every newspaper. This man will say, in the name of his organization: "That is a lie; it shall not go in. This news-item is colored to favor the railroad interests; it must be re-written. To-night there is a mass-meeting of labor to protest against intervention in Russia. That meeting is worth a column." Such demands of the copy-reader will, if challenged, be brought before a committee of the workers of the paper—the workers both of hand and brain. If any demand is not complied with, the paper will not appear next day. Do you think that lying about the labor movement would continue under such conditions?
I recognize the rights of the general public in the determining of news. I should wish to see a government representative sitting in all councils where newspaper policy is laid down. The owner should be represented, so long as his ownership exists; but unless I mis-read the signs of the times, the days of the owner as owner are numbered in our industry. The owner may best be attended to by a government price-fixing board, which will set wages for newspaper work and prices of newspapers to the public at a point where interest, dividends and profits are wiped out. So the owner will become a worker like other workers; if he is competent and honest, he will stay as managing director; if he is incompetent and dishonest, he will go to digging ditches, under the eye of a thoroughly efficient boss.
Little by little the workers of all industrial nations are acquiring class-consciousness, and preparing themselves for the control of industry. In America they seem backward, but that is because America is a new country, and the vast majority of the workers have no idea how the cards are stacked against them. I have just been reading an account of the general strike in Seattle, the most significant labor revolt in our history, and I observe how painfully chivalrous the Seattle strikers were. Because they did not permit the capitalist papers of their city to be published, therefore they refrained from publishing their own paper! This was magnificent, but it was not war, and I venture to guess that since the Seattle strikers have had the capitalist newspapers, not merely of their city, but of all the rest of the world telling lies about them, they will be more practical next time—as practical as those they are opposing.
How all this works out, you may learn from the Syn-
