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CONSTRUCTIVE SUGGESTION
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wildly unrelated to any possible social change, that we rightly set them down among the antics of a disordered or undisciplined mind. An I. W. W. writer has complained in one of their journals that too many of the membership enter upon oratorical instruction before they are in the least prepared for it. He then adds: "These new converts are too much 'in advance' to be of any help to the cause," but how can one ignorant of his own business be "in advance" of anything? Why not state it as it is. "They are so far behind that they are unfit to teach." A nimble vanity is not confined to certain criminal and degenerate types. It has the thriftiest growths in that immaturity which first peeps in upon some vast human problem and is at once fired to suffocation with desire to lift the burden of the world's ignorance. It is always the mark of this immaturity to assume that its light burns far in advance of the dull and lagging multitude. If these old fogy survivals mock or turn deaf ears, the neophyte finds easy solace in the thought that other great light-bearers of the race have met the same hard fate. I once heard the ironic pleasantry, "Don't try to reform the world until you are perfectly certain that the world can't reform you. Such reproof as the rebuke carries has a far wider application than to I. W. W. neophytes. It applies to every shade of crude impatience from which few of us are wholly free.

On a far higher plane is the constructive suggestion of Odon Por. It is full of speculative charms but, at every point, fatal to the benumbing practices of our I. W. W.