I do not intend to imply that the labor movement is a conscious attempt at such cooerdination.  It is not.  The conscious purpose is the direct and simple desire to resist specific acts of domination and to increase labor’s economic returns.  But any one who follows the sacrifices which organized workers make for some small and equivocal gain or who watches them in their periods of greatest activity, knows that the labor movement gets its stimulus, its high pitch of interest, not from its struggle for higher wage rates, but from the worker’s participation in the administration of affairs connected with life in the shop.  The real tragedy in a lost strike is not the failure to gain the wage demand; It is the return of the defeated strikers to work, as men unequipped with the administrative power—­as men without will.

There could be no greater contrast of methods of two movements purporting to be the same, than the labor movement in Germany and in the United States.  The German workers depended on their political representatives almost wholly to gain their economic rewards.  Their organizations made their appeal to the sort of a state which Bismarck set up.  They would realize democracy, happiness, they believed, when their state represented labor and enacted statutes in its behalf.

If Germany loses the war the chances are that the people may recognize what it means for the people of a nation to let the title to their lives rest with the state; they will know perhaps whether for the protection they have been given and for the regulation of their affairs and destiny they have paid more than the workers of other countries, who, less protected by law, suffered the exigencies of their assumed independence.

How much the German people depended upon the state and how much their destiny is affected by it is illustrated better by their educational system and its relation to industry than by any labor legislative protective practices or policy.

George Kerschensteiner, the director of the Munich schools, in his book on “The Idea of the Industrial School,” tells us that the Purposes and Duties_ of the schools are to realize the ideal ethical community, and that this realization is possible in so far as the educational provisions are made from the standpoint of the ethical concept of each state.  In America we do not think of the state as the embodiment of our ethical concepts.  The state, as we know it, is one of the several instruments for realizing ends, ethical as well as material.  The state is supposed to serve the common ends of all people.  A state may be used, we are all aware, as an instrument, either by Prussian junkers or American business men; either may capture a state to serve their ends.  But as a state serves special individuals it belies its professed reason for existence, and in America is in danger of falling from grace, so far, that is, as the common people are concerned.  But when a state stands in the minds of a people as the embodiment