The daily Nome industrial worker., 1917-06-05

make ends meet from low wages teaches a simple theory of surplus value all the academic talk in the wohd and all the pamphleteering and all the editorials from Heaven to Breakfast could not fasten so in the minds of the workers. The persistent effort to crush unionism through gunmen, lock outs, injunc- tions, trials and the like serve to impress the facts of the class strug- gle in a way no agitator were he to talk himself hoarse can do.
 The lack of intelligence in mak- ing personal actions responsible for social conditions. and it is not con fined to the employing classes, simply ignores the fact that eco- homie conditions under which men live are the driving force which give vitality to mems thought and in spiration to mems actions.
 It is true enough that continued exploitation has a brutalizing effect, it is true enough that continued ex- ploitation will often enough help to produce a condition of servility wherein the servile will hug their chains. But just as often they will excite a discontent which will not do any such thing. which will grow more and more rebellious and which will finally organize and act.
 The man who sits in an arm chair may have all kinds of pipe dreams, but the man who knows that on the job he is oyerworked and underpaid will have nothing ot the kind. And he is interested in feeling out if his fellow worker is similarly situated and similarly af- fected by conditions and they begin to discuss the ways and means of betterment. The educational effect of the system is ceaseless; it drops in with the fatigue from over work, it creaks in the overstrained joints, it mumbles in the underfed belly, it stiffens in the overworked muscles. 1t throbs in the toll excited heart and it deadens itself in the jaded brain. It needs no agitation for the victim of such a system, producing wealth beyond any other age, and living in the positive bord- erland of starvation. to produce dis content. It needs no agitation for that discontent to ally itself with others. aud to organize to remove what is inYtinctively felt to be a means of oppression. Furthermore if that instinct does not exist. it is not likely to be called into being by editorials, pamphlets. articles es- says. traatises, speeches, harrangues. These may serve to promote a bet ter understanding of instinctive i'm. pulses and to explain what has been felt but never understood, but they can uO no more.
 The complaint that is heard from time to time that the masses are losing their respect for men, institu- tions and things hit"irto considered and respectful is in itself due to the failure to understand upon the part of the other fellow who experiences nothing of what they experience.
 It is easy enough for any person sitting in a comfortable chair, smok ng fine cigars, having a fine dinner. md a comfortable and secure liv- ng with the lightest kind of work o manifest fine notions of loyalty, reverence and patriotism. All those hings are wrapped up in the man Ter of r;s living. They are par, and parcel of his good dinner. of his chair, of his pleasant lome, of his good cigar. of his se- ure income and his easy way of ,etting it. They are not necessary of the workers mode I # life: his unsanitary quarters, his neager wages, his job uncertainty, lis difficulty in making ends meet or himself and his family if he las one, in his forced denial of | needed things that help to ease the abor of life and his utter weari- | less from exhausting high speed 1 oil If he does feel any such thing | IS patriotism, loyalty and reverence md the like, it is because he has