long run.
4. In the last analysis, the consumers in any given industry, if duly organized as capital and labor are now, will not only have the disposition to act fairly in a quarrel between the people who are making something that they buy, and the disposition to act quickly and have the fight over with, but they will have as buyers the power as a last resort to choose the factories they will deal with; to do their buying naturally and cheaply, and from factories that are entirely in the business of making goods and not half in the business of making goods and half in the business of making civil war. The nationally organized consumers will naturally advertise to people which firms take the least time off for fighting, and put all their work into the goods they expect the people to pay for.