My Life and Work | Page 3

work
whether he wants to or not. The freedom of the citizen has disappeared
in the discipline of a prison-like monotony in which all are treated alike.
That is slavery. Freedom is the right to work a decent length of time
and to get a decent living for doing so; to be able to arrange the little
personal details of one's own life. It is the aggregate of these and many
other items of freedom which makes up the great idealistic Freedom.

The minor forms of Freedom lubricate the everyday life of all of us.
Russia could not get along without intelligence and experience. As
soon as she began to run her factories by committees, they went to rack
and ruin; there was more debate than production. As soon as they threw
out the skilled man, thousands of tons of precious materials were
spoiled. The fanatics talked the people into starvation. The Soviets are
now offering the engineers, the administrators, the foremen and
superintendents, whom at first they drove out, large sums of money if
only they will come back. Bolshevism is now crying for the brains and
experience which it yesterday treated so ruthlessly. All that "reform"
did to Russia was to block production.
There is in this country a sinister element that desires to creep in
between the men who work with their hands and the men who think
and plan for the men who work with their hands. The same influence
that drove the brains, experience, and ability out of Russia is busily
engaged in raising prejudice here. We must not suffer the stranger, the
destroyer, the hater of happy humanity, to divide our people. In unity is
American strength--and freedom. On the other hand, we have a
different kind of reformer who never calls himself one. He is singularly
like the radical reformer. The radical has had no experience and does
not want it. The other class of reformer has had plenty of experience
but it does him no good. I refer to the reactionary--who will be
surprised to find himself put in exactly the same class as the Bolshevist.
He wants to go back to some previous condition, not because it was the
best condition, but because he thinks he knows about that condition.
The one crowd wants to smash up the whole world in order to make a
better one. The other holds the world as so good that it might well be
let stand as it is--and decay. The second notion arises as does the
first--out of not using the eyes to see with. It is perfectly possible to
smash this world, but it is not possible to build a new one. It is possible
to prevent the world from going forward, but it is not possible then to
prevent it from going back--from decaying. It is foolish to expect that,
if everything be overturned, everyone will thereby get three meals a
day. Or, should everything be petrified, that thereby six per cent,

interest may be paid. The trouble is that reformers and reactionaries
alike get away from the realities--from the primary functions.
One of the counsels of caution is to be very certain that we do not
mistake a reactionary turn for a return of common sense. We have
passed through a period of fireworks of every description, and the
making of a great many idealistic maps of progress. We did not get
anywhere. It was a convention, not a march. Lovely things were said,
but when we got home we found the furnace out. Reactionaries have
frequently taken advantage of the recoil from such a period, and they
have promised "the good old times"--which usually means the bad old
abuses--and because they are perfectly void of vision they are
sometimes regarded as "practical men." Their return to power is often
hailed as the return of common sense.
The primary functions are agriculture, manufacture, and transportation.
Community life is impossible without them. They hold the world
together. Raising things, making things, and earning things are as
primitive as human need and yet as modern as anything can be. They
are of the essence of physical life. When they cease, community life
ceases. Things do get out of shape in this present world under the
present system, but we may hope for a betterment if the foundations
stand sure. The great delusion is that one may change the
foundation--usurp the part of destiny in the social process. The
foundations of society are the men and means to grow things, to make
things, and to carry things. As long as agriculture, manufacture, and
transportation survive, the world can survive any economic or social
change. As we serve our jobs we serve the world.
There is plenty of work to do. Business is merely work. Speculation in