oor
scrawny substitute for joy--the baseball extra.

It is as symptomatic as the labor union. It expresses need. And
statesmanship would find an answer. It would not let that passion and
loyalty be frittered away to drift like scum through the nation. It would
see in it the opportunity of art, play, and religion. So with what looks
very different--the "syndicalist movement." Perhaps it seems preposterous
to discuss baseball and syndicalism in the same paragraph. But that is
only because we have not accustomed ourselves to thinking of social
events as answers to human needs. The statesman would ask, Why are there
syndicalists? What are they driving at? What gift to civilization is in
the impetus behind them? They are human beings, and they want human
things. There is no reason to become terror-stricken about them. They
seem to want things badly. Then ostriches disguised as judges cannot deal
with them. Anarchism--men die for that, they undergo intolerable insults.
They are tarred and feathered and spat upon. Is it possible that
Republicans, Democrats and Socialists clip the wings more than free
spirits can allow? Is civilization perhaps too tightly organized? Have
the irreconcilables a soul audacious and less blunted than our
domesticated ones? To put it mildly, is it ever safe to ignore them
entirely in our thinking?

We shall come, I think, to a different appraisal of agitations. Our
present method is to discuss whether the proposals are right and
feasible. We do this hastily and with prejudice. Generally we decide that
any agitation foreign to our settled habits is wrong. And we bolster up
our satisfaction by pointing to some mistake of logic or some puerility
of statement. That done, we feel the agitation is deplorable and can be
ignored unless it becomes so obstreperous that we have to put it in jail.
But a genuine statecraft would go deeper. It would know that even God has
been defended with nonsense. So it could be sympathetic to agitations. I
use the word sympathetic literally. For it would try to understand the
inner feeling which had generated what looks like a silly demand. To-day
it is as if a hungry man asked for an indigestible food, and we let him
go hungry because he was unwise. He isn't any the less hungry because he
asks for the wrong food. So with agitations. Their specific plans may be
silly, but their demands are real. The hungers and lusts of mankind have
produced some stupendous follies, but the d