e the more
common kind of employers and employees who find it difficult to think,
and who need strikes to think with. When we see 175,000 weavers striking
in Lancashire, and the Trades Unions insisting on the discharge of
Non-Union men, and employers being willing to recognize the Unions but
being unwilling to be controlled by them, most of us find ourselves
taking sides very quickly. We are often amazed to see how quickly we
take sides, and what amazes some of us most is our apparent
inconsistency. We find ourselves now on the Union side and now on the
employer side in the dispute between Capital and Labour. We never know
when we take up the morning paper, some of us, which side will be our
next; and very often, if we were suddenly asked why, on reading quietly
about a new dispute in the morning paper, we had taken promptly one side
rather than the other, almost unconsciously, before we knew it we would
not perhaps be able to say at once. The other day I became a little
alarmed at myself at what looked at first like a kind of moral weakness,
and inability to stand still on one side or the other in the contest
between Labour and Capital; and I tried to think my way sternly through,
and decide why it was my mind seemed to waver from one side to the
other, and seemed so inconsistent and inefficient.

It seems to me I have just discovered a certain thread of consistency,
as I look back over many disputes.

As near as I can remember, I find the side that uses force, or that uses
the most force, invariably turns me against it. If, as I read, I find
that both sides are using force, I find myself against both sides. I
find myself wishing, in spite of my dislike of Socialism, that the
nation had the power, when a quarrelsome industry turns to the people in
the street and stops them in what they are doing, and tells the people
in the street that they cannot ride, or that they shall not sleep, or
that they cannot eat--when a quarrelsome industry insists on keeping the
whole world up all night because it has a Stomach Ache, I feel suddenly
that the people ought to be able to take the industry away and put it
into such hands that the people in the streets will be protected; into
hands that will make the industry behave so that it won't have a stomach
ache. An industry with a stomach ache always has it because somebody in
it has been over-eating and getting more than their share, and is
incompetent and unfit; and obviously it shoul