We are living in a day when not only all competent-minded students of affairs, but the crowd itself, the very passers-by in the streets, have come to see that the very essence of the labour problem is the problem of getting the classes to work together.  And when the crowd watches the labour leader and sees that he is not thinking correctly and cannot think correctly of the other classes, of the consumers and the employers, it drops him.  Unless a leader has a class consciousness that is capable of thinking of the other classes—­the consumers and employers, so shrewdly and so close to the facts that the other classes, the consumers and the employers, will be compelled to take him seriously, tolerate him, welcome him, and cooeperate with him, the crowd has come at last to recognize promptly that he is only of temporary importance as a leader.  He is the by-product of one of the illusions of labour.  When the illusion goes he goes.

Capital has been for some time developing its class consciousness.  Labour has lately been developing in a large degree a class consciousness.

The most striking aspect of the present moment is that at last, in the history of the world, the Public is developing a class consciousness.

The Crowd thinks.

And as from day to day the Crowd thinks—­holds up its little class heroes, its Tom Manns and Pierpont Morgans, and sees its world through them—­it comes more and more to see implacably what it wants.

It has been watching the Tom Mann, or Bill Heywood type of Labour leader, for some time.

There are certain general principles with regard to labour leaders that the crowd has come to see by holding up its heroes and looking through them, at what it wants.  The first great principle is that no man needs to be taken very seriously, as a competent leader of a great labour movement who is merely thinking of the interest of his own class.

The second general principle the Crowd has come to see, and to insist upon—­when it is appealed to (as it always is, in the long run) is that no labour leader needs to be taken very seriously or regarded as very dangerous or very useful—­who believes in force.

A labour leader who has such a poor idea that a hold-up is the only way he can express it—­the Crowd suspects.  The only labour leaders that the Crowd, or people as a whole, take seriously are those that get things by thinking and by making other people think.

The Crowd wants to think.

The Crowd wants to decide.

And It has decided to decide by being made to think and not by being knocked down.

It is not precisely because the Crowd is not willing to be knocked down, and has not shown itself to be over and over again, when it thought its being knocked down might possibly help in a just cause.

But it has not been through coal strikes, Industrial Workers of the World, and syndicalist outbreaks for nothing.