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AMERICAN SYNDICALISM

bitration, "welfare work" in all its varieties,—the abiding successes will depend upon the degree and intelligent heartiness with which the representatives of labor are encouraged to coöperate with business management. An authoritative and one-sided ascendency in these things was once possible and in spots may be so still, but their day, for much of our industry, is gone and soon will end for the whole of it. In thirty years we have seen scores of these fine schemes wrecked because of lurking insincerity in the proclaimed objects.

In the larger and more general field of social contact and discussion, it is as clumsily fatal to act in the old absolutist spirit, as to attempt railway management in the "public-be-damned" manner of the earlier magnates of transportation. The old feeling may still be there but it can neither be publicly expressed nor successfully acted upon. They have now to coöperate with government and every day will be forced into completer coöperation. In many countries not a step can now be taken in most social legislation without the assenting coöperation with Socialism.

No considerable force appearing among us seeking social betterment is to be held off and treated like a marauder or an outcast. Invariably these forces bring with them idealisms that no society can afford to lose. Much of the conscious plan and method of Syndicalism is whimsically chimerical. But in it and through it is something as sacred as the best of the great dreamers have ever brought us. In the total of this movement, the deeper, inner fact seems to me to be its nearness to and sympathy with that most