Page:George Soule - The Intellectual and the Labor Movement.djvu/13

 is not false, it is only immensely fore-shortened and romanticized. If he will but remember that workmen are people, very much like other people, and that their organizations and collective habits are institutions, very much like other institutions, he will save himself much needless chagrin. Most people are interested in petty things, most of them prefer roundabout alleys and sideshows to straight progress along the main highroad. Heroic moods are not stable. The labor movement moves, but sometimes more like a glacier than like a race-horse, sometimes more like an eddy than like a cataract. It is historic, not in the sense of a carefully directed pageant, but in the sense of a highly varied and slow migration. Its institutions are just as liable to encrusted bureaucracy, to cautious protection of their vested interests, as are other institutions. They have, to be sure, merits of their own, but they are not the type of an ideal world. The fact that unions are concerned about wages and hours, about political factions, that they progress haltingly and clumsily, does not mean that the high-sounding manifestoes and programs are nothing but so much political bunkum. It means merely that like all words of man, they are too small and clipped to encompass more than the general direction and the finer spirit of the reality.

There is one aspect of the labor movement, moreover, which is likely to take by surprise the intellectual who is unfamiliar with it. He will probably be unprepared for the intricacy and difficulty of its daily functions, or for the technical skill demanded of its practical leaders. Seen closely, it is not chiefly an affair of meetings, strikes and speeches. A successful trade union is a complex organization with a highly developed government of its own, dealing with the life of industry in a hundred details. Its officials have an accumulated experience in organizing methods, in negotiating with employers, in the conduct of industrial warfare when that is necessary, in the administration of the affairs of large bodies of men; which places them on a level of practical intelligence at least as high as that of the average business man. The officialdom of the labor movement may, like most other officialdoms, be unduly conservative. It may for a time follow policies which prove mistaken in the long run. It may have much to learn about the conduct of its own business. All these faults are characteristic of almost any group of