The daily Nome industrial worker., 1916-09-21
IN UNKNOWN GROUND.

SteinmetZ, the expert manager ot the General Electric Co. and his in- veterate habit of smoking. He smokes on the job. And when he was told that he could not do so, this man, who is probably the great est electrician in the world, without exception, simply walked out and stayed away until he was permitted his cigar. He wanted more free dom.
 This incident is characteristic of what occurs on large Scale in all or almost all American employments. There is surrounding tho employees an atmosphere of authority and re- gulation that simply makes the work little better than slavery.
 Dante Barton in a recent number of the Masses tells of Jim Lord, the president of the Mining Department in the American Federation of La bor. Barton thinks Jim Lord is the biggest man in the American Trade Union Movement. He tells of meeting Lord in a train, and how Interestingly Lord spoke to him. Lord while speaking of the Youngs- town strike, Barton writes, fired this question at rue":
 Barton did you ever write any of this damned rot about this bad treatment of workers in American industries being un-American? Ii you ever did. take it back. For. by God, it's only American. It's dis tinctively American. A foreign worker comes here and it doesn't matter where he comes from-he is driven at longer hours under hard CT whip, than he is ever worked or ever felt back in his home country.
 Most Americans, naturally enough feel very keenly when anyone sub iects the country to criticism. What they observe is the great political freedom that is here existing. They see the voters cast their ballots for the men of their choice and they say, if things are not satisfactory the people can change them
 But for these people, the industri- al life of the nation, which outside the management is practically i'll the hands of the foreign workers, is unknown ground. They do not know and will likely never know how the workers are treated ill those industries Instead what they do see is a discontented class of for eigners "who are always causing trouble, as they think,
 But men like Jim Lord who is himself an American, fully under stand the situation. He realizes that the real life of the nation is . not the political life, is not life on the farm, or in mercantile activities, but in the industries of the nation.
 And most of the life of the work ing class is spent in the induseries. They only vote once every so sell dom, and their experience in the ci- ties or the fields is limited to a few minutes when leisure came to them in little struggling moments.
 That is why so many fail to grasp the fact that in "a land of liberty there can be no liberty, and in a land of personal freedom, there can be nothing but industrial tyranny.
 For the average worker, say ill the steel industry, his life as an em- ployee yielding up his labor power, consists of ninety-nine per cent of his waking existence. Conse- uuently what happens in the other one per cent is of small account. IL is immaterial if the welfare workers and up-lifters and leagues for this or that, endeavor to dump into that little margin of free leisure all the generous contents of the cornucopia of blessings. What counts with that worker is what happens while at work. That is his experience ot America. lndt IS HIS uHuerStdnuih6 of the life the country affords; that is his real life and the living in the land of the free and home of the brave.
 And his experience therein is something appalling. That surely has been shown during many recent investigations. The worker is com