I do this as a labouring man.  I decline, because I spend my time daily tracing out little crooked lines on paper with a pen, because I have wrought day and night to make little patterns of ink and little stretches of words reach men together round a world, because I have sweat blood to believe, because in weariness and sorrow I have wrought out at last my little faith for a world ...  I decline not to be numbered with the labourers I see in the streets.  I claim my right before all men this day, with my unbent body and with my unsoiled hands, to be enrolled among the toilers of the earth.

I speak as a labouring man.  I say Tom Mann is incompetent as a true leader of Labour.

The first reason that he is incompetent is that he does not observe facts.  He merely observes facts that everybody can see, that everybody has seen for years.  He does not observe the new and exceptional facts about capital that only a few can see, the seeing of which, and the seeing of which first, should alone ever constitute a man a true leader in dealing with capital.  He merely believes facts that nearly everybody has caught up to believing—­facts about human nature, about what works in business.  The crowd is not content with this.  It has become accustomed to seeing that the men who lead in business, and who make others follow them, whether masters or workmen, are men who do it by observing certain new and exceptional facts and acting upon them.  If these men cannot observe them, we have seen them create them.  It is the men who make new things true wherever they go that the crowd is coming to recognize and to take seriously and permanently as the real leaders of Labour and of Capital to-day.  Tom Mann is incompetent as a labour leader in dealing with capital to-day, because the things that he proposes to do all turn on three facts which, looked at on the outside, merely have or might be said to have a true look: 

First, employers are all alike;

Second, none of them ever work;

Third, they are all the enemies of Labour.

Tom Mann is incompetent to grapple with Capital in behalf of Labour as any great labour leader would have to do, because he has his facts wrong about Capital, is simple-minded and rudimentary and undiscriminating about the men with whom he deals, and sees them all alike.

This is a poor beginning even for fighting with them.

The second reason that Tom Mann is incompetent is, not that he has his facts wrong and does not think, but that he carries not-thinking about the employing class still further, has come to make a kind of religion out of not-thinking about them.  And instead of thinking how to make labouring men think better than their employers think, and making them think so well that they can crowd their way into their employers’ places, he proposes to have labour get into their places without thinking, and run a world without thinking.  All that is necessary in order to have workmen run the world, is to get workmen to stop working, to stop thinking, and then as rapidly as possible to get everybody else to stop thinking.  Then the world will fall into their hands.