announce here a more or less dogmatic hypothesis to
which the writer will steadfastly adhere: that human behavior results
from the rather simple, arithmetical combination of the inherited nature
of man and the environment in which his maturing years are passed! Man
will behave according to the hints for conduct which the accidents of
his life have stamped into his memory mechanism. A slum produces a mind
which has only slum incidents with which to work, and a spoiled and
protected child seldom rises to aggressive competitive behavior, simply
because its past life has stored up no memory imprints from which a
predisposition to vigorous life can be built. The particular things
called the moral attributes of man's conduct are conventionally found by
contrasting this educated and trained way of acting with the exigencies
and social needs or dangers of the time. Hence, while his immoral or
unpatriotic behavior may fully justify his government in imprisoning or
eliminating him when it stands in some particular danger which his
conduct intensifies, this punishment in no way either explains his
character or points to an enduring solution of his problem. Suppression,
while very often justified and necessary in the flux of human
relationship, always carries a social cost which must be liquidated, and
also a backfire danger which must be insured against. The human being is
born with no innate proclivity to crime or special kind of unpatriotism.
Crime and treason are habit-activities, educated into man by
environmental influences favorable to their development. . . .

"The I.W.W. can be profitably viewed only as a psychological by-product
of the neglected childhood of industrial America. It is discouraging to
see the problem to-day examined almost exclusively from the point of
view of its relation to patriotism and conventional ventional commercial
morality. . . .

"It is perhaps of value to quote the language of the most influential of
the I.W.W. leaders.

"'You ask me why the I.W.W. is not patriotic to the United States. If
you were a bum without a blanket; if you left your wife and kids when
you went West for a job, and had never located them since; if your job
never kept you long enough in a place to qualify you to vote; if you
slept in a lousy, sour bunk-house, and ate food just as rotten as they
could give you and get by with it; if deputy sheriffs shot your
cooking-cans full of holes and spilled your grub on the ground; i