First, I should like to point out that we are hearing a deal too much about a man’s inalienable right to work or play, at his own sovereign will. In so far as that means—and it is always used to mean—his right to quit any kind of work at any moment, without notice and regardless of consequences to others, it is false; there is no such moral right, and the law should have at least a speaking acquaintance with morality. What is mischievous should be illegal. The various interests of civilization are so complex, delicate, intertangled and interdependent that no man, and no set of men, should have power to throw the entire scheme into confusion and disorder for promotion of a trumpery principle or a class advantage. In dealing with corporations we recognize that. If for any selfish purpose a trade union of railway managers had done what their sacred brakemen and divine firemen did—had decreed that “no wheel should turn” until Mr. Pullman’s men should return to work—they would have found themselves all in jail the second day. _Their_ right to quit work was not conceded: they lacked that authenticating credential of moral and legal irresponsibility, an indurated palm. In a small lockout affecting a mill or two the offender finds a half-hearted support in the law if he is willing to pay enough deputy sheriffs; but even then he is mounted by the hobnailed populace, at its back the daily newspapers, clamoring and spitting like cats. But let the manager of a great railway discharge all its men without warning and “kill” its own engines! Then see what you will see. To commit a wrong so gigantic with impunity a man must wear overalls. How prevent anybody from committing it? How break up this _régime_ of strikes and boycotts and lockouts, more disastrous to others than to those at whom the blows are aimed—than to those, even, who deliver them? How make all those concerned in the management and operation of great industries, about which have grown up tangles of related and dependent interests, conduct them with some regard to the welfare of others? Before committing ourselves to the dubious and irretraceable course of “government ownership,” or to the infectious expedient of “regulation,” is there anything of promise yet untried?—anything of superior simplicity and easier application?