f the Government says that this is conspiracy, and that shutting up a
factory to make the people in it listen to each other and listen to the
consumers is against the law of the land, all the people in America who
shave will turn the Government out of office and have the law changed.

A strike by workmen in a particular business is a holdup of all the other
workmen in the country, raises the cost of living for everybody, and is
undemocratic and unfair.

A lockout of employers in a particular business is a holdup of all other
employers and workmen, and is undemocratic and unfair.

In a country of a hundred million people a holdup conducted by a hundred
million people for the hundred million people is democracy.

I employ this rather threatening illustration of the possible action of
the League in certain cases because it suggests the power of democracy
when experts and crowds act together--the fact that democracy can really
be made to work, that democracy can be as forcible, as immediate and
practical in dealing with autocratic classes, as autocracy can.

But only two or three per cent of what the League in its local and
national branches would really do would be like the illustration I have
used. The power the League would have to do things like this would make
doing them unnecessary.

The regular work of the League would largely consist in accepting
invitations from factories, and in supplying and training experts for the
purpose of conducting in a factory mutual advertising campaigns, or
studies in attention between workmen and employers, adapted to different
types of factories.

The way out for democracy in dealing with predatory wealth which
organizes to hold up the consumers, and with predatory labor which
organizes to hold up the consumers, is for the consumers to organize.

XVII

THE NATIONAL LISTENING MACHINE

People are so much more apt to bear in mind in proportion, the power of
an organization to be ugly, than they are its power not to need to be
ugly--to get what it wants with people by combining with them instead of
fighting them, that perhaps it might be well to dwell a moment on the
fact that the power of the consumers of the country as organized in the
Air Line League, to make it uncomfortable for predatory labor or
predatory capital, will never be abused.

If what an organization is for, is to put the soul and body of a people
together it is compelled as a matter of course, to get it