customers or pulling wires to get and hold a job, is fatal to free speech and that truthfulness without which free speech is worse than useless. Commercialism, which has become this country's God, is the condition of mutual and slavish dependence. Freedom is the condition of individual independence, and where that individual independence has gone out of existence free speech is practically dead.

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It was my own good fortune to live for years where we all habitually spake our minds, for we were economically free. It was my subsequent misfortune to be caged for years in business, as conducted in these United States, and to chafe unceasingly at restraints on free speech which apparently my associates took philosophically, as part of the day's work. As a newspaper man I know something of the "sacred cows" whom it is sacrilege to criticize, though they are almost invariably the community's great criminals. I have scores of business acquaintances in Los Angeles who attend church regularly, and scoff, in private, at the preposterous fairy tales the church still teaches. But the church means valuable business connections--for the whole things [sic] hangs together--and that means bread and butter. You may talk to such people until Doomsday and they will still be trotting to church. Give them the economic independence that will enable them to snap their fingers at business connections, and go a-fishing. He who does not understand these things after a short business experience is either stupid beyond redemption or willfully blind.

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It is no better among workingmen, and you will walk far before meeting one who dares speak out his actual opinions, either in the shop or at the union meetings. In these latter workmen will inveigh against Capitalism, for that is safe and popular, but ask them to criticize their own officials, who have economic power and can make jobs insecure, and see how they will wilt. Free speech may be well enough in theory, but business is business, and they do not propose to risk their bread and butter. All of us are in the meshes of the same commercial net, and the very fact that we talk so much about free speech is proof that we do not possess the thing itself.

Habit makes the man, and people who toady habitually to customers and employers are not going to be heroic in their defence of scuh agitators as the as the authorities see fit to supress. They may go to a protest meeting, for that [?] pleasureable excitement, but that is as far as they will go, and it has been proved a thousand times. Nor, under such conditions are the agitators themselves likely to be heroic, and this also the history of the last eighteen months has demonstrated most sadly. Fear of jail, fear of putting themselves in a position where they would be blacklisted and barred from the all-essential job, has gagged millions of workmen during the last eighteen months; and you will notice that practically the only exceptions have been found among the I.W.W. As the advertisements say, "there is a reason." The I.W.W. is composed largely of men who have ceased to care for Jobs, where are rebels against business and have made up their minds to beat their way through life. As for the others, they are all dependent on the commercial machine. Even the rich banker must keep his tongue between his teeth to win depositors, and while Emma Goldman cries out for men of backbone, I myself doubt if her own devotion to business has left her the rudimentary vestige of such a thing. If she had it she would say the things which need, most sternly, to be said. As it is, she picks the subjects that are popular, which is a vastly different thing.

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Why should one spare the whip? These Labor leaders, Socialist Leaders, Anarchist leaders, etc., what are they but flies upon the wheel? Our task is to shove ahead the revolutionary wagon, at present stuck fast in the mud of an agitation that deals only with effects. We must life it to the firm ground of causes. When we howl about the suppression of free speech, we deal with an effect. When Emma Goldman whines, as she did recently in Los Angeles, about the cruelty of modern "economic efficiency," she deals with an effect. When we treat of sexual evils and are horrified at the discovery that jaded millionaires pay large sums for virgin flesh, we deal with an effect. When we surround the ballot with secrecy, that the master may not know how his dependent slave has voted, with deal with an effect. We do not get to causes until we discuss that artificial dependence, which is our punishment for living on each other, and contrast it with the independence, such as the Mexican enjoyed before they let their politicians steal the land from beneath their feet--which comes with access to and getting our living, in the natural way, from nature. Our economic dependence on one another is the cause of our troubles, and we should recognize it frankly. We should not be such hypocrites as to pretend that, which that rotting slavery endures, we can purify the social system by Ferrer schools, Socialist