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of Labour and the I.W.W. Certain members of these learned societies, including expert hod-carriers and pick and shovel engineers, find difficulty enough with our language as now written, and could not possibly tolerate the presence of those reformers who are adding variability to its other faults.
The burning question of contemporary literature apparently concerns the eight-hour day for historians and the minimum wage for sonneteers. These things, and countless others which fret the artistic brain, could easily be solved by unionism. For instance; shall poets be paid by the hour or by the line? The one system discriminates unjustly against such careful workmen as Tom Gray, who consumed seven years on a job only 128 lines long, called "An Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard"; whilst the other system is too partial to speedy labourers like Sam T. Coleridge and Bob Southey, who, working together, built the poetic drama of "The Fall of Robespierre" between seven o'clock of an evening and the next noon. Also, pay by the line is unfair to writers of Alexandrines like Mike Drayton, while it unduly favours tetrameter bards like Sam Butler and Walt Scott, and leaves a bitter dispute to be settled amongst the ballad-mongers; who sometimes reckon their verses by long lines of fourteen syllables each, and at other times double the number of lines, the long heptameters being split up into alternate lines of eight and six syllables, respectively.
Amateur journalism, because of its free avenues of expression, would doubtless be suppressed as a hotbed of "scabs" by the Gomperses and the Giovanittis of organised literature. Since it is the prevailing notion of trade unionism that no man has the right to labour without supporting a union and assuming the insignia of industrial blackmail, it may easily be deduced that literary unionism would utterly forbid all thought or expression by outsiders; and that it would, if necessary, resort to violence in cases of stubborn authorship by United members. Whether this violence would consist of stoning or of satire, is as yet uncertain.
A rather perplexing aspect of the case is afforded by the classic authors. These writers, having lived before the dawn of the New Slavery, are all necessarily non-union, wherefore a man who reads their works must logically be boycotted or placed upon the "unfair" list by the modern Knights of Grub Street. The manner of establishing such a boycott would be interesting to determine; but the action will probably never be necessary, since but few up-to-date persons over touch or peruse classic literature.
Looking ahead, as is the custom of all good radicals, the student may discern an age in which the whole domain of art: literary, pictorial, sculptural, architectural, and musical; will be placed upon a strictly union basis. Indeed, the modern Huns are already proving their efficient progressiveness by destroying the offensively beautiful non-union architecture of mediaeval religion in Belgium and Northern France. "Down with the cathedrals, Comrace von Teufel" cries Bill Hohenzollern, head of the Berlin Butchers' Local No. 1914, "for they bear not the union label"!
Concerning trade unionism among authors as a whole, "The Conser-
