of his seeming decline in mentality. Having no longer a wrong to right, he can only make a noise that sounds good to the confused mass, on whose support his leadership depends.

In one way and one way only can organized labor deserve more pay than it has-by coöperating loyally and efficiently with other elements in our life to raise the productivity and the wealth of the nation as a whole. Unquestionably the Federation leaders realize this. In their calmer moments they have often stated the fact explicitly-but not during labor arbitrations or at labor conventions held in a period of deflation. The larger programme has no appeal to their followers, for to reach that ultimate goal present sacrifice is needful. In order to take labor must give, and in its traditional philosophy giving has no part.

The situation is vividly illustrated in another happy thought, frequently broached, that was urged once more at Denver in 1921. Mr. Gompers waved the bogey of an alliance between the 4,000,000 Federationists and the 14,000,000 of our farmers, which would enforce upon the nation the financial claims of both factions. Apparently it did not enter into his calculation that certain interests of labor and agriculture are unreconciled and, at least for the present, irreconcilable. What the laborer wants is cheap food, cheap clothing; but the farmer is out to get the maximum price for the raw materials of both. What the farmer wants is cheap transportation, cheap manufactured commodities of all sorts; but to achieve this the first requisite is a reduction of union wages. This opposition of interests was dramatized during the war-rendered obvious to the humblest intelligence. With wartime crops in the ground, the factory had drawn from the farm the cream of its laborers. Lured by union hours, union pay, and all the delights of silk shirts and the movies, the man with the hoe dropped it and made tracks for the city. The farmer, accustomed to labor from sun-up to sundown for gains that are at best problematical, has little use for the unionist. Genuine coöperation between farm and factory would of course result in a general lowering of prices, a general increase of production, and so inure to the benefit of both, of the nation as a whole. But this was farthest of all things from the intention at Denver. The farmer is learning that he has no business in that

galley. He has a programme in tune with his necessities—a national federation of his own, financed to market crops in the manner of other business men. The Washington agricultural conference of 1922, which met to consider measures of relief for the prostrate farmer, called for the deflation of wartime wages on the railways as essential to a reduction of rates. Mr. Gompers loudly protested-and was firmly though courteously given to understand that the Brotherhoods were profiteers against the nation.

And the lady, whose fate is so strangely allied to that of the laboring man? The American Federation of Labor makes no overtures to her, even when talking for Buncombe. Yet far more than the farmer she is its victim. What is to be the defense of the middle class home, its means of regaining the dignity, the natural function, of which the industrial revolution has robbed it? Few if any questions are as momentous as that.

The more obvious answer is an organization of brainworkers such as labor has achieved. In point of fact workers in many professions are already enrolled under the American Federation of Labor-newspaper reporters, teachers, clerks, musicians, actors. The musicians and actors, once helpless victims of managerial oppression, have profited as signally as ever a bricklayer or pressman. Yet there is one of those clouds on the horizon, no bigger than a hand. It is, in fact, the stage hand-who has joined in strikes for both actor and musician and for whom they are morally bound in turn to walk out, as musicians have already done. It is not only in this matter of the sympathetic strike that the professional class, when it joins the Federation, is bound to the wheel of organized labor. Between handworker and brainworker there is an essential, deep-seated opposition; and, however fully the brainworkers became organized under the Federation, they would always be outvoted by the millions of hand laborers. Especially in the case of far-seeing projects that promised a national benefit to be ultimately shared by all they would be hampered by the necessity of converting craftsmen who have little vision beyond present wages and working conditions. It is largely a sense of this that has prevented the organization and affiliation of salaried workers and professional men.

In England this difficulty has been avoided by forming a

separate group, the Middle Class Union. Though recently organized and having only some 300 local branches with an aggregate membership of a quarter of a million, it has already performed prime service. When a strike is threatened that would shut down any basic industry, tie up any public utility, the Middle Class Union calls for technically trained volunteers from its own membership to take the places of striking motormen, enginemen, motor truck drivers, electricians, until the dispute can be settled equitably. In the transportation strike of 1919, and again when a general strike of the Triple Alliance was threatened in 1921, the Middle Class Union was a powerful factor in the uprising of the public which overawed the strikers and defeated the strike. In America the danger from national strikes, though distinct and increasing, is less and the movement to organize the middle class, though already on foot, is backward; but there can be no doubt that in both countries there is a future of great service for the Middle Class Union.

The gain will not be limited to the protection afforded against selfish or unreasonable demands of labor. A Middle Class Union should be the most powerful of correctives to our social and political thinking. When national industrial conferences are called, such as those at Washington in October and December, 1919, an effort has been made to represent what is called "the public"; but the spokesmen of "the public" lack weight and indeed a programme, being members without a constituency. There is in fact no such thing as a "public" that is distinct from labor and capital. To adjust the balance of national interests it is necessary that the brainworker should be represented as such. When we have an adequately national Middle Class Union its representatives will sit in at such conferences; they will speak with the voice of an organized, vigilant constituency and be backed by its industrial and political power.

There remains the second programme of organized labor, "industrial democracy." It is a plausible phrase glibly used by many who little comprehend it. If it means anything it means the blending and the consummation of the Industrial and the Democratic Revolutions in a socialist state. Whatever else may be said of this idea, it is not static but dynamic; for good or for

evil it could only result in the transformation of our national life, political, economic, social. It is not, like the trade union programme, the fabric of opportunist intelligence, invoking chimerical policies in order to gain immediate and class-limited ends. Nor is it, like the Middle Class Union, the product of a backward-looking, though educated and patriotic, conservatism. It was conceived by men of genius of a sort, middle-class in their origin and education,-what it contemplates is a renovation of society from its depths, the logical culmination of the two historic revolutions of the nineteenth century.

If the new Socialist is a menace-the I. W. W., the Syndicalist, the Bolshevist, the National Guildsman-it is because he has taken seriously, and logically built upon, the doctrine of equality and democracy—which we others have so long professed, and disregarded. That is his only offense against reality. In the main body of his thought, he is a pioneer, a builder. While conservatives among us dwell amid phantoms of the past, he knows that the Industrial Revolution has violently shifted the national center of gravity. Our actual daily life and all the sources of our material power center in the great industrial units of the twentieth century. What Massachusetts and South Carolina, New York and Virginia, once were, that to-day are the coal mines, the steel trade, the steamships, the railways. The strongly federal Nation, which Washington and Hamilton conceived in terms of mainly agricultural States, cannot be achieved to-day without a federation of national industries into an intricately inter-dependent yet harmoniously functioning whole. Yet our publicists still unconsciously think in terms of the agricultural individualist and the ancient industrial household, while our legislators struggle legalistically at the task of adapting the static common law to the regulation of a new world, splendidly dynamic. The modern Socialist rejoices in the instinct for the jugular vein. Thanks to the war, he has been able not only to think but to act realistically, dyeing his hands deep in actuality. Like the traditional conservatives, it is true, he accepts the dogmas of equality and democracy—and ignores, much as they do, the middle class and its claim to a special scope. This doubtless results from his need of justifying his claim that the pro

letariat shall rule. In the name of native equality he can overturn the world. But the strength of his theory has proved the weakness of his practice. Where syndicalism was put into actual working, as in Russia and Italy, the fact that it rejected the middle class proved its undoing; where the attempt failed, as in England and the United States, it was the silent strength of the middle class that defeated it. In the way of actual progress, few things are less important than past-war experiments in the New Socialism industrial democracy; but nothing in the world to-day is quite as significant as the joint spectacle of the thing it intended and the manner of its frustration.

The middle-class man has little use for democracy, social or industrial. What he holds dearest is his home, and the very special standard of his living. With regard to the woman well born and well bred, whom the middle-class man holds so dear, the industrial democrat is stone blind, abject in dehumanized theory, in economic materialism. In his eager if inadequate striving toward an ideal of democracy, he ignores the one thing that gives life its ultimate importance and dignity. In all the literature of the new Socialism there is no rustle of feminine drapery, no accent of the child-no thought of the middle-class family, with its traditions of character and culture, of the national need of always passing them on.

With every generation, it has been said, the life of the nation passes through the bodies of its women, is formed anew in the warmth and light of the home. But what if, in this curious, unconscious conflict between laborer and lady, the laborer should permanently triumph? Those who know the middle class best, its dwindling in numbers and in resources, know that the laborer will triumph, inevitably, unless we realize, and very soon, whither we are tending. First and foremost among the needs of the nation is that women well born and well bred shall lead wholesome, seemly lives-that those who are of sound body and able mind shall transmit to the future the most precious of a people's treasures.

JOHN CORBIN.