labor's economic returns. But any one who follows the
sacrifices which organized workers make for some small and equivocal
gain or who watches them in their periods of greatest activity, knows
that the labor movement gets its stimulus, its high pitch of interest,
not from its struggle for higher wage rates, but from the worker's
participation in the administration of affairs connected with life in
the shop. The real tragedy in a lost strike is not the failure to gain
the wage demand; It is the return of the defeated strikers to work, as
men unequipped with the administrative power--as men without will.

There could be no greater contrast of methods of two movements
purporting to be the same, than the labor movement in Germany and in
the United States. The German workers depended on their political
representatives almost wholly to gain their economic rewards. Their
organizations made their appeal to the sort of a state which Bismarck
set up. They would realize democracy, happiness, they believed, when
their state represented labor and enacted statutes in its behalf.

If Germany loses the war the chances are that the people may recognize
what it means for the people of a nation to let the title to their
lives rest with the state; they will know perhaps whether for the
protection they have been given and for the regulation of their
affairs and destiny they have paid more than the workers of other
countries, who, less protected by law, suffered the exigencies of
their assumed independence.

How much the German people depended upon the state and how much their
destiny is affected by it is illustrated better by their educational
system and its relation to industry than by any labor legislative
protective practices or policy.

George Kerschensteiner, the director of the Munich schools, in his
book on "The Idea of the Industrial School," tells us that the
_Purposes <and Duties_ of the schools are to realize the ideal ethical
community, and that this realization is possible in so far as the
educational provisions are made from the standpoint of the ethical
concept of each state. In America we do not think of the state as the
embodiment of our ethical concepts. The state, as we know it, is one
of the several instruments for realizing ends, ethical as well as
material. The state is supposed to serve the common ends of all
people. A state may be used, we are all aware, as an instrument,
either by Prussian junkers or American bu