One cannot help thinking what it would mean, in our present industrial deadlock, if the people who are whispering would shout, and the people who are shouting would shut up. But perhaps it does not matter so much what the shouters shout. The first moment the shouters suspect what the whisperers are whispering,--the whisperers on the other side--they will stop shouting to listen. The whole industrial situation narrows down to this,--might be put into two words by a hundred million people to-day, to Capital and Labor, "Swap Whispers!" The tumult and the shouting die. It is with the whisperers, we will save the world. XII MR. DOOLEY, JUDGE GARY AND MR. GOMPERS The proposal that we have a new profession--a group of specialists to go to, to straighten out our souls so that we can get on with other people and be competent in business, comes to one's mind at first perhaps as a kind of good humored, whimsical way of treating a serious and almost tragical subject. But something has made me want to begin my idea in this way. In strained situations between people--situations in which one sees people getting all worked up and fine, noble and wild-eyed about themselves, I am not so sure but that the best, most pointed, most immediate and thorough thing that can be done, is for some one--some one who feels like it, to start up a little, mild, good-natured and careless laugh. To start up something careless even for a minute, whether it laughed or not, would be practical. Mr. Dooley in our present tightened up hysterical situation between Capital and Labor, could really do more than Savonarola. And Life could do more than the Christian Register. It was not frivolous in Abraham Lincoln in the deepest and most tragic hour this nation ever had, to try to make way with his Cabinet, for his Emancipation Proclamation, by introducing it with Artemus Ward. It was the pathetic humanness, the profound statesmanship of the loneliest man of his time, in the loneliest moment of his life smiling his way through to his God. I am not sure but that if Peter Finley Dunne could have been appointed on the President's Industrial Conference and could have got off some nice cosy relaxed human little joke just in the nick of time--just as Mr. Gompers and his Labor Children like so many dear little girls said they would not play any more, took their dollies and their dishes and went home--stuck their heads up and majestically walked from the room--if Mr. Dooley and Hennessy could have been present and got in a small deep lighthearted human word, all in one half minute the President's Conference might have been saved.