After a lecture on some phase of labor troubles, a young lady, who had been nettled by some remark, made tart objections. "My father," she said, "employs hundreds of men. They make no end of trouble for him, though he gives every one of them a living." She had at her tongue's end the exact amounts which went each week to "support," as she said, these troublesome employees. When I ventured to ask if it was really so onesided as that: if the men in the factory did not also help "support" her father: if they gave him nothing in return for all his favors, I found, though she had college training, that the question had no meaning for her. She was going about in her little world carrying in her pretty head this dense illusion that her father was a kind of patron saint dispensing favors to ungrateful and little deserving mill hands.
Years after, at a strike against another kind of mill, I met a youth to whom Syndicalism was a religion. With glowing sincerity he was telling the packed hearers about him that the employers were "shirkers and not workers." "They did not make that mill or anything in it. From cellar to roof labor made it; and what labor makes, labor should have."
Here again was the young lady. As with her, I tried to draw from him some further statement about the employer's obvious part in the creation and maintenance of the mills in question. But this meant nothing to him. There was no further question in his mind. "The mill is ours and we shall take our own."
Since then, these two have hung in my memory as companion pictures. In point of density, one illusion is as pernicious as the other. There are views so
