resence of the other boys, that poking a verse in a Bible feebly
out at him and saying to him, "He that keepeth his temper is greater than
he that taketh a city," would be rude. The way for me to give him good
advice about losing his temper is to sit there quietly with him while he
is losing his, and keep mine.

If Capital wants to get its way with Labor--and thinks that the way to
begin with the industrial situation in this country, after all that has
happened, is with a vast national spectacle of Labor confessing its sins,
the most practical thing to do is for Capital to give Labor an
illustration of what confessing sins is like, and how it works.

The capitalists among us who are the least deceived by their subconscious
or automatic minds, are at the present moment not at all incapable of
confiding to each other behind locked doors that the one single place,
extreme labor to-day has got its autocracy from, is from them.

Labor is merely doing now with the scarcity of labor, the one specific
thing that Capital has taught it to do and has done for forty years with
the scarcity of money and jobs.

It seems to me visionary and sentimental and impracticable for Capital to
try to fix things up now and give things a new start now, by slinking off
and confessing its sins to God.

Labor will slink off and confess its sins to God, too.

That will be the end of it.

It may be excellent as far as it goes, but in the present desperate
crisis of a nation, with the question of the very existence of society
and the existence of business staring us in the face, it really must be
admitted that as a practical short cut to getting something done, our all
going out into a kind of moral backyard behind the barn and confessing
our sins to God, is weak-looking and dreamy as compared with our all
standing up like men at our own front doors, looking each other in the
eye and confessing our sins to one another.

I am not saying this because I am a moral person. I am not whining at
thirty thousand banks pulling them by the sleeves and saying please to
them and telling them that this is what they ought to do.

I am a practical matter of fact person, speaking as an engineer in human
nature and in what works with human nature and saying that when
capitalists and employers stop being sentimental and off on their facts
about themselves and about other people, when they propose to be
practical and serious, and really get their way with other