hat people think in National
Associations of Employers and national associations of workingmen in
labor unions.

Thinking a thing out nationally on a hundred million scale which is being
done by people who cannot even think a thing out individually or on a
two-person, or five-person scale, is in danger of coming to very
superficial decisions.

Capital has been in danger for forty years and labor is in danger now, of
being fooled by its own bigness. Because it is big it does not need to be
right, and because it does not need to be right it might as well be wrong
about half the time.

The trouble with the illusion of bigness is that it is not content with
the people who are in the inside of the bigness who are having it. Other
people have it.

When a man looks me in the eye and tells me with an air, that two times
two equals four and a half, he does not impress me and I feel I have some
way of dealing with him as a human being and reasoning with him. But when
I am told in a deep bass national tone that 2973432 multiplied by 2373937
is 9428531904456765328654126178 I am a little likely to be impressed and
to feel that because the figures are so large they must be right. At all
events, on the same principle that very few of my readers are going to
take a pad out of their pockets this minute and see if I have multiplied
2373937 by 2173937 right, or if I have even taken half a day off to
multiply them at all, I am rather inclined to take what people who talk
to me in a deep bass seven figure national tone, at their word.

Labor unions and trusts in dealing with the American public have been
fooled by their own bigness and have naturally tried to have us fooled by
it a good many years.

It is a rather natural un-self-conscious innocent thing to do I suppose,
at first, but as the illusion is one which of course does not work or
only works a little while, and does not and cannot get either for capital
or labor what they want it does not seem to me we have time,--especially
in the difficulties we are all facing together in America now, to let
ourselves be fooled by bigness, our own or other people's, much longer.

The difficulties we have to face between capital and labor are all
essentially difficulties in human nature and they can only be dealt with
by tracing them to their causes, to their germs, looking them up and
getting them right in the small relations first where the bacilli begin,
dealing at particular times and