partner in all business." If this is true, or half true, of "all business," what is to be said of this Colossus whose products are riveted into the whole material fabric of our existence? Through all the vast enginery, the phalanxes of labor passed, but at a pace and strain which burned out the vitality of average men in half life's working time.
Is this no business of the public? Who is to pay the bill for all the wreckage which such overpaced industries throw back upon the community? We do not forget that when managers themselves looked through the lid they, too, were startled into belated action. Quite magnificently have they set to work to standardize the human side of their industry; to deal with the living factor as cunningly as with steel beams and finance. This honorable step should have its recognition, but it is a beginning only, and the slowly waking public will continue to observe; to reflect and hold the managers to account.
It will press, too, that other question: Are the giants alone to have organization? If not, what follows?
Two years ago, I found in a Pittsburg suburb the first sure sign of Syndicalism that I had seen in the United States since its abrupt formation out of that portentous strike of Colorado miners in 1903–4. It was a strike in which the lawlessness of labor was matched and outmatched by the lawlessness of capital. The fruits of it were Syndicalism, or, as here named, the "Industrial Workers of the World." Belted and armed, it now enters the arena of discontent. For several weeks in 1911, I watched it in a half dozen cities on the Pacific coast.
