secure a more genuine social and industrial justice. Nor
was I especially to blame for this. The good citizens I then knew best,
even when themselves men of limited means--men like my colleague Billy
O'Neill, and my backwoods friends Sewall and Dow--were no more awake
than I was to the changing needs the changing times were bringing.
Their outlook was as narrow as my own, and, within its limits, as
fundamentally sound.

I wish to dwell on the soundness of our outlook on life, even though as
yet it was not broad enough. We were no respecters of persons. Where our
vision was developed to a degree that enabled us to see crookedness, we
opposed it whether in great or small. As a matter of fact, we found that
it needed much more courage to stand up openly against labor men when
they were wrong than against capitalists when they were wrong. The
sins against labor are usually committed, and the improper services to
capitalists are usually rendered, behind closed doors. Very often the
man with the moral courage to speak in the open against labor when it is
wrong is the only man anxious to do effective work for labor when labor
is right.

The only kinds of courage and honesty which are permanently useful to
good institutions anywhere are those shown by men who decide all cases
with impartial justice on grounds of conduct and not on grounds of
class. We found that in the long run the men who in public blatantly
insisted that labor was never wrong were the very men who in private
could not be trusted to stand for labor when it was right. We grew
heartily to distrust the reformer who never denounced wickedness unless
it was embodied in a rich man. Human nature does not change; and that
type of "reformer" is as noxious now as he ever was. The loud-mouthed
upholder of popular rights who attacks wickedness only when it is allied
with wealth, and who never publicly assails any misdeed, no matter how
flagrant, if committed nominally in the interest of labor, has either a
warped mind or a tainted soul, and should be trusted by no honest man.
It was largely the indignant and contemptuous dislike aroused in our
minds by the demagogues of this class which then prevented those of us
whose instincts at bottom were sound from going as far as we ought to
have gone along the lines of governmental control of corporations and
governmental interference on behalf of labor.

I did, however, have one exceedingly useful experience. A bill was
introd