And now this present week, morning after morning I take up my paper and read that 500,000 miners want something.  I look in my fire dubiously day by day.  I may have to go home to America in a few weeks to get warm.

Of course it is only fair to say at the outset that this little series of impressions, or sketches, as one may say, of Civilization as I have seen it since arriving in England are of such a nature that I need not have come over to England to observe them.  I would be the last to deny that the same conveniences for being disagreeable and for getting in the way and for making a general muss of Life can be offered almost any time in my own hopeful and blundering country.

What more immediately concerns me in these things is that, having happened, there can be no doubt that they have some valuable and worthy meaning for me and for other people that I ought to get out of them.

One cannot stand by and see a great civilization like our English-speaking civilization, with its ocean liners, cathedrals, and aeroplanes, being undignified and inefficient before one’s eyes and even a little ridiculous, without trying to see if it does not serve some purpose.  There must be something beyond, something further and deeper, something newborn about it, which shall be worth our while.  Strikes seem to be common people’s way of thinking things out.  If they had more imagination, they would know what they were going to think beforehand, without so much trouble perhaps; but so long as they have not, and so long as it is really true perhaps that all these millions of levers and wheels and engines will have to be stopped, so that the rich mechanical-minded people who own them and the poor mechanical-minded people who work with them can think better, we will have to be glad at least that they are thinking, and we will have to hope that they are thinking fast, and will soon have it over with.  In the meantime, while they are thinking, we can think too.

It is never fair to lump people together, and there are always exceptions and special reasons to consider; but, speaking roughly, it is fair to lay it down as a general principle that it is apt to be the more common kind of employers and employees who find it difficult to think, and who need strikes to think with.  When we see 175,000 weavers striking in Lancashire, and the Trades Unions insisting on the discharge of Non-Union men, and employers being willing to recognize the Unions but being unwilling to be controlled by them, most of us find ourselves taking sides very quickly.  We are often amazed to see how quickly we take sides, and what amazes some of us most is our apparent inconsistency.  We find ourselves now on the Union side and now on the employer side in the dispute between Capital and Labour.  We never know when we take up the morning paper, some of us, which side will be our next; and very often, if we were suddenly asked why, on reading quietly about a new dispute in the morning paper, we had taken