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THE CHALLENGE OF FACTS

which are organized under monarchical or oligarchic forms, and which threaten to carry out their program at all cost to the community. They are doomed to fail. They will not be overcome by conciliation and concession because they are not animated by the spirit from which any concession will secure peace, but only larger demands. They will fail because they will come into collision with the sober sense of the community. It is indeed a great experiment to grant the fullest liberty and the greatest political equality, in the faith that the unsuccessful will not only regard without envy the prosperity of the successful, but also will help to secure and defend it; but it is a fallacy in every point of view that, because those-who-have-not outnumber those-who-have, therefore those-who-have-not will plunder those-who-have. Still more certainly, the measures that have been used to assist the employed class against the employers will fail, because they are irrational and at war with economic forces. There are a great many cases in sociology where the sum of the parts is not the whole, but is zero. The trades-union is one of them; a national trades-union, or an international trades-union, of all employees, instead of being invincible would be nil. If by all going out to-day all could force an advance in wages, by all going back to-morrow all would restore the old rate. The human race cannot lift itself by the boot-straps in this way any more than in any other. If we want more wages, the only way to get them is by working, not by not working.