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, 
