quently happens that the readjustment lowers the wage that piece-work becomes an object of suspicion. I have had the plainest admissions from employers that the trade-union resistance to piece-work was wholly justified if the resistance could be guarded from abuses.

So also the "un-American way" of restricting the ability of exceptional men, the "levelling down to inferiority," and other confident charges made against the unions are seen to have so much justification in actual experience as to leave the student far more tolerant even of the abuses connected with them.

These illustrations may make clear why I have been led in the following chapters to use with so much freedom purely personal opinions that have been expressed to me during twenty years of investigation and lecturing upon the topics here considered. It has not, in most instances, seemed to me fair to give names. The opinions were in many instances given on the express condition that the name be not used. That this is open to censure and may be thought to constitute a weakness in the book, I readily admit. The responsibilities for the weakness I must accept. I trust that some corresponding advantages may appear in the result, as I report from responsible men on the labor side, from socialists, business managers, engineers, and capitalists alike.

It was another inexcusably slow discovery that most men do not put their deepest opinions into print, or state them before the public. My first clear conception of this was in listening during a semester to a German professor. From these lectures and from

a stiff volume that he had already published, I believed myself in possession of his most important opinions. In later and more personal conversations with him, I found another and very different man, of whom no printed utterance would have given me a glimpse. He was far more radical, far bolder in his critical restrictions about the institutional life about him, and far more willing to welcome great changes in our social organization.

He was

I do not impeach this man's sincerity. giving to me the freer and more extemporaneous opinions that are habitual in private intercourse. In those moments he was unconcerned about the maturity or coördination of his views. I yet believe there was more of the real man in his conversations, more even of his real thought, than in the elaborated and guarded utterances as publicly expressed. In the whole class of socially disturbing topics the freest and deepest opinions are not usually printed in a book, and, so far as this is true, one has to go elsewhere for full evidence.1

Many of the socialists who make the best literature for the propaganda, do not, any more than the professor, put all their real opinions into their publications. Like the respectabilities among the bourgeois, they have opinions for dress parade — opinions that are safe and orthodox for the cause they represent. They may publicly maintain with great vehemence the essential integrity of Karl Marx's

1 Professor J. W. Jenks tells me that in his long and exhaustive investigation of the "trust," by far the most important facts about the purposes and methods of these combinations were only secured in private conversation.

theory of socialism. In private they may admit to you, as the best-trained French and German socialists have admitted to me, that Marx's fundamental doctrine of surplus value is unsound. Another

may have philosophic training enough to challenge Marx's fatalistic theory of history. I asked a cultivated Belgian socialist why he did not openly proclaim these doubts about the "master." "We can't yet afford," he said, "to embarrass our cause by displaying doubts about the theories on which it is believed to rest." The value of these private opinions is priceless because they point the way along which the less enlightened mass of socialist thought will follow. A collectivist editor in Paris gave this reason why he should not expose these doubts about the sacred traditions: "You must have," he said, "a certain unity and completeness of form in your exposition, or it loses literary effectiveness. I must have this, or I could get no scholars to read what I write." It is precisely this vanity for what will excite academic or conventional approval that devitalizes so many books. To appear "scientific," "to display unity of treatment," to have showy classifications in which new technical names are given to very well-known and commonplace facts, is the subtlest form which temptation puts on for these ambitions. This is not harmful among subjects where a 'synthesis" is possible, where "form and completeness" are in any way attainable; but in those studies that have to do with the vastness and complexity of human society and its reorganization, the craving for these literary and scientific graces has left a great deal of our printed sociology chillingly empty of result.

For this very reason our need is the greater for genuine opinions and simple facts, even if the time is not yet come for their more systematized exposition.

Not only socialists but many of our most influential trade-union leaders have grown into larger opinions than they can yet enforce upon their followers. They are as a unit upon the importance of keeping every contract their unions sign with employers. They are as a unit against all violence against non-union men. They are often helpless before the impulsive action of some local union, but their unquestioned policy is to strengthen their organization at these weaker points. There are other issues upon which they are forced to be as politic as a "dynamic clergyman with a static congregation." Too many of the workmen are not yet enlightened enough to take the larger view. There are unions, for example, in which the amount of work done is deliberately restricted as a matter of principle. I have talked at length recently with the head of such an organization. He said to me, "I know perfectly well that the policy is suicidal. I know that a smaller output means, upon the whole, less comfort all round. The men are under the illusion that there is only about so much work to be done and they want to 'stretch it out,' or 'not use it up too quick.' I have several times got a lot of men together and explained to them why the policy is a bad one. But if I were to be too strict I should lose my place, and a man would be put in who wouldn't try to educate them into better sense. In time we can teach them better. When the employers lecture them about this they all think he is simply trying to get more work for the

same money. When I lecture them they at least begin to talk it over and think about it."

Another source of penetrating criticism comes from a certain contemplative type of successful business man who can rarely be induced to put his strictures in print. I have, for instance, never heard an abler defence of Henry George's theory of the single tax than from a man who had made a fortune in city land speculation. He did not like to apply the theory to the country at large, because he thought that the practical difficulties would be too great; but for municipal areas he came to believe that we are simply stupid not to turn the enormous land values created by an increasing population into the public treasury.

In gathering evidence for a report on German workingmen's insurance, I found that the published opinions of many business men in that country had upon the whole a very different and certainly a far lower value than opinions one could get from them in conversation. One of our own trust organizers has published valuable opinions on the subject of the trust. In private, I heard him analyze the actual dangers of the trust with a searching skill that I have not seen equalled. I asked him why he put none of these views into print. He replied: "Those are things a wise man doesn't say in public. I am not advertising the weakness of the trust."

Now it is the very things "the wise man does not say in public" that I wish to get in as evidence. I would not exclude the soberer and more cautious public or printed view, but the further emphasis which I venture to give to the open and unreserved opin