significance still is it that the new principle of progressively democratized management demands the education of employer and laborer alike. Now the education of labor cannot longer be kept outside this common organization. It may go on in excluded and hostile areas with all the dangers that imports. Or it may go on in essential and increasing partnership with management.
To set our faces henceforth in this direction, to understand that this inclusive association, though it take a century, is the way of safety and the way of growth, is the lesson to be learned, especially in the United States. One of the most successful of English business men now in Parliament recently spent six weeks in this country. He saw a great many of our larger employers. I heard him asked about his impressions. One of them was this. "So many of your big men don't seem to me to realize in the least what is happening."
Let us begin by avoiding the blunder of that autocrat in Austria, that our present insurrection is "a mere disease of envy and irreligion." This is not in the least "what is happening." The harsh and mutinous protest of our I. W. W. is to be judged solely in its relation to a vastly larger democratic rising against the absolutism and masked economic privilege of our own day. Cynical men of the world will make light of this belief of the many. It will be so easy for them to show the muddled misconceptions in the "mass-conviction," but for what we have here in hand, it is enough that the conviction is real and that it has won alliances and quite strength enough to make its reactions felt in our political life.
