acts through politicians whom, if they are against us, we call "demagogues."
This is the landmark we have now reached. So many people have come to sympathize with the socialistic ideals that these disturbances can no longer be kept out of politics. It is a sympathy of such strength, that even politicians of high character will use it. A Public Service Corporation which has not now learned this lesson cannot even make the bluff that its managers are really practical men. No one can claim that distinction who ignores the most obdurate facts that enter into this kind of strike.
Yet all this is on the surface of our problem. What concerns us far more is the character and justification of this new popular sympathy with those in revolt. If the Boston Elevated Railroad in its strike of 1912, is forced to do finally about everything that it at first stoutly and rather contemptuously said it could not do, our interest is to know about the forces that brought about the change. If greater events like the English "Taff-Vail Decision" and the "Osborn Judgment" have finally to be utterly remodeled because a new political reckoning has to be made, we want also to know what meaning there is in this insistance that the most solemnly sanctioned laws must be changed; that labor shall retain rights and privileges that courts would deny, If the public, once instructed, will not stand it to see men discharged because they join a trade union, or because I. W. W. agitators are treated as "bums," it must suggest at least this,—that the deeper cause these agitators have at heart is misconceived by those who think such summary
