n. The Civic Federation has been a safe plodding vague
institution because it has not had a vigorous vision of itself, and has
not been conducted by men who have a personal genius for conceiving and
carrying out cooeperation between capital and labor. It has been weak,
theoretical, and full of generalization because it has not had the
driving force that such a man as Schwab--some Schwab in publicity instead
of steel--could have given it.

The Consumers' League has been a useful, suggestive institution, and has
done work of value (as it would doubtless say itself) in a more or less
nagging and sporadic way, but it has had no national militant vision or
sense of thoroughness in what it could do because it lacked the
advertising clinch, the advertising willfulness and irresistibleness that
puts things through.

The new organizations--as a super-consumers' league, a super-advertising
club--will converge these two ideas into a huge momentum, into a national
organized drive or vision of making men see together and act together,
until we work out social democracy in every man's business, in every
man's store, and the daily work of every man's life. Programs which have
merely been yearned at before, which have been sleazily groped at and
generalized over and guessed at before, will be gathered up, articulated,
melted into a huge common national action by men who have the consuming
passion and genius for touching the imaginations of others. The selection
and articulation of these men in all communities is all that is
necessary. Everything is waiting and ready. First we will get the men
together who have the fire. Then we will put fire under the boilers of
the nation and turn the drive-wheels of a world.

XX

UP TO THE PEOPLE

There are several reasons which, as it seems to me, show that my plan is
not visionary, and that the skilled consumers who organize their skill in
the way I have outlined, are bound to succeed in doing what now most
needs to be done for high production and team-work in the industries of
the country.

1. The consumer class is practically everybody.

2. The consumer class is the most disinterested, and is identified with
both capital and labor. It is the natural umpire between them. Its line
of least resistance is to act fairly.

3. The interests of the consumer class lead it not only to act fairly but
to act energetically. The consumer class as a class will want to pay
extra for as few quar