...And that is why we are today in the vanguard of the labor movement. We have broken away from the past. We are not destroyers, but we have stopped licking the dust of the past. So far as our ideals are concerned, we always know that they will become a reality when you have your feet on the ground and when you fight now and here for Immediate improvements, always guided by a big broad desire to improve not only your own conditions but the conditions of the world. It is this combination of the ideal and the practical that is characteristic of our union. We cannot build the cooperative commonwealth unless you build better men today. The union builds and creates that soul which is essential for the world to travel forward.

The sailor is made on the sea and in the storm, the soldier on the firing line. The man that will build a future society must begin building his character and his manhood and his moral strength and develop his fibre as a fighter today and here in the fights for the betterment of the conditions of the workers.

I recall having read a beautiful sketch by one of the great Russian writers, Andreyev. He pictures a skillful aviator— a man who in a very short time acquired a reputation as the best aviator in the country. He had the very best machine. He was to give an exhibition of his skill and adroitness. And as he went up, the plaudits of the crowd accompanying him, he looked with contempt on the crowd below him. All was so petty and so small and and so sordid. And he said, “I will go up higher and higher and away from this crowd of small men, and away from the little things and away from the commonplace. And as he went up high he determined to make this circle still wider and still higher, and up he went higher and higher and higher, and wider and wider was the sphere that he soared away from the low, away from the contemptible, away from the little men and women who Inhabit the earth— higher and higher. He refused to come down. Every thing below was so sordid. But he did come down, and his machine came down, a dead machine with a dead aviator.

The Idealist who starts out with a complete disregard for things as they are, who believes that this world is sordid and small, that the fight for wages and for hours is too petty a thing, that what we ought to do is to reorganize the entire society, all at once, and build up a cooperative commonwealth beginning from the twentieth floor, is like that aviator. He will go up higher and higher Into wider and wider spheres away from everything small, but he will come down a dead man in a dead machine.

The man who fights today for things worth while is the man who builds the world.