The natural employer left to himself is apt to suppose, if he is making shoes, that his consumers ought to pay more for shoes, and that his employees ought to be paid less. As regards hats, and umbrellas, and overcoats, and underwear, the same man is a rather noble impartial person towards employers and employees. He wants them to listen to each other and lower the cost of living by not having strikes and lockouts, and by not fighting each other ten hours a day. In 999 out of 1000 labor quarrels a consumer is naturally a fair-minded person and the best-located person to control and determine how any particular business shall be run. The League proposed is planned to operate in its national and local functions as a national Consumers' Club, with working branches in every town which shall be engaged in doing specific things every day toward making the employers and employees in that town listen to each other in the interests of the consumer public. It is always to the interests of the consumer-public to see to it that people who have particular interests in a business should be compelled to listen to the others' interests. Consumers naturally prefer experts to run things for them, but if they do not run them for them, they are the natural people to make them do it. In the last resort the right to control is with the consumers. We are going to look to them very soon now as the natural Central Telephone Exchange in business. It is the consumers who connect everybody up. They are the switchboard of the World. XII THE RIGHT TO TRUST SOMEBODY Democracy--as perhaps my reader will have heard me say before--democracy is a form of government in which the people are supposed to be waited on in just the way kings are and in which the people arrange to have things done for them so that they won't have to hold up their work and take the time off to do them themselves. I try to go to the polls as I should. But I resent being obliged by my dear native country to stand up in a booth by myself with a lead pencil and know all there is to know and in a few minutes, about seventy-five men on a ticket. I do not like to feel that I am swaying the world with that yellow pencil, and that the ignorant way I feel when I am putting down crosses beside names, is the feeling other people have, that this feeling I have--in those few brief miserable moments I spend with the yellow pencil--is the feeling that this country is being governed with. I met a man the other day as he came out from the polls who asked me who somebody was he had voted for, and he said he went on the general principle when he was up in one of those stalls of ignorance and was being stood up faithfully with nothing in his head to rule the country--he went on the general principle that every time he came on the name of a man he knew, he just voted for the other.