Mr. Dooley in our present tightened up hysterical situation between Capital and Labor, could really do more than Savonarola.
And Life could do more than the Christian Register. It was not frivolous in Abraham Lincoln in the deepest and most tragic hour this nation ever had, to try to make way with his Cabinet, for his Emancipation Proclamation, by introducing it with Artemus Ward. It was the pathetic humanness, the profound statesmanship of the loneliest man of his time, in the loneliest moment of his life smiling his way through to his God.
I am not sure but that if Peter Finley Dunne could have been appointed on the President's Industrial Conference and could have got off some nice cosy relaxed human little joke just in the nick of time—just as Mr. Gompers and his Labor Children like so many dear little girls said they would not play any more, took their dollies and their dishes and went home—stuck their heads up and majestically walked from the room—if Mr. Dooley and Hennessy could have been present and got in a small deep lighthearted human word, all in one half minute the President's Conference might have been saved.
The broad every day human fact about the Conference was, that seen from the point of view of God or of common people, many of the men in it,—most of the men in it, for the time being, were really being very funny and childish about themselves. So far as the public could see through the windows, the only real grown-ups in the Conference who conducted themselves with dignity, with serenity, with some sense of fact about human nature and humor, some sense of how the Conference would look in a week, were the men in The Public Group. There were doubtless lively and equally disconcerning individuals in the Capital group and the Labor group, but they were voted down and hushed up, and not allowed to look to the public outside, any more like intelligent fellow human beings than could be helped.
The President's Conference, at that particular moment, like our whole nation to-day, had worked itself up into a state of spiritual cramp—a state in which it did not and could not make any difference what anybody thought, and nobody had the presence of mind at the moment apparently, or the willfulness of love for his kind, or the quickness to do what Lincoln would have done, slip in a warm homely joke that would have got people started laughing at one another until they got caught laughing at themselves.
When Mr. Gompers and the labor people with tragic and solemn dignity, as if they were making history and as if a thousand years were looking on, walked out of the room, I do not claim that if they had met Oliver Herford or Mr. Dooley in the hall, they would have come back, but I do claim that if some one just beforehand had made a mild kindly remark recalling people to a sense of humor and to a sense of fact, Mr. Gompers and the labor group would have found it impossible to be so romantic and grand and tragic about themselves, they would have seen that the ages were not noticing them, that they were off on their facts, that they were not making history at all, or that the history they were making would all have to be made over in a week. They had the facts wrong about the capital group, and wrong about the public group, and like dear little girls were believing in their dear little minds what they thought was prettiest, about themselves.
Of course it is only fair to say that Capital, while it did not do anything so grand, was probably responsible for the grandeur of Labor's emotions and actions, and was equally believing what it wanted to believe about itself.
With Capital not yet grown up—not yet really capable (as the really mature have to be in the rough and tumble of life) of making a creative use of criticism,—incapable of self-confession, self-discipline and of making fun of itself, it naturally follows that with Labor in the same undeveloped state, the President's Conference was mainly valuable as a national dramatization,—a rather loud and theatrical acting out before an amazed people of the fact that Capital and Labor in this country as institutions were as petulant, as incapable, as full of fear, superstitions and childishness about one another as the monotonous strikes and lockouts they have dumped on us, and made us pay for forty years, had made us suspect they were!
For forty years Capital and Labor have taken out all the things that bothered them, their laziness in understanding one another, their moral garbage, their moral clinkers, tin cans and ashes, and dumped them in what seems to them apparently to be a great backyard on this nation—called The Public. And we have carted it all away and paid for carting it away without saying a word.
There are three courses we can take in the Public Group now.