es and making the other workmen
pay for it.

* * * * *

The American workman, as things are organized now, finds himself
confronted with two main problems. One is himself. How can he get
himself to work hard enough to make his food and clothes cheap? The
other is his employer.

What will the American workman do to express his American temperament
through his labour union to his employer? The American workmen will go
to their employers and say: "Instead of doing six hours' work in nine
hours, we will do nine hours' work in nine hours." The millers, for
instance, will say to the flour mill owners: "We will do a third more
work for you, make you a third more profit on our labour if you will
divide your third more profit like this:

"First, by bringing down the price of flour to everybody;

"Second, by bringing up our wages. Third, by taking more money
yourselves."

American labouring men who did this would be acting like Americans. It
is the American temperament.

They will insist on it: The labour men will continue to say to their
employers, "We will divide the proceeds of our extra work into three
sums of money--ours, yours, and everybody's." In return we will soon
find the employers saying the same thing to the labour men. Employers
would like to arrange to be good. If they can get men who earn more,
they want to pay them more.

The labourers would like to be good, _i.e._, work more for employers who
want to pay them more.

But being good has to be arranged for.

Being good is a matter of mutual understanding, a matter of
organization, a matter of butting our American temperament into our
industrial machines.

All that is the matter with these industrial machines is that they are
not like us.

Our machines are acting just now for all the world as if they were the
Americans and as if we were the machines.

Are we for the machines, or are the machines for us?

All that the American labourers and that the American capitalists have
to do is to show what they are really like, organize their news about
themselves so that they get it through to one another, and our present
great daily occupation in America (which each man calls his "business")
all the workmen going down to the mills and all the employers going down
to their offices, and then for six, eight, nine hours a day being chewed
on by machines, will cease.

We make our industrial machines. We are Americans. Our machin