ockholders.
Equally desirable but equally improbable, is the raising of the level of
leadership in the labour unions so that these valuable institutions may
no longer stultify themselves and wreck their own cause by their unjust
and anti-social regulations as to apprentices, control of maximum output
and its standard of quality, division of labour with ironclad
inhibitions against one man doing another's work and against one man
doing what six men can do less well, and as to the obligation to strike
on order when no local or personal grievance exists. Most useful of all
would be a voluntary renunciation, on the part of the purchasing public,
of nine-tenths of the futile luxuries they now insanely demand, coupled
with the production by themselves of some of the commodities which are
easily producable; in other words, establishing some measure of
self-support and so releasing many men and women from the curse of
existence under factory conditions and giving them an opportunity of
living a normal life under self-supporting circumstances. This, coupled
with a fostering of the "back to the farm" movement, and the development
of conditions which would make this process more practicable and the
life more attractive, would do much, though in small ways, towards
producing a more wholesome and less threatening state of affairs.

Back of the whole problem, however, lies a fallacy in our conception of
existence that must be eliminated before even the most constructive
panaceas can possibly work. I mean the whole doctrine of natural rights
which has become the citadel of capitalism in all its most offensive
aspects, and of labour in its most insolent assumptions. The "rights" of
property, the "right" to strike, the "right" to collective bargaining,
the "right" to shut down an essential industry or to "walk out" and then
picket the place so that it may not be reopened, the "right" to vote and
hold office and do any fool thing you please so long as it is within the
law, these are applications of what I mean when I speak of a gross
fallacy that has come into being and has stultified our intelligence
while bringing near the wrecking of our whole system.

Neither man nor his community possesses any _absolute_ rights; they are
all conditioned on how they are exercised. If they are not so
conditioned they become privilege, which is a right not subject to
conditions, and privilege is one of the things republicanism and
democracy and every