"You've wanted Germany to be right because she had been right in certain things you had at heart. You picked out those things and would not see their place in her scheme. You rage at the use some of the mills and mines make of welfare work; their efforts to turn attention from a just distribution of profits, free discussion, full representation, by improving conditions. I tell you, Ralph, that is Germany's use for all her social and industrial machinery. It carries with it no honest effort to appraise the value of the man's contribution and see that he gets it; no determination to give him a free voice and a free vote; no attempt to arouse him to exercise his opinion, get from himself whatever he has in him that may contribute to the whole. It fits him into a scheme; all of whose material profits and privileges go to a selected few. Your industrial welfare jugglers are a perfect type of German rule. But you were so obstinate in your determination to have it as you wanted it that you would not see the likeness. It has been your opinion, your propaganda, your desires, that you clung to at a time when the very core of things just and decent in the world was attacked. "Why, why should as sensible a fellow as you settle back on your particular interest in life as something permanent and essential, something to be done before anything else, and rather than anything else? How, in heaven's name, can you suppose your conclusions are the final and supreme ones? How can you expect the world to give you right of way? Why, boy, if you read your books, you must know that since the beginning, men setting out to do one thing have had to do another. No man has any assurance that the thing to which he has laid his hand, however noble, however beneficent, may not be whisked out of the way like a toy. What is your way or mine to the sweating world? It turns up now one side and now another in its endless war for righteousness--it asks for this method now, and now for that; to-day for war by words, and to-morrow for war with fists. You can't choose either where you'll fight for righteousness or how, Ralph; you can only say you will fight for it--that much is in your power--but where? Insist on your place, and before you know it you are alone without helper or enemy--the fight has changed its field, its colors, its terms, its immediate object. Insist on your method! You might as well insist the day shall be fair. You fight in this world, Ralph, in the way the gods select for that particular day. You say you won't countenance war, but what have you waged but war? When you did your levelest to stir the wire mill to strike two years ago, what was that but war--gaining a point by force? What but war are those campaigns of yours in the _Argus_? There's many a man would prefer to face a machine gun to facing you when you've loaded the _Argus_.