telling a young twelfth century Crusader, fired and panting for departure, that he was imprudent, that the facts were all against him, that he was spoiling a career, that the holy sepulchre was not after all in any real peril. A young college woman told me that the "new movement" came to her like a great light; that it had given her such a peace in her heart as she had never known. "All that I can give and become," she said, "goes to discredit a society in which one cannot ever have self-respect." Young Christians doubtless spoke like that when to be known as Christian was to be marked for torture. In very considerable numbers, the like of these are there in our I. W. W. crusade. They are practically inseparable from those with coarser ignorances and meaner motives. Unless these idealisms are held rather tenderly in mind, we shall neither see nor estimate the larger movement with either truth, justice, or safety to ourselves.
At the risk of weariness to the reader, it must be repeated that present labor troubles differ from those in the past chiefly in this, that they now develop in a new and changed atmosphere. They attract a wider and more powerful public sympathy which enables the politician to play in them a new and more effective rôle. It does not help us to throw the blame upon the politician, or would-be politician. Every whit of his strength is in the public opinion that he merely reflects. No politician who took a hand in the recent strike on the Boston Elevated had an atom of real influence except what general opinion gave him.
If this had been recognized, many a public service corporation would have been spared humiliation.
