the working-men against his real interests and real friends. This is
perfectly easy, because the American working-man, though singularly shrewd
and sensible in other respects, is the victim of an unaccountable
obliquity of vision which keeps him from seeing his real interests and
real friends--or, at least, from knowing them when he sees them.

There could be no doubt, I thought, in the mind of any reasonable person
that the walking delegate was the source of the discontent among our
proletariate, and I alleged him with a confidence which met the approval
of the professor, apparently, for he nodded, as if to say that I had hit
the nail on the head this time; and the minister seemed to be freshly
impressed with a notion that could not be new to him. The lawyer and the
doctor were silent, as if waiting for the banker to speak again; but he
was silent, too. The manufacturer, to my chagrin, broke into a laugh. "I'm
afraid," he said, with a sardonic levity which surprised me, "you'll have
to go a good deal deeper than the walking delegate. He's a symptom; he
isn't the disease. The thing keeps on and on, and it seems to be always
about wages; but it isn't about wages at the bottom. Some of those fellows
know it and some of them don't, but the real discontent is with the whole
system, with the nature of things. I had a curious revelation on that
point the last time I tried to deal with my men as a union. They were
always bothering me about this and about that, and there was no end to the
bickering. I yielded point after point, but it didn't make any difference.
It seemed as if the more I gave the more they asked. At last I made up my
mind to try to get at the real inwardness of the matter, and I didn't wait
for their committee to come to me--I sent for their leading man, and said
I wanted to have it out with him. He wasn't a bad fellow, and when I got
at him, man to man that way, I found he had sense, and he had ideas--it's
no use pretending those fellows are fools; he had thought about his side
of the question, anyway. I said: 'Now what does it all mean? Do you want