re improved are not blocked or checked. That we
must do. That has been the matter about which I have taken pleasure in
conferring from time to time with your president, Mr. Gompers; and if I
may be permitted to do so, I want to express my admiration of his
patriotic courage, his large vision, and his statesmanlike sense of what
has to be done. I like to lay my mind alongside of a mind that knows how
to pull in harness. The horses that kick over the traces will have to be
put in corral.

Now, to stand together means that nobody must interrupt the processes of
our energy if the interruption can possibly be avoided without the
absolute invasion of freedom. To put it concretely, that means this:
Nobody has a right to stop the processes of labor until all the methods
of conciliation and settlement have been exhausted. And I might as well
say right here that I am not talking to you alone. You sometimes stop
the courses of labor, but there are others who do the same, and I
believe I am speaking from my own experience not only, but from the
experience of others when I say that you are reasonable in a larger
number of cases than the capitalists. I am not saying these things to
them personally yet, because I have not had a chance, but they have to
be said, not in any spirit of criticism, but in order to clear the
atmosphere and come down to business. Everybody on both sides has now
got to transact business, and a settlement is never impossible when both
sides want to do the square and right thing.

SETTLEMENT HARD TO AVOID

Moreover, a settlement is always hard to avoid when the parties can be
brought face to face. I can differ from a man much more radically when
he is not in the room than I can when he is in the room, because then
the awkward thing is he can come back at me and answer what I say. It is
always dangerous for a man to have the floor entirely to himself.
Therefore, we must insist in every instance that the parties come into
each other's presence and there discuss the issues between them, and not
separately in places which have no communication with each other. I
always like to remind myself of a delightful saying of an Englishman of
the past generation, Charles Lamb. He stuttered a little bit, and once
when he was with a group of friends he spoke very harshly of some man
who was not present. One of his friends said: "Why, Charles, I didn't
know that you knew so and so." "O-o-oh," he said, "I-I d-d-don't; I-I
ca