trade depression had laid all labor organization low.  It was in the eighties, with the turmoil of the Knights of Labor and the Anarchist bomb in Chicago, that the “intellectuals” first awakened to the existence of a labor problem.  To this awakening no single person contributed more than the economist Professor Richard T. Ely, then of Johns Hopkins University.  His pioneer work on the Labor Movement in America published in 1886, and the works of his many capable students gave the labor movement a permanent place in the public mind, besides presenting the cause of labor with scientific precision and with a judicious balance.  Among the other pioneers were preachers like Washington Gladden and Lyman Abbott, who conceived their duty as that of mediators between the business class and the wage earning class, exhorting the former to deal with their employes according to the Golden Rule and the latter to moderation in their demands.  Together with the economists they helped to break down the prejudice against labor unionism in so far as the latter was non-revolutionary.  And though their influence was large, they understood that their maximum usefulness would be realized by remaining sympathetic outsiders and not by seeking to control the course of the labor movement.

In recent years a new type of intellectual has come to the front.  A product of a more generalized mental environment than his predecessor, he is more daring in his retrospects and his prospects.  He is just as ready to advance an “economic interpretation of the constitution” as to advocate a collectivistic panacea for the existing industrial and social ills.  Nor did this new intellectual come at an inopportune time for getting a hearing.  Confidence in social conservatism has been undermined by an exposure in the press and through legislative investigations of the disreputable doings of some of the staunchest conservatives.  At such a juncture “progressivism” and a “new liberalism” were bound to come into their own in the general opinion of the country.

But the labor movement resisted.  American labor, both during the periods of neglect and of moderate championing by the older generation of intellectuals, has developed a leadership wholly its own.  This leadership, of which Samuel Gompers is the most notable example, has given years and years to building up a united fighting morale in the army of labor.  And because the morale of an army, as these leaders thought, is strong only when it is united upon one common attainable purpose, the intellectual with his new and unfamiliar issues has been given the cold shoulder by precisely the trade unionists in whom he had anticipated to find most eager disciples.  The intellectual might go from success to success in conquering the minds of the middle classes; the labor movement largely remains closed to him.