; that if the workers and
the capitalists could change places, there would be a corresponding
change in their views of many things. I refuse to flatter the workers,
my friend: they have been flattered too much already.

Politicians seeking votes always tell the workers how greatly they
admire them for their intelligence and for their moral excellencies.
But you know and I know that they are insincere; that, for the most
part, their praise is lying hypocrisy. They practice what you call
"the art of jollying the people" because that is an important part of
their business. The way they talk _to_ the working class is very
different from the way they talk _of_ the working class among
themselves. I've heard them, my friend, and I know how most of them
despise the workers.

The working men and women of this country have many faults and
failings. Many of them are ignorant, though that is not quite their
own fault. Many a workingman starves and pinches his wife and little
ones to gamble, squandering his money, yes, and the lives of his
family, upon horse races, prize-fights, and other brutal and senseless
things called "sport." It is all wrong, Jonathan, and we know it. Many
of our fellow workmen drink, wasting the children's bread-money and
making beasts of themselves in saloons, and that is wrong, too, though
I do not wonder at it when I think of the hells they work in, the
hovels they live in and the dull, soul-deadening grind of their daily
lives. But we have got to struggle against it, got to conquer the
bestial curse, before we can get better conditions. Men who soak their
brains in alcohol, or who gamble their children's bread, will never be
able to make the world a fit place to live in, a place fit for little
children to grow in.

But the worst of all the failings of the working class, in my humble
judgment, is its indifference to the great problems of life. Why is
it, Jonathan, that I can get tens of thousands of workingmen in
Pittsburg or any large city excited and wrought to feverish enthusiasm
over a brutal and bloody prize-fight in San Francisco, or about a
baseball game, and only a man here and there interested in any degree
about Child Labor, about the suffering of little babies? Why is it
that the workers, in Pittsburg and every other city in America, are
less interested in getting just conditions than in baseball games from
which all elements of honest, manly sport have been taken away; brutal
slugging match