results.

In America these leaders have risen from the rank and file of labor.
Their education is limited. The great majority have only a primary
schooling. Many have supplemented this meager stock of learning by
rather wide but desultory reading and by keen observation. A few have
read law, and some have attended night schools. But all have graduated
from the University of Life. Many of them have passed through the
bitterest poverty, and all have been raised among toilers and from
infancy have learned to sympathize with the toiler's point of view. *
They are therefore by training and origin distinctly leaders of a class,
with the outlook upon life, the prejudices, the limitations, and the
fervent hopes of that class.

* A well-known labor leader once said to the writer: "No
matter how much you go around among laboring people, you
will never really understand us unless you were brought up
among us. There is a real gulf between your way of looking
on life and ours. You can be only an investigator or an
intellectual sympathizer with my people. But you cannot
really understand our viewpoint." Whatever of misconception
there may be in this attitude, it nevertheless marks the
actual temper of the average wage-earner, in spite of the
fact that in America many employers have risen from the
ranks of labor.

In a very real sense the American labor leader is the counterpart of the
American business man intensively trained, averse to vagaries, knowing
thoroughly one thing and only one thing, and caring very little for
anything else.

This comparative restriction of outlook marks a sharp distinction
between American and British labor leaders. In Britain such leadership
is a distinct career for which a young man prepares himself. He is
usually fairly well educated, for not infrequently he started out to
study for the law or the ministry and was sidetracked by hard necessity.
A few have come into the field from journalism. As a result, the
British labor leader has a certain veneer of learning and puts on a more
impressive front than the American. For example, Britain has produced
Ramsey MacDonald, who writes books and makes speeches with a rare grace;
John Burns, who quotes Shakespeare or recites history with wonderful
fluency; Keir Hardie, a miner from the ranks, who was possessed of
a charming poetic fancy; Philip Snowden, who displays the spiritual
qualities of a seer