(A Note on Collective Bargaining) I would like to say to begin with that I believe in national collective bargaining as it is going to be in the near future--collective bargaining executed on such subjects and with such power and limitations and in such spirit as shall be determined by the facts--the practical engineering facts in human nature and the way human nature works. I do not feel that collective bargaining has been very practical about human nature so far. The moment that it is, the public and all manner of powerful and important persons, who are suspicious or offish or unreasonable about collective bargaining now, are going to believe in it. A book entitled "A Few Constructive Reflections on Marriage" by a man who had had a fixed habit for many years of getting divorces,--a man whose ex-wives were all happily married would not be very deep probably. A symposium by his ex-wives who had all succeeded on their second husbands would really count more. Most candid people would admit this as a principle. The same principle seems to hold good about what people think in National Associations of Employers and national associations of workingmen in labor unions. Thinking a thing out nationally on a hundred million scale which is being done by people who cannot even think a thing out individually or on a two-person, or five-person scale, is in danger of coming to very superficial decisions. Capital has been in danger for forty years and labor is in danger now, of being fooled by its own bigness. Because it is big it does not need to be right, and because it does not need to be right it might as well be wrong about half the time. The trouble with the illusion of bigness is that it is not content with the people who are in the inside of the bigness who are having it. Other people have it. When a man looks me in the eye and tells me with an air, that two times two equals four and a half, he does not impress me and I feel I have some way of dealing with him as a human being and reasoning with him. But when I am told in a deep bass national tone that 2973432 multiplied by 2373937 is 9428531904456765328654126178 I am a little likely to be impressed and to feel that because the figures are so large they must be right. At all events, on the same principle that very few of my readers are going to take a pad out of their pockets this minute and see if I have multiplied 2373937 by 2173937 right, or if I have even taken half a day off to multiply them at all, I am rather inclined to take what people who talk to me in a deep bass seven figure national tone, at their word. Labor unions and trusts in dealing with the American public have been fooled by their own bigness and have naturally tried to have us fooled by it a good many years.