ess
us, we are Englishmen and we are Americans. We will butt our character
into it until it does.

* * * * *

If the American workman were to insist upon butting his American
temperament into his labour union machinery, what would his labour
machinery in America soon begin to show that an American labourer was
like?

I imagine it might work out something like this:

The thoughtful workman looks about him. He discovers that the workman
pays at least two times as much for coal as he needs to because miners
down in Pennsylvania work one third as hard as they might for the money.

When he comes to think of it, all the labouring men of America are
paying high prices because they have to pay all the other workmen in
America for working as little as they can. He is working one third less
than he can and making his own class pay for it. He sees every workman
about him paying high prices because every other workman in making
things for him to eat and for him to wear, is cheating him--doing a
third less a day for him than he ought.

At this point the capitalists pile in and help. They shove the prices up
still higher because capital is not interested in an industry in which
the workmen do six hours' work in nine. It demands extra profits. So
while the workmen put up the prices by not working, the capitalists put
up the prices because they are afraid the workmen will not work. Half
work, high prices.

Then the American workman thinks. He begins to suppose.

Suppose that the millers' workmen and the workmen in the woollen mills
in America see how prices of supplies for labouring men are going up and
suppose they agree to work as hard as they can? Suppose the wool workers
of the world want cheap bread. The flour mill workers want cheap
clothes. We will say to the bread people, "We will bring down the price
of wool for you if you will bring down the price of bread for us."

Then let Meat and Potatoes do the same for one another. Then two
industries at a time, industries getting brains in pairs, until like the
animals going into the ark, little by little (or rather very fast,
almost piling in, in fact, after the first pair have tried it), at last
our true, spirited, practical minded American workmen will have made
their labour machines as natural and as human and as American as they
are. They will stop trying to lower prices by not working, each workman
joining (in a factory) the leisure class