r round a world, because I have
sweat blood to believe, because in weariness and sorrow I have wrought
out at last my little faith for a world ... I decline not to be numbered
with the labourers I see in the streets. I claim my right before all men
this day, with my unbent body and with my unsoiled hands, to be enrolled
among the toilers of the earth.

I speak as a labouring man. I say Tom Mann is incompetent as a true
leader of Labour.

The first reason that he is incompetent is that he does not observe
facts. He merely observes facts that everybody can see, that everybody
has seen for years. He does not observe the new and exceptional facts
about capital that only a few can see, the seeing of which, and the
seeing of which first, should alone ever constitute a man a true leader
in dealing with capital. He merely believes facts that nearly everybody
has caught up to believing--facts about human nature, about what works
in business. The crowd is not content with this. It has become
accustomed to seeing that the men who lead in business, and who make
others follow them, whether masters or workmen, are men who do it by
observing certain new and exceptional facts and acting upon them. If
these men cannot observe them, we have seen them create them. It is the
men who make new things true wherever they go that the crowd is coming
to recognize and to take seriously and permanently as the real leaders
of Labour and of Capital to-day. Tom Mann is incompetent as a labour
leader in dealing with capital to-day, because the things that he
proposes to do all turn on three facts which, looked at on the outside,
merely have or might be said to have a true look:

First, employers are all alike;

Second, none of them ever work;

Third, they are all the enemies of Labour.

Tom Mann is incompetent to grapple with Capital in behalf of Labour as
any great labour leader would have to do, because he has his facts wrong
about Capital, is simple-minded and rudimentary and undiscriminating
about the men with whom he deals, and sees them all alike.

This is a poor beginning even for fighting with them.

The second reason that Tom Mann is incompetent is, not that he has his
facts wrong and does not think, but that he carries not-thinking about
the employing class still further, has come to make a kind of religion
out of not-thinking about them. And instead of thinking how to make
labouring men think better than their employers think, and