﻿SAPHRONCISCO, CALIFORNIA 
 
Self-interest: 
Opinions will differ: A man throws down a dime for coffee and snail, “Fifteen cents, please,” gurgles the waiter. 
“Fifteen? Why I thought I was to get five cents back from the dime?”–– 
So it goes and here like in all things the variation in opinion has an economic background: 
Meet a ma nthat disagrees with you, you may make up your mind his bread is buttered on the reverse side of the question––or is in need of butter on that side. 
That which has no economic background is nothing.  

It’s getting so a man hasn’t time to eat his dinner, he must start after his supper, ho, hum!–– 
Sleeping out is a little too refreshing.––a man doesn’t get his full might’s rest. Me thinks I see snow on top of Mt. Tamalpais––oh well, it’s better up there than in the valleys. 
Sunny California! 

Mann cannot be legislated into a union but he can be legislated out. . . . 
As Lincoln would say, union is prior to and independent of legislation.  
A union that attempts to legislate a man or body of men into its “fold” is legislating a body of trouble for itself and shall live to regret the success of its attempt. 
Law directed against isolated individual, or evil, operates too often against a mass of innocent bystanders and virtues galore––spare the rod. 
Selective organization is futile and makes for an “exclusiveness” that denies the “discriminate” powers to better their condition. 
Hand made, not machine made, unionism is what makes the bosses grow gray, and bald, and fends the worker from the soupline and its superior––the garbage can. 
Nevertheless, while we’re lunching, the size of the cafe does not denote the strength of the coffee and size of the union does not determine the weight of its prestige. 
Haa, I see you want to start an argument? Don’t.  
Even though the union is only one person, undivided, and he has the right dope, that union’s power cannot be estimated or measured––its prestige cannot be computed or weighed. 
Enlarging upon the habit of directed law hitting the wrong person let me give you a frail example: 
One of the bright California ranchers troubled nightly by turkey thieves did set, with malice afore thought, a trap-shotgun that was supposed to shoot down the thief when he opened the door. (The thief probably watched him do it). Undoubtedly it is very sinful for a man to deliberately crave another man’s turkey and I can conceive of no workable punishment too severe for such a heinous undertaking. Still and all I cannot fully endorse the rancher’s position as a self-elected executioner. 
However, let that pass, it seems the rancher preoccupied by his many other troubles quite forgot all about the set-gun, when he went to feed the birdies. Woe is me, the heavy charge of buckshot hit the rancher’s stomach and set him shaking hands with St. Peter. 
Were he alive he would testify his law (the trap-gun) was unjust, unnecessarily severe, yea cruel, for the crime of shanghaiing a gobbler. And, on the other hand, death for setting a trap-gun seems kind of heavy punishment. Laws have a habit of destroying right and left and do not pick their victims as carefully as one might expect. 
I can’t understand them.  

Now that its been “decided” a union must not be selective we may as well decide a worker, or working class, should be, must be and is selective, finickey about whom (what) he, she or they associate with. 
Right and proper. 
There they stand, the guides, ballyhooing like a bunch of taxi drivers reaching for your suit case “Come with me! ME! Ride MY car! Right this way!” and so on ad lib and ad nauseum. 
Shouldn’t the worker then be selective? 
An outfit feels it cannot organize any but the aristocratic workers––should it succeed, the working class is busted in two. 
Another outfit aims to organize only those that look as if they could cut a sleepers’ throat . . . Why take up space recounting the many efforts to disrupt the working class; my point sticks out the organizers are selecting workers for their private machine . . . 
Are the worker going to fall for it? 

It cannot be disargued the one big union of the workers is the only thing that can save the workers from the slough of despond and industrial despotism. 
Well, then, what in hell are all those other organizers in the field for? To crack up the working class? Not one of them has a program that extends beyond the boundaries of their little machine––working class is left out. 
The working class is left out involuntarily, discarded, culled and assorted against its will and interest. Assorted and graded and boxed like so much Kadota figs––the rest lay on the ground, under the trees, like a shacker’s supply of English walnuts. All of these movements are factions or fractions there of––and the world calls vainly for a one big union. 
It there is any merit in any of these it is in the Industrial Workers of the World. 
There is a union that welcomes every man, woman and child that works for a living, regardless of race, creed or color.  
In it “the membership do the [unclear]ing ––they have the whole say so.” 
Worldwide in its scope, it cannot be accused of selectiveness. 
Possibilities for a one big union are there––none elsewhere.