And now we are threading a way for nations through the moral wilderness of the earth.

This position has been accorded us because it goes with our temperament, because we can be depended upon to insist on asserting ourselves and on expressing ourselves in what we do.  If the present impromptu industrial machinery which has been handed over to us thoughtlessly and in a hurry, does not express us, everybody knows that we can be depended on to assert ourselves and that we will insist on one that will.  The nations that are more polite and that can dance and bow more nicely than we can in a crisis like this would be dangerous.  It is known about us throughout a world that we are not going to be cowed by wood or by iron or by steel and that we are not going to be cowed by men who are all wood and iron and steel inside.  If wood, iron, or steel does not express us, we are Englishmen and we are Americans.  We will butt our character into it until it does.

* * * * *

If the American workman were to insist upon butting his American temperament into his labour union machinery, what would his labour machinery in America soon begin to show that an American labourer was like?

I imagine it might work out something like this: 

The thoughtful workman looks about him.  He discovers that the workman pays at least two times as much for coal as he needs to because miners down in Pennsylvania work one third as hard as they might for the money.

When he comes to think of it, all the labouring men of America are paying high prices because they have to pay all the other workmen in America for working as little as they can.  He is working one third less than he can and making his own class pay for it.  He sees every workman about him paying high prices because every other workman in making things for him to eat and for him to wear, is cheating him—­doing a third less a day for him than he ought.

At this point the capitalists pile in and help.  They shove the prices up still higher because capital is not interested in an industry in which the workmen do six hours’ work in nine.  It demands extra profits.  So while the workmen put up the prices by not working, the capitalists put up the prices because they are afraid the workmen will not work.  Half work, high prices.

Then the American workman thinks.  He begins to suppose.

Suppose that the millers’ workmen and the workmen in the woollen mills in America see how prices of supplies for labouring men are going up and suppose they agree to work as hard as they can?  Suppose the wool workers of the world want cheap bread.  The flour mill workers want cheap clothes.  We will say to the bread people, “We will bring down the price of wool for you if you will bring down the price of bread for us.”