or economically bearable, or are condemned as being unlawful, or confiscatory.  These four attributes of a strike are important only as incidental consequences.  The habit of Americans thus to measure up social problems to the current, temporary, and more or less accidental scheme of traditions and legal institutions, long ago gave birth to our national belief that passing a new law or forcing obedience to an old one was a specific for any unrest.  The current analysis of the I.W.W. and its activities is an example of this perverted and unscientific method.  The I.W.W. analysis, which has given both satisfaction and a basis for treating the organization, runs as follows:  the organization is unlawful in its activity, un-American in its sabotage, unpatriotic in its relation to the flag, the government, and the war.  The rest of the condemnation is a play upon these three attributes.  So proper and so sufficient has this condemnatory analysis become, that it is a risky matter to approach the problem from another angle.  But it is now so obvious that our internal affairs are out of gear, that any comprehensive scheme of national preparedness would demand that full and honest consideration be given to all forces determining the degree of American unity, one force being this tabooed organization.

“It would be best to announce here a more or less dogmatic hypothesis to which the writer will steadfastly adhere:  that human behavior results from the rather simple, arithmetical combination of the inherited nature of man and the environment in which his maturing years are passed!  Man will behave according to the hints for conduct which the accidents of his life have stamped into his memory mechanism.  A slum produces a mind which has only slum incidents with which to work, and a spoiled and protected child seldom rises to aggressive competitive behavior, simply because its past life has stored up no memory imprints from which a predisposition to vigorous life can be built.  The particular things called the moral attributes of man’s conduct are conventionally found by contrasting this educated and trained way of acting with the exigencies and social needs or dangers of the time.  Hence, while his immoral or unpatriotic behavior may fully justify his government in imprisoning or eliminating him when it stands in some particular danger which his conduct intensifies, this punishment in no way either explains his character or points to an enduring solution of his problem.  Suppression, while very often justified and necessary in the flux of human relationship, always carries a social cost which must be liquidated, and also a backfire danger which must be insured against.  The human being is born with no innate proclivity to crime or special kind of unpatriotism.  Crime and treason are habit-activities, educated into man by environmental influences favorable to their development. . . .

“The I.W.W. can be profitably viewed only as a psychological by-product of the neglected childhood of industrial America.  It is discouraging to see the problem to-day examined almost exclusively from the point of view of its relation to patriotism and conventional ventional commercial morality. . . .