242 THE FAT OF THE LAND 



stay out six weeks longer, and each six weeks 

 adds another fifteen years to your struggle to 

 catch up with your losses. Is this a load which 

 thinking people would impose upon themselves ? 

 Not much ! You will lose your battle, for your 

 strike is badly timed. It seems to be the fate 

 of strikes to be badly timed ; they usually occur 

 when, on account of hard times or over-supply, 

 the employers would rather stop paying wages 

 than not. That's the case now. Four months 

 of coal is in yards or on cars, and it's an absolute 

 benefit to the Company to turn seventy or eighty 

 thousand dollars of dead product into live money. 

 Don't deceive yourselves with the hope that 

 you are distressing the owner by your foolish 

 strike ; you are putting money into his pockets 

 while your families suffer for food. There is no 

 great principle at stake to make your conduct 

 seem noble and to call forth sympathy for your 

 suffering, only foolishness and the blind follow- 

 ing of a demagogue whose living depends upon 

 your folly. 



"McGinnis talked to you about the conflict 

 between capital and labor. That is all rot. 

 There is not and there cannot be such a conflict. 

 Labor makes capital, and without capital there 

 would be no object in labor. They are mutually 

 dependent upon each other, and there can be no 

 quarrel between them, for neither could exist 

 after the death of the other. The capitalist is 

 only a laborer who has saved a part of his wages, 



