Then let Meat and Potatoes do the same for one another.  Then two industries at a time, industries getting brains in pairs, until like the animals going into the ark, little by little (or rather very fast, almost piling in, in fact, after the first pair have tried it), at last our true, spirited, practical minded American workmen will have made their labour machines as natural and as human and as American as they are.  They will stop trying to lower prices by not working, each workman joining (in a factory) the leisure classes and making the other workmen pay for it.

* * * * *

The American workman, as things are organized now, finds himself confronted with two main problems.  One is himself.  How can he get himself to work hard enough to make his food and clothes cheap?  The other is his employer.

What will the American workman do to express his American temperament through his labour union to his employer?  The American workmen will go to their employers and say:  “Instead of doing six hours’ work in nine hours, we will do nine hours’ work in nine hours.”  The millers, for instance, will say to the flour mill owners:  “We will do a third more work for you, make you a third more profit on our labour if you will divide your third more profit like this: 

“First, by bringing down the price of flour to everybody;

“Second, by bringing up our wages.  Third, by taking more money yourselves.”

American labouring men who did this would be acting like Americans.  It is the American temperament.

They will insist on it:  The labour men will continue to say to their employers, “We will divide the proceeds of our extra work into three sums of money—­ours, yours, and everybody’s.”  In return we will soon find the employers saying the same thing to the labour men.  Employers would like to arrange to be good.  If they can get men who earn more, they want to pay them more.

The labourers would like to be good, i.e., work more for employers who want to pay them more.

But being good has to be arranged for.

Being good is a matter of mutual understanding, a matter of organization, a matter of butting our American temperament into our industrial machines.

All that is the matter with these industrial machines is that they are not like us.

Our machines are acting just now for all the world as if they were the Americans and as if we were the machines.

Are we for the machines, or are the machines for us?

All that the American labourers and that the American capitalists have to do is to show what they are really like, organize their news about themselves so that they get it through to one another, and our present great daily occupation in America (which each man calls his “business”) all the workmen going down to the mills and all the employers going down to their offices, and then for six, eight, nine hours a day being chewed on by machines, will cease.