cial life is as expressed in industry. These have heights, depths, and complications of which the objects of our study have at least as much to learn as others.
I was told of a Pennsylvania farmer with keen intellectual interests who was led to study the I. W. W. propaganda. Having read a good deal about Socialism, he became so absorbed in this new and bolder variation, as to go a long distance to hear a lecturer. In the questions which followed, the speaker had said of a steel mill near Pittsburg, "We shall take it if we can get it. Everything in it that labor didn't make was stolen out of labor. We can't get it 'politically.' We shall take it directly just as soon as we have the power to do it. The capitalists have stolen from us since the mill was started, and we don't propose to pay 'em just because they've been robbing us."
The farmer was not satisfied with this easy account of things. Among other questions, he insisted upon knowing by what right the special set of laborers, who happened just then to be in the mill, proposed to take to themselves all that others before them had earned. "You who are now there didn't make the mill nor very much of the machinery. I've got a big well-stocked farm, but I made only part of it. My grandfather and his boys, my father and my brothers—all of us helped get it where it now is. Shall the hired men that I have now, come in and take it?" This farm had expensive machinery and was worked under the wage system as "capitalistically" as the mill, and the question was perfectly fair. Its greater simplicity brings out the fantastic impossibilities of remedying our industrial wrongs by any such rough and ready methods.
