Weekly Nome industrial worker. (Nome, Alaska) 1918-1919, 1918-11-16
which will enjoy an ascendancy.

which will enjoy an ascendancy.
Nor is it true that progress has al
ways been the course of the world.
There have ben cases when the world
never advanced whit. There can be
cited instances when quite the re-
verse occurred; when free countries
became slave, when liberty was re-
placed by tyranny and when reaction
triumphed over progress in every way.
Turn to China to cite even mod
crate example of this. For fully a
thousand years China has been on a
retrograde movement. Where it did
not show this reactionary tendency
it stood still and that was the best
could be said of it.
While systems of philosophy. close
ly identified with truth and pustice
became Unidentified and closely assoc
lated with falsehood and injustice.
There was a system of ethics that
provided mankind with code full
of living faith and hope which became
! the empty outward ceremOnials of
dead creeds and reactionary rituals.
AS we see it today there are two
we'll marked tendencies in the indus
! trial world. One is a tendency to-
wards industrial absolutism and the
other is a tendancy towards indus
! trial freedom.
Neither one or the other is allowed
free play. but to deny that the reac-
tionary tendency has not behind it
the most powerful weapons, the best
system of organization, or propagan-
da, of all compelling influence would
be to voluntarily deny what are facts
so obvious that anyone may observe
them. This tendency towards max
! ing the masses become industrial
serfs of the industrial autocrats is
no myth and its manifestation is in
no wise more powerfully seen than in
the very reluctance of many who have
voluntarily resigned themselves to
that condition of serfdom which has
been imposed upon them in many in
stances, denying with so much en-
condition exists. They have made
! common cause with the Industrial
barons and economic over lords and
make their own individual selves
subservient as they are, interested in
the well being of their employers.
To say that after the war no such
condition will be allowed to prevail is
to give unreasoned rein to the imagi-
nation. We have no possiblereason
for maintaining that such will be the
case On the contrary unless each in
dividual determines himself to see
that it shall not, it most certainly
will The employers, the leading EN-
ployers are entrenchod il positions OF
great power. They have the great
weapon of economic fear in tkeil
hands Control of the means of sub
sistance of the masses gives them a
control of industrial conditions that
cannot be questioned. They have or.
carnations with qualifications into
every nook and Granny of society and
social activities, so that they reach
everywhere, and those who would
oppose them on the other hand are
hardly organized at all.
Yet, wthal we believe that this
Great War is primarily a war for the
extention of the democratic idea. This
alone is much. The will to see that
the purpose of this war is fulfilled in
every nation is much more ad should
be in evidence everywhere.
Only by effort after Liberty, only
after a genuine struggle for freedom
will we prepare ourselves to receive
the larger, fuller measure to which we
lay claim for all the world.