I am only speaking for myself of course, as one person, as representative--possibly more possibly less of others in the Clan. Any scintilla or fleck of truth I can pick off from a revolutionary, I take but I will not take him. The same is true of a standpatter or reactionary. I want to know all he knows. If I take his truth I can use it, if I take him I will find him cumbersome. Life is too short to spend ten hours on him when ten minutes would do as much with some one who could listen or converse or with whom one could exchange thoughts and actions instead of papal bulls, orders and explosions. People who do not listen--extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionists, really ought, in getting the attention and the backing they want in the Put-Through Clan, to have what comes last and what is left over from the day's work. It is only fair that people should get attention in proportion as a little attention goes a great way. If people do not listen it takes too much time to deal with them. Besides which, of course, giving what they want to people who do not listen--to people who in the very face of it, cannot be trusted to notice or consider others--people who are always getting up and going out, who move in an idle thoughtless rut of ultimatums, is dangerous. People who are in the mood and the habit of ultimatums will naturally be picked out by the Put-Through Clan as the last people they will hurry with. Extreme reactionaries and extreme revolutionaries apparently will have to be carried and supported by society, kept on as it were on the spiritual town farm or under surveillance, or in the workhouse or slave pen of thinking they prefer, until they can come out and listen and treat the rest of us as fellow human beings. * * * * * On the same principle of time economy and of being fair to all, the Put-Through Clan will find itself coming to its decisions and giving its backing to people--to capital groups and labor groups in proportion as they are spirited. The people who give the most return on the investment--the people who give the most quick thorough and spirited response--in the general interests of a world that is waiting to be decent must be the ones who shall be waited on first. I have never been able to see why it is so generally supposed that people who have so little spiritual power that they cannot even summon up enough spirit not to be ugly, should be spoken of as spirited. I would define spirited labor as labor which uses its imagination, labor which thinks and tries to understand how to get what it wants instead of merely indulging in wild destructive self-expression and worship of its own emotion about what it does not want. Spirited labor is inventive and constructive toward those with whom it disagrees and wants to come to terms. Revolutionaries and reactionaries are tired and automatic, tumtytumming people--who do not want to think.