hers like Washington Gladden and Lyman Abbott, who
conceived their duty as that of mediators between the business class and
the wage earning class, exhorting the former to deal with their employes
according to the Golden Rule and the latter to moderation in their
demands. Together with the economists they helped to break down the
prejudice against labor unionism in so far as the latter was
non-revolutionary. And though their influence was large, they understood
that their maximum usefulness would be realized by remaining sympathetic
outsiders and not by seeking to control the course of the labor
movement.

In recent years a new type of intellectual has come to the front. A
product of a more generalized mental environment than his predecessor,
he is more daring in his retrospects and his prospects. He is just as
ready to advance an "economic interpretation of the constitution" as to
advocate a collectivistic panacea for the existing industrial and social
ills. Nor did this new intellectual come at an inopportune time for
getting a hearing. Confidence in social conservatism has been undermined
by an exposure in the press and through legislative investigations of
the disreputable doings of some of the staunchest conservatives. At such
a juncture "progressivism" and a "new liberalism" were bound to come
into their own in the general opinion of the country.

But the labor movement resisted. American labor, both during the periods
of neglect and of moderate championing by the older generation of
intellectuals, has developed a leadership wholly its own. This
leadership, of which Samuel Gompers is the most notable example, has
given years and years to building up a united fighting _morale_ in the
army of labor. And because the _morale_ of an army, as these leaders
thought, is strong only when it is united upon one common attainable
purpose, the intellectual with his new and unfamiliar issues has been
given the cold shoulder by precisely the trade unionists in whom he had
anticipated to find most eager disciples. The intellectual might go from
success to success in conquering the minds of the middle classes; the
labor movement largely remains closed to him.

To make matters worse the intellectual has brought with him a psychology
which is particularly out of fit with the American labor situation. We
noted that the American labor movement became shunted from the political
arena into the economic one by virtue of fundamental con