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their commonplace, respectable, and unimaginative careers of money-grabbing, the artist and the aristocrat join forces with the ploughman and the pensant in an involuntary mental wave of reaction against the monotony of materialism.
Never has this kinship been more plainly exhibited than in the present movement among a certain class of American professional authors to band themselves together in an honest workingman's union, and to affiliate with that peerless palladium of industrial independence--the well known and far famed American Federation of Labour. That the professions of the average modern author and of the day-labourer are remarkably alike in intellectual requirements, "The Conservative" has long been convinced. Both types show a certain rough vigour of technique which contrasts very strikingly with the polish of more formal times, and both seem equally pervaded with that spirit of progress and enlightenment which manifests itself in destructiveness. The modern author destroys the English language, whilst the modern strike-loving labourer destroys public and private property.
Nor can the ambitious author afford to despise the prodigious power to be gained by entrance into the ranks of organised labour. Since our obliging executive Mr. Wilson has established the precedent of national surrender of the least crook of Labour's gnarled finger, it may be justly assumed that the Writers' Brotherhood, as the most voluble and volatile of all the various bodies of workmen, will have complete power over all departments of the government; at least, until March 4, 1917. From this immeasurable height, our professional scribblers may brandish the quill of authority over a submissive Congress, and extort by due process of law every conceivable sort of advantage over the publishing fraternity, as well as over their less enterprising fellows--the non-union writers. It is barely possible that a strike of authors might be slightly less effective as a threat, than a strike of railway men; but so fond is our present idealistic executive of the beauties of rhetoric, that he would without doubt do much for the cause of find words.
The place of literary radicals and imagist "poets" in this Utopian scheme demands grave consideration. Since the trade union movement requires at least an elementary amount of intelligence in its adherents, and is applied mainly to skilled labour; these deserving iconoclasts of the Amy Lowell school would seem to be left, Othello-like, without an occupation. But a moment's reflection serves to dissolve the difficulty. Here, indeed, is ideal material for that vague and awe-inspiring industrial "Mano Nera" known as the "I.W.W."! The benefits of such a coalition of "vers-libristes" and anarchists are patent to all. Since, save for its law and window breaking, the I.W.W is in a condition of perpetual idleness, its leaders being generally out on strike, or out on bail; its imagistical recruits would naturally be constrained to follow the general example, inaugurating amongst themselves a sympathetic "walkout", and thereby delivering the public ear and the editorial waste basket from the annoyance of their effusions.
It is quite probable that the Brotherhood of Simplified Spellers would have to be created separately from both the American Federation
