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the labor political potential, which meant that Harry had a kind of half-fear, and he told me this himself, that at some time we might lose the enthusiastic support of labor. Whether he was thinking back to his own early days in the early 1900's, whether he had deeply drunk of the idea that working people will stand just so much and not any more, and then will do something about it, I don't know. Of course, that was an idea that was in common circulation in the early 1900's. Hopkins often had ideas that I sometimes thought sprang from a conception like that.

At one time I was arguing about something we didn't need to do, such as putting so many labor people in so many government posts. They were being employed where they really didn't do anything and couldn't do anything. Harry said to me, “Yes, but we've got to have their support.”

I said, “We've got their support. We can't possibly lose it. Where will they go? They've never been so prosperous,” and all that line of talk.

I remember his saying, “Yes, but you know, Frances, these people might just lie down on us any day.”

I said, “Why would they?”

“Well,” he said, “they don't like playing second fiddle. They don't like being second-class men. They like playing up in the front ranks too.”