Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/199

Rh are dangerous persons, but we know them to be such, although we may not always know just what mischief they are doing. Even more dangerous, owing to their not being recognized as such, are our emotional idealists, philanthropologists and sociologists, who take the part of what they are pleased to regard as the underman in ways that do credit to their hearts but not to their heads.

The relation among capital, labor, and management or brains, has been compared to that of the supports of a three leg stool. If any one of the legs be missing the stool can not stand. This is indeed a good illustration, but I am going to offer another one as more aptly describing things at the present time as they look to me.

The people of this country are all in the same boat. Imagine one like a galley of old, with a gangway down the center and the rowers on benches on either side. Capitalists row on one side and laborers on the other. Once they pulled in unison and the boat was kept on fairly even keel. There has been a great storm, during which the captain—the principle of authority—has been washed overboard. The laborers, rowing on one side, have acquired more weight and have tipped the boat toward their side, so that the gunwale is nearly awash and the craft is in danger of sinking, the weather being still foul and the sea running high. Management, as coxswain in the stern, has great difficulty in steering the boat and keeping it afloat. A passenger, a socialist, jostles his elbow on one side, loudly voicing his superior ability to run things and trying persistently to take the helm from the experienced hands. Another passenger, a philanthropologist, pokes the coxswain’s elbow from the other side, while he emotionally begs him to spare