While education makes rogues more effective, it makes the ordinary person of more benefit to his community. On the other hand, when a man owns a little house he is not going to shoot up the town, and when he has a small savings bank deposit he is not going to work for a financial panic.

After all, the hope of this country lies in the fact that more than half the people have some education and have something to lose by the I. W. W. or Bolshevism. Nevertheless, the people when acting collectively move sluggishly. Minorities are always a good deal more active than majorities; certainly they are always much noisier. Their noise scares the majority so much that for a great part of the time it is afraid to act. When things get so bad that it is forced to act, the minority gets out of sight and stays there until the situation quiets down. A large part of the things that vex our political and industrial life are unnecessary. They trouble us because we let them; because we do not suppress them in their incipiency. A good many people today profess fear of Bolshevism, but every sensible person knows that Bolshevism is not possible in this country at this time. If all small holdings of real estate could be wiped out, and all savings bank deposits confiscated, and all life insurance policies rendered null and void, and if from all minds could be eliminated the product of nationwide public school education, there might be some fear of Bolshevism.

The Consumer's "Consent"

Mr. George H. Cushing, managing director of the American Wholesale Coal Association, in an article in the Black Diamond says: "Furthermore, the consumers of coal are not a negligible factor. They supply the money with which it is run. The consumers must know about and consent to any arrangement made or there is sure to be trouble." He is talking about a program. for the future regulation of coal, a matter which has been under consideration in Washington. The words quoted seem to imply a fact too frequently ignored in discussions regarding capital and labor. It is generally assumed that labor and capital are antagonistic, that they belong to opposite camps, that they are mutually repulsive. As a matter of fact they belong to the same camp, they are part of one and the same great machine. While on the surface they may seem to be governed

by disruptive influences, they are indissolubly tied together by common interests.

Labor and capital together form the productive agent. They are working to a common end and their interests are mutual, whether they think so or not. Together they form one-half of our economic life, and in unrecognized or in recognized alliance with each other they are pitted against the other half, which may be termed the agent of consumption. Everyone who is employing capital in industry is a concomitant in production in the matter of the one particular thing on which he employs his capital or his labor, but in the matter of the hundreds or thousands of other things on which other people employ capital and labor he is a consumption agent. Other consumption agents are warring against him on one point and he is warring against them on many points. The line is sharply drawn between the two statuses.

Attention has been almost wholly devoted in the past to patching up agreements between the labor and the capital employed in this, that and the other industry, but comparatively little attention has been paid to bringing about just and equitable relations between production agents and consumption agents, between labor and capital on one side and the people who buy and consume the goods or services created by labor and capital on the other.

At this particular moment the telephone service of New England is at a standstill. There is said to be a contest between the telephone operatives and the telephone company. So far as these two forces are concerned it is merely a squabble in the family. This may be where the talk lies, but the suffering all lies with the public. It is so in almost every case of a strike. The loss to the labor and the capital employed is as nothing to the loss to the consuming public, who have adjusted their forces to conditions previously prescribed, and who are put to great loss when these conditions are violently overturned.

CONCRETE ARCHED DAM AT SAVENAY, FRANCE Built by American Army Engineers to store water supply for American Base Hospital No. 8 (20,000 beds) mostly removed. The dam contains about Dam is 450 ft. long on top, 60 ft. high at center and impounds 150,000,000 gallons of water. Water was 30 ft. dee

BEHIND THE LINES IN FRANCE

BY DAVID R. COOPER*

The story of my experiences with the American Expeditionary Forces in France is not a story of harrowing adventure and bloody Huns, but involves such prosaic subjects as dams and pumping stations, and a great deal of hard work in the mud and rain. In its lack of spectacular features it does not, however, differ from the story of a million other Americans in France, and may, on that account, be of interest to those who want a conception of those phases of the army's activities that are not featured by the newspapers, since there were no medals involved and the casualties were negligible, being confined to such ignominious causes as a fractured skull resulting from a falling derrick, or death from pneumonia, brought on by working in icy water without rubber boots and going to bed afterwards in a damp, unheated tent.

Paris was the nearest point to the front that I ever reached. I never heard a shot, except perhaps some distant anti-aircraft guns near Paris, when I spent one night there last summer. I didn't even hear a band from the time we left New York harbor, with not a sign of khaki showing above deck, until I sailed for home fifteen months later. On the way across we had not even a rumor of a submarine, although the ship on which I crossed was reported to have been sunk on the way back. We were fourteen days in crossing, having sailed from New York. We lay in the outer harbor at Halifax for twentyfour hours, where we joined up with eleven other ships. We pursued a zig-zag course, now popularly described by the doughboys as "going through military channels," and landed at Liverpool. It was night when we docked, and we were promptly marched to the railroad station and loaded into day coaches, and went to Southampton that night. So that all I saw of Liverpool was confused, dark shapes, vaguely discernible in the dim lights. I also crossed the channel in inky blackness on a boat which went like a scared goose. In France first-hand stories of the front came to me not infre

*Captain of Engineers A. E. F. now returned to his former position with Stone and Webster as Asst. Chief Drafts man, Division of Construction and Engineering.