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AMERICAN SYNDICALISM

atrocities by McNamaras caught and uncaught. It will so act because it has learned that point for point, capital has its own ugly record of lawless misdemeanor that is at least as threatening to social peace and welfare as all the ill-bred violence of labor.

Such resources has great capital, that it has been able to cloak its evil doing in veiled, legal decencies, while labor must go to its sinning naked and exposed. This too the public has learned. It has learned it so well that conspicuous business can no longer act in the spirit of "I'll manage my business as I like." This public has also come to feel that all the gilded welfare schemes which only screen secret and arbitrary power over labor have probably had their day. The great and healing resources left us are those of "social insurance," meant primarily to secure labor against those dire fatalities—sickness, accident, unemployment, and death. The best of them are far more generous and more efficient for those insured than any government insurance in the world. They are open to the freest investigation by every employee. Whether capitalism has yet a long life or a short one, these private schemes are of very highest value. They are educating the race in the great art of self-protection. If Socialism were to come to-morrow, it would use these institutions as models. With all their excellence, there is one drawback. More and more labor suspects them. As they depend utterly upon the willing coöperation of labor, this gangrene of suspicion sets too narrow limits to their widest efficiency as "remedies."

We are thus driven to one further step. This can have no statement except as a general principle, but