A Quarter Century of Strikes

THE fact has commonly escaped notice that about twenty-five years ago the economic development of the United States (to-day so often proclaimed) had already and suddenly attained a certain approximate maturity. A strange variety of events, in swift concurrence, gave evidence of revolutionary changes. The patient industry of generations, exerting itself in infinite repetition,had been so abundantly rewarded, that the national wealth seemed now to overflow old uses for enjoyment and capital to burst the limitations of old industrial methods. The swelling volume found an outlet in landownership, until about 1884 the last of the fertile government land passed to private holders. It overflowed into education, and made possible that rapid growth of independent American scholarship which had its wellmarked beginning about 1876 in universities newly enlarged or newly founded. Capital now gathered in lakes where before it flowed in rivulets, and with increasing swiftness the small shop and wayside mill were replaced by great apparatus of machinery and buildings. This redundancy manifested itself also in a sudden growth of outdoor sports and other employments of leisure. By the early seventies the system of railways, extending with the extension of industry, had thoroughly united the Atlantic coast and the central valley, and competition for this developing trade had provoked the first great railway wars and the first pooling arrangements. At the same time the first trusts made their appearance.

With all these things, and not by chance, but by necessity, came the new militant organization of labor. In 1877 a multitude of strikes broke forth simultaneously from the Atlantic to the Missouri and beyond it, fierce and widespread beyond precedent, like the upheaval in England two decades earlier, of which Henry Fawcett, the blind economist, with prophetic vision had declared that convulsions so violent must signify the approach of deep industrial changes, — “ arrangements different from those existing at the present time.” The railways were chiefly affected, but the railways touched all industries, and the railway workmen, constantly in motion and peculiarly inflammable, carried the spark from the miners of the East to the shop-workers of the West, enveloping in one conflagration all that part of the continent which was industrially most developed. Henceforth industrial conflicts ceased to be matters of local concern. In the strikes of 1877, labor organizations played little part. Though this outburst extended so widely, yet no common organization or deliberate concert brought it about. There was concerted action only of a disorderly sort, as when employees of the Missouri Pacific Railway at St. Louis were driven from work by strikers, or when a few men in the iron works at Scranton blew a whistle, rushed out shouting, “ We have struck, ” and the other men, at the mere suggestion, left their work. There were at that time but few trade unions of importance. Their membership in the United States was not more than one fifth the number of trade unionists today in the state of New York alone. Nevertheless, in a certain sense the organization of labor was already actual. There was at least a mental readiness for united action, and in the strike its effects appeared for a moment, still fluid but ready to congeal into permanence.

The growth of trade unions came partly no doubt from the growing selfassertiveness of a population well fed and self-respecting through generations, and anxious to share in the growing national income, but a powerful impulse to organization came also from the industrial conditions increasingly characteristic of the present age, with its new methods of production, its developed transportation, and its concentration of capital. The earlier system of industry had been relatively stable, the new is as changeable and as threatening to frail craft as the shifting surface of the half-frozen polar sea. Not only by migration, which brings new rivals to the laborer, and the introduction of machinery with its rivalry yet more to be dreaded, but also by the steady grinding force of competition, bearing first upon employers and through them upon workmen, has the new industrial system subjected the wage-earners to a pressure which threatens them with destruction, and to which they have responded by massing their units as living tissue protects itself by hardening under friction. It is commonplace that for an indefinite time the competition of rival producers has been growing more severe, and that this tendency has recently been accelerated to an astonishing degree. The widening of markets by improvements in transportation and perhaps a growing acuteness and energy among men of affairs have intensified the fierceness of competition, but it has been intensified most of all by the peculiar characteristics of the great industry. Capital employed in large masses for the supply of a wide market exhibits a certain brutal aggressiveness whatever may be the wishes of the individual capitalist. The master of a small shop in the earlier age could produce only within the limits prescribed by his own labor and capital and his narrow market. At these limits he could easily stop producing. But the great industry of today looks to a market practically unlimited, toward which it is not only tempted with a peculiar allurement, but goaded by a peculiar necessity. It is tempted to produce in excessive abundance. because production on a vast scale is cheaper, but even when there is loss in continuing, it is helplessly impelled to continue. Certain expenses (for guarding property, for taxes and insurance) persist even if work stops, and, if earlier managers have over-estimated the chances of gain, there may be interest to pay or dividends guaranteed. These must be met and something earned to meet them. The policy of the enterprise is determined not by the capitalist but by capital. The monster runs away with its master. It is afflicted with an obligation to press on as irresistible as the curse of the Wandering Jew. The only hope lies in defeating rivals and possessing the market with the weapon of low prices attained by every effort and every economy.

No method of lowering prices is more obvious than that of depressing wages. In times of crisis, the impulse to reduce wages is fearfully strong, but at all times, in any establishment which feels at all strongly the force of competition, the downward tendency compelling a reduction of wages or forbidding an increase is always likely to assert itself. One group of producers, by a lowering of wages which permits lower prices, may compel its competitors also to force down the wages of their laborers.

The uncontrollability of capital, with the resulting excess of competition, has been the most striking fact of industrial history in the past thirty years. It is said that vigorous sugar-refining companies, for years before the formation of the trust, sold usually at a loss, and that before the steel-makers protected themselves by combination, the influence of competition upon prices in the steel industry had threatened to become almost equally disastrous (one company preparing to increase its output by some tens of millions within a few months, for the purpose of supplanting its competitors in a market already for the most part supplied). In the manufacture of linseed oil, the competition of capital invested to excess forced men ordinarily honest to adulterate their product as the only hope of solvency. In 1876 the railways extending westward from the Atlantic seaboard had multiplied until their capacity far exceeded the traffic to be divided among them. The ambitions or the desperate necessities of the competitors drove them into a struggle which reduced freight charges by three fourths, until receipts from a shipment were at times less than the specific cost of its transportation. Here, again, a partly effective remedy was found in an agreement as to rates. In the coalmining industry the product increased almost fourfold in twenty years, with the same result in excessive supply and prices unduly lowered.

For the restraint of competition in excess, the trust (or pool) and the trade union are the two coördinate and indispensable agencies. As to the trust, this fact is admitted by a large number of observers, but it has not so frequently been recognized that the trade union is equally indispensable to shield the wage-earner against the same pressure. In countless instances the reduction of prices has been effected by lowering wages. Thus, while the average price of bituminous coal fell off by more than one fourth from 1893 to 1897, wages in some districts declined one third, leaving less than four dollars per week as the average weekly wages of Pennsylvania miners who struck in 1897. Mine owners complained in 1899 that both wages and profits were lower in 1899 than they had been ten years before. The railway strike of 1877 followed a sweeping reduction of wages necessitated by the railway war. The Pullman strike of 1894 resulted from low wages, which were in turn ascribed to low prices accepted by competing carbuilders. The aggregate force of the tendency to depress wages seems stupendous, and the laborer seems helpless under it. When great manufacturing or mining companies, for example, are engaged in a competitive fight to the death, employing every resource of ingenuity and every conceivable economy to outdo one another in the market, what economy could be more obvious or more easy than a retrenchment in the pay roll ? In such a case, how can the miner or the factory hand in his weakness hope to survive ? There is ready to his hand, and he uses it instinctively, a fact in sociological mechanics as wonderful as any of those principles of mechanical physics by which a slight force rightly applied — a touch on a lever, a spark in an explosive — exerts a prodigious power. The saving fact is this : the employer as competitor finds little advantage in low wages, little damage in high wages; he is concerned almost entirely with comparative prices and wages. He is not seriously reluctant to pay high wages if his competitors are compelled to pay the same, and that compulsion is comparatively easy if each one understands that it is universal. It is thus a task of the labor organization to establish an approximate equality of wages, to repress in the interest of labor and of the competing employers each effort to gain a competitive advantage at the expense of the laborer. The overhanging arch of masonry is safe so long as the surface remains even; it is dangerous if one stone is out of place. So long as equal wages are maintained, the task of forcing them to a higher level or preventing a decline is simpler, not inconsiderable, but immeasurably easier. This effort to raise wages by establishing uniformity at the highest attainable level has been welcomed and actively aided by many employers who preferred to be liberal in the matter of wages when liberality involved no great sacrifice to themselves. The long series of strikes for higher wages or better conditions of labor in the New York clothing industry has been for this reason substantially a conflict by the work-people and certain liberal employers against other employers more blindly selfish or helplessly necessitous. Most of the manufacturers, it is said, profess to favor reforms, but declare their helplessness so long as a part persist in the old course. In coal mining, the inseparability of high wages and equal wages is especially evident. In fact, the whole bituminous coalfield through several states was kept in agitation for years by the exceptional behavior of a few men who refused to keep in line. The great soft coal strike of 1897 might almost be described as an effort by the union to protect the majority of the mine owners against a few competitors who were enabled to sell at low prices through the payment of excessively low wages. Between the strikers and the majority of their employers whose service they had for the time abandoned there was little or no ill feeling; the miners’ president publicly declared that the mine operators were in most cases free from blame, while the principal journal published in the mine owners’ interest said that the strike was a proper revolt against a condition of extreme misery precipitated by excessive competition; and one of the principal mine operators offered the opinion that “ the miner is getting too small pay for his toil, ” and that most of the employers were willing to advance wages if the increase was made general. Quite recently a Pittsburg mine owner has said that some operators in his district are enabled by low wages to mine coal at less expense than he can do it with machinery, and he lamented the inability of the union to control the entire field. In a few instances coal miners have undertaken in yet bolder fashion to regulate the coal-mining industry when competition and low prices threatened them. They have announced that prices were excessively low under the pressure of over-production, and have ordered a suspension of mining until prices should advance. In one of the anthracite coal strikes a certain company settled with its men by giving them an advance in wages under an agreement that it might recede to the old rates of wages if a rival company resumed work on terms unfavorable to the men, and during the great machinists’ strike, which extended from one ocean to the other in 1901, the employers repeatedly granted the demands of the men on condition that their competitors also yielded.

It is necessary to understand that the uniformity of wages (or other conditions of labor) which is a chief principle of trade union policy is only a relative uniformity. No union (unless there is some rare exception) attempts to establish for an entire industry in widely separate places precisely the same rate of wages. Their determination is sometimes left to unions of the locality after the manner of the machinists, the building trades, cigar making and printing, or (among the miners) a standard rate is fixed for one district, and there is provision for modifying it from district to district, or from mine to mine. The principle, recognized distinctly by some unions, half consciously by others, requires merely that wages in no factory or mill or mine must be permitted to fall materially below the rate prevailing elsewhere.

If a trade union is to exercise an effective restraint on competition it must extend its activities through the whole industry with which it concerns itself. It must bring into its ranks the workmen of every region where competition is at all likely to appear. The fruits of its efforts can be enjoyed only as they are imparted. It must make conquests like the army of Mohammed for its own salvation. Mere physical remoteness of two mines or two factories is of no consequence if their products meet in one market. A shoemaker in St. Louis is concerned with the wages of a shoemaker in Lynn; for low wages in the shoe factories at Lynn mean low prices in Lynn, then low prices in St. Louis and low wages in St. Louis; so a miner in Illinois is vitally interested in the wages of a miner in Pennsylvania. In recognition of this principle the printers of a New England town spent time and money uninvited to establish a union in the next town because the competition was strong between the two places. The lastersof southeastern Massachusetts struck successfully to establish one scale of wages throughout their section of the state. The granite cutters of New England were locked out by their employers in 1892 because the union was trying to establish a uniformity of wages throughout the country, and especially to increase wages in New England where they were comparatively low. Half a dozen years later the granite cutters renewed the attempt, demanding for work on stone which wars meant for Chicago customers the higher wages prevailing in the West. The wages of glass bottle blowers were lowered in the panic of 1893, but it was impossible to increase them with the return of good times because of competition by non - union works. The trade union becomes therefore as a matter of sheer self-preservation the defender of the ill paid. From a motive stronger than benevolence it protests against the employment in factories of ill-paid children, and it exerts itself to increase the wages of immigrant laborers. The labor problem in the soft coal mines has been especially a problem of inordinately fierce competition precipitated by a few mine owners, but the competitive weapon employed by these exceptional operators has been cheap immigrant labor, largely from eastern Europe, and it has been the obvious practical policy of the miners’ unions to destroy the efficacy of this weapon by bringing the foreigners into the unions, and thus extending to them also the rule of equal wages. In the soft coal strike of 1897 the centres of activity were the regions of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, where foreigners were most numerous. Into this territory came representatives of the union; mass meetings were held, and the miners by thousands encamped to persuade or overawe those who continued to work at the lower rates. The miners refused arbitration because it would not have included all the mines, and could therefore by no possibility have resulted in uniformity; they finally consented to a compromise because of competition from coalfields which they were unable to control.

The activity of the unions in seeking to establish through whole industries and across the continent a uniformity of wages is exercised not only through the persuasion of a missionary, but often also through compulsion. Membership in a union with its privileges is offered as a blessing, but a blessing which the non-unionist may properly be compelled to accept. The compulsion is sometimes exerted through the ostracism of non-union fellow workmen, but in many instances the union acts through the employers, obliging them to employ only members of the union. In a great number of towns and cities the unions in the printing and building trades have maintained by this method a complete local monopoly. In some instances the union has forced the dismissal of non-union workmen who would not join a union, and it appears even that the whole working force in a large factory who had not been previously members of a union have been commanded by their foremen to join the union and compelled thereafter to maintain themselves “in good standing.”

The Flint Glass Workers’ Union has within a few years been peculiarly daring and successful in extending its membership by this method. Nineteen companies united to form the National Glass Company and the consolidation seemed certain to produce a conflict, as some of the works of the constituent companies employed members of the union and others employed non-union men, while a rule of the labor organization forbade its members to serve a company which employed non-unionists in any of its works. Though only about half of the men concerned were members of the union, the rule could not safely be ignored by the company, as this trade employs workmen of great skill whose position of strength has not been weakened by mechanical substitutes for their dexterity. The directors of the new company decided to avoid the strike, and it was agreed that the company should pay the union scale and conform to union rules, but that it would not coerce men to join the union. This immunity of the non-union men was, however, merely formal. Most of the nonunion workmen soon joined the union, chiefly it seems because the rules of the union which the company adopted under its agreement gave a substantial preference to unionist workmen. The great but futile steel strike one year ago was avowedly undertaken for the similar purpose of compelling the steel trust to sign the union wages scale “for all the mills in the respective constituent companies instead of for part of them.” At this moment it has been charged that the anthracite miners’ strike is undertaken not merely to secure shorter hours or better wages for the miners, but that it is a covert attempt to secure the recognition of the national organization as an authority entitled to decide upon the rates of wages and the conditions of labor in the coalfield wherever situated.

The policy of compelling membership in a union, or forcing the acceptance of a union scale by workmen who desire neither the membership nor the scale, has been generally denounced as a grave infraction of liberty. This protest certainly merits serious consideration, but the matter in dispute is too complicated to permit a hasty verdict, either in condemnation of the union or in approval.

Beyond doubt it is of itself a lamentable thing if a miner or a man in any other employment is denied the right, after taking account of all his circumstances, his needs, and the needs of his dependents and the apparent resources of his employer, to decide for himself what offer of wages it is his pleasure to accept. It is difficult to imagine an experience more vexatious or humiliating to a man of positive judgments and keen sensibilities than dictation on such a subject as this by a body of strangers. Certainly so far as there is any such thing as an inalienable right the privilege of freedom in this matter is inalienable. The case is not closed however until we have noticed the reasons on account of which the members of the union interfere. The union exists for the purpose of increasing or at least maintaining wages. Few would deny their right to do this if they can. The welfare of themselves and their families depends upon it most vitally, and it too is inalienable, if indeed there are rights sacred beyond question. But the men who voluntarily join trade unions, if they are but a fraction of their craft, cannot alone protect themselves against falling wages. If at any point in the whole line of competing producers a few workmen by their submission impair the equality of wages, it is hopeless for others to attempt to maintain their standard. The effect is a depression in prices where there has come a depression of wages, then necessarily a general decline in prices and a fall in all wages. This is the injury which the worker for low wages inflicts on those who seek by organization to increase wages. The pressure of competition, which has in recent times grown so intense, brings the fall of prices and of general wages close after the first yielding by a body of laborers. One may conceivably condemn the method employed by workmen thus injured to defend themselves, but it cannot be denied that the injury is real; it cannot be denied that one is interested in what greatly injures him, — that one group of defenders in a beleaguered city is interested when negligence permits a breach at another part of the same wall, — that dwellers in far-away Mediterranean cities may without impertinence interest themselves in the pestilencebreeding but holy wells of Bombay, which the zeal of the faithful holds sacred against cleansing.

Here are two rights in irrepressible contradiction, the right to “liberty” and to the “pursuit of happiness,” both of which a great authority has mentioned in one breath as “inalienable.” There is an alternative between these two; one must give way. An impartial observer must take his choice; perhaps on reflection he will doubt whether there is any such thing as a right inviolable without regard to other rights which are its rivals for recognition. It is not impossible that he will look with as much favor upon the right of energetic selfpreservation as upon the right to be nerveless and poor.

The rise of labor unions means, then, first of all, that the determination of wages for each laborer and his conditions of work cease to be primarily his own affair; this in order that wages may be uniform, and that thus the merciless downward pressure of present day competition may be checked. There are recorded nearly five thousand strikes in the United States during twenty years, avowedly directed to this purpose of forcing the employer to deal collectively with the union. The responsibility for the fixing of wages shifts farther and farther from the individual workmen, not only as the unions extend more widely over the nation, but also as the authority in one union and another becomes more centralized. The analogies between trade union history and the history of civil governments are numerous and striking; it is peculiarly noticeable that in most unions, as in the politics of this nation, the conflict for and against a strong central government has been waged fiercely, and that generally the centralizing party has prevailed. Where once the national officers or conventions had only an advisory authority, as shadowy as that of the Continental Congress, they have come in time to exercise definite but very wide powers, to levy taxes where they could once only make requests, to give commands where they once expressed opinions. Most important of all, they have gained in the power to permit or forbid strikes; to give or withhold money or other assistance to strikers. This central organization of control implies of course that the principle of uniformity may be more and more thoroughly applied, but the tendency to centralization and uniformity has its limits. Each trade or each department of industry stands by itself. The individualist spirit is too strong to permit the authoritative control of wages in one trade by men in another trade. The socialist programmes for entire amalgamation have been frequently offered, but thus far always rejected.

As its second revolutionary task the trade union, through strikes or otherwise, is engaged in depriving the employer of an important though vague power, which he exercises at discretion, of controlling the workmen in various matters not defined by the labor contract. For example, the work of grain shoveling at Buffalo a few years ago was done by “ bosses ” who did the work on contract, employing their own assistants. These bosses also engaged in the saloon business, and required the shovelers to buy beer only of a certain brewery and pay for it promptly or lose their places. The men with the largest accounts at the saloons enjoyed the surest tenure. Single men were favored in filling places because they were more likely to “loaf ” and drink. The men remedied this by the curious (but not unusual) method of striking for some other reason, and then as an afterthought demanding redress of this grievance. The strike resulted in an agreement by which the contract system was abolished, and the work done thereafter under superintendents employed by the Lake Carriers’ Association. Similarly the brewers and the union of beerwagon drivers in New York city made a contract that no driver should be employed on the recommendation of a saloon-keeper. The Jewish bakers of the same city obtained release from the obligation to board with their employers. Some years ago engineers of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad complained of the fact that they were not paid for time lost by occasional delays in their work. They gained a contract allowing half pay for time lost as a result of accidents. The Miners’ Union in the district of Kansas secured from the mine owners a contract which relieved the miners from the obligation to pay for the services of the company physician if they preferred not to employ him. In coal mining the employers have traditionally claimed a right of “docking ” at discretion for an excessive proportion of inferior coal, slate, or stone. No question has caused more frequent dispute in the coal - mining business. In the Kansas miners’ contract just mentioned it was agreed that a dispute on this subject should be referred to a board of arbitration. Many a strike, again, has been waged against the company store, an institution partially good, chiefly bad, but deriving both its good and bad qualities from the fact that the employer at his own will urges or forces his workmen to use it.

Our National Department of Labor has recorded strikes by workmen in nearly seven hundred establishments in the course of twenty years, for purposes which have it as their common work to strip the labor contract bare of all accessories but the mere exchange of labor for money, and particularly to cast aside those accessories added by employers in the exercise of their authority as industrial superiors. This enumeration does not, however, fully indicate the extent of this work by the trade unions, as much of it has been done without strikes, something by legislation, and something by strikes undertaken ostensibly for other purposes.

The changes thus wrought have not all been purely advantageous. By the earlier system which is being assailed, the employer is not only vested with a considerable discretion, but rests under a peculiar moral obligation. The workmen are in a degree at his mercy, but have a claim to fairness and kindness. The ideal is beautiful; many employers sincerely endeavor to conform to it, paying liberally in wages and assisting the unfortunate, retaining old men whose services have lost their value, and spending money generously for the comfort and improvement of their people. Mr. Carnegie provided a system of savings deposits for his men, and lent them money to build homes. Mr. Pullman constructed a model town with a library and other provision for the welfare of its inhabitants. The owners of a factory at Dayton, with the utmost liberality, furnished libraries, schools, lectures, good lunches at a small price, dressing-rooms and restaurants for the women, a working apron and sleeves for each woman to wear over the street dress, elevators, a Saturday half holiday with a full day’s pay. Yet each of these philanthropies failed to insure the friendliness of the workmen, and to restrain the hostility of the trade unions, which in their thorough-going work of taking from the employer all his discretionary power to complicate the exchange of labor for cash have seemed to resent his use of that power even for benevolent purposes. It seems evident that the trade unions, so far as they gain strength, must terminate not only the evil, but the pleasant incidents of this discretion. An Eastern manufacturer declared in a public address that "‘there is no chance and no disposition to take undue advantage of labor. ” “Every effort of mine and my associates, ” he adds, “ is to make the work of the laboring men easy, to improve their condition in every way we can, and yet that organization precludes my being on intimate terms with those in my employ. ” This is doubtless sincere ; it represents the feeling of many benevolent employers; and the opinion that trade unions reduce the relations of employer and workmen to pure “ business ” is undoubtedly correct. In the vanishing state of things which this employer prefers he is himself the judge of what is just and fair. When a trade union appears, there is present a second power strong enough to demand a share in the decision. This new arrangement is not thoroughly satisfactory, but tbe old condition is questionable for more than one reason: first, because generosity is rare among men; second, because the competence to decide in one’s own case is rare even among generous men; third, because in modern competitive industry no employer with impulses good or bad can do as he will. Man has ceased to be a free moral agent. When competition forces down prices an employer may be compelled to lower wages, as generous impulses are insufficient to maintain solvency. The trade union undertakes to prevent his competitor from lowering wages so that the competition may not compel him also to lower wages. If he desires to be liberal, the trade union is thus his ally for that purpose.

But even when the old ideal of benevolent authority appears at its best in the model town and the model factory, its influence is not beyond question. There is great difficulty in distinguishing that which may be claimed by employees as a right (as essential to health or as part of earnings) and that which is conferred as a gift, but when the line has been drawn there should be no system of gratuities, no free clubroom, libraries, books, or reading-rooms, no excessive interest on savings deposits. The opinion has of late gained ground rapidly that charity to persons able to work is debilitating, that self-reliance, industry, and foresight can be strengthened best by denying all enjoyment which has not cost effort. Our whole system of private property and unequal wealth is to be justified only because the hope of great possession stimulates to great effort, while the constant argument against socialism is the corresponding proposition that it would weaken effort by taking away the reward of effort. By the same argument most intelligent persons condemn indiscriminate giving to the poor or other practices which encourage the hope of unearned acquisition. It seems probable that gratuities to workmen must have somewhat the same effect upon self-reliance and independence of spirit as prizes from a lottery, money from gambling, and pennies cast to a sturdy beggar. An employer’s liberality may find expression in additions to wages without damage to the spirit of self-reliance.

In fact, however, such experiments as those of Pullman and Homestead have certainly had very little debilitating effect, because they have met with so poor a welcome from the workingpeople and have so seldom been repeated. These favors have awakened resentment rather than gratitude, and their authors have, in some instances, been singled out by workingmen for unmerited execration. Though they are commonly regarded by the public and presumably by those who establish them as gratuitous expressions of kindness, they are at the same time intended as a method of peace-making. The workmen are expected to receive them as the price of abstaining from vexatious demands upon their employers. They are gifts, but they are likewise payment for a consideration. As an agency for peace-making they are an awkward device. It is a very naïve expectation that workmen would relinquish for this reason the privilege of striking to gain, for example, money; that, in other words, they would permit an employer to purchase for them a quantity of things — books, papers, or the use of a clubroom — which the employer assured them they ought to want, instead of taking the money and choosing for themselves. It is curious that business men of shrewdness unsurpassed should have imagined that their employees would permit others in effect to regulate their expenditure. These philanthropists have evidently been controlled by a traditional conception of the relations of employer and workmen, in which the wage-earners appear to be essentially and permanently a distinct species, not only dependent but acquiescent in their dependence, while the employer exercises a superior discretion, with an obligation to exercise it benevolently. Though the Pullman strike and the strike at Homestead were ascribed to other provocations, they were at the same time very effectual protests against this idea, and the protest added to the bitterness of feeling which attended both those strikes.

It is a useful service of labor organizations to destroy not only the old conception of industrial over-lordship, with its harshness, its arbitrary fines, its compulsory patronage of physician, saloon, or store, but even to destroy those of its implications which are attractive but enfeebling, and to leave in its place, free from all accessories, the naked contract of purchase and sale, unmistakable and even harsh in its definiteness. It is not only to the advantage of the wageearners that this change should take place, but it is to the advantage of all industry and every industrial class, because it is an indispensable prerequisite to peace. The old inequality at its best means dependence on one side and condescension on the other ; in its usual, less fortunate manifestation it means a certain degree of contempt in the employer’s mind, and resentment in that of the workman. The fruit of these emotions is necessarily discord. The work of mediators and arbitrators will be for the most part superfluous, even where it now has value, when every assumption of inequality has disappeared and the employer maintains a similar attitude toward the dealer in labor and toward the dealer in raw material, making the best bargain he can with no favor but civility. A whole century of change has led from a system in which responsibility might be shirked (by the master in oppression of a servant, by the servant in the hope of charitable aid from his master) to this better system of coördinate responsibilities definitely placed and not to be shirked without loss to the delinquent. The rise of the factory system with its much lamented severance of personal bonds between master and worker, and the organization of labor which the factory system facilitated, have contributed most to this fortunate revolution.

It was inevitable that with the development of the modern industrial system there must be a growth of labor unions and an increase of strikes, both in number and magnitude, yet curiously enough this same complicated and delicate industrial organization, plus its product, the labor union, implies a tendency toward the cessation of strikes. The earlier less highly organized industrial system was also less sensitive to attack. The stoppage of work due to a strike or other cause did no great damage, but industry in which capital plays an important part cannot endure interruptions. The earlier and later types of industry, it has been observed, in this respect present a contrast like that between the lower and higher forms of animal life. Certain inferior animals may endure for some time an almost complete suspension of vitality, while one of the higher vertebrates whose vital functions have once been interrupted never revives. So long as labor organizations are still relatively feeble, the power of capital is sufficient for its protection against serious interruption. The laborer soon yields or is replaced. But when the income of the individual laborer grows so that he will not starve if he has to be unemployed, and when the organization is wide enough and compact enough so that substitute workmen are not readily found, then the organization is able to strike blows which are fatal.

Although the modern system of industry thus confers upon the workman a grave power to inflict injury, it has at the same time put a mighty weapon into the hand of his adversary. Except in a few trades, the subdivision of labor and the use of machinery make it easy to train men to take the places of strikers, or even to put in their places at once men without special training. The resulting situation is this: in any conflict between a vigorous trade union and a strong corporation, the union may inflict great loss upon the company, but the company can in the long run, by obstinate sacrifice of its resources, defeat the union, supply its service with other men, and probably leave many of the strikers unemployed.

The probable injury to both sides is thus so great that neither will lightly enter upon such a struggle when its hardships have once been learned by experience. Fifteen years ago engineers and firemen on the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad struck. The consequences were almost ruinous to both contestants. The company employed new men whose inexperience occasioned numerous accidents and great damage to engines; in a few weeks these men had become familiar with their work, and gradually the operation of the road resumed its normal course. The president of the company reported to the directors at the end of the year that gross earnings as contrasted with those of the previous year had declined and expenses had increased so that net earnings were $4, 906,707 for that year against $11,478,165 the year before. After the payment of interest on debts there was a deficit. The losses for the year were chiefly (not entirely) ascribed to the strike, and the president urged the necessity of a system of “benefits,” insurance against death or injury in service, to attach the employees to the company, and prevent a repetition of this disaster. The engineers suffered no less severely. Men who had earned nearly $2000 a year were in some instances unable to obtain work with railway companies and sank into poverty. Since then the Railway Engineers’ Brotherhood has been singularly peaceable. Many other strikes have resulted in mutual disaster. A strike of printers in a certain town is said to have ruined the firms involved, and a cigar makers’ strike brought bankruptcy to the cigar manufacturers of another town. The granite cutters’ lockout in 1892 has been followed by almost unbroken peace because of the great strength shown at that time by the union. Employees of a street-car line in New York city in 1887 struck against the employment of non-union men and were defeated, but the annual report for that year showed a deficit of $60,620 against net earnings of $25,524 the year before.

A European writer has attempted to show in a well-known work that international wars must soon come to be an impossibility. Modern instruments of warfare are so deadly, the expenses of war so great, the losses to commerce so severe, and the nations so evenly matched, that no European people could endure the injury inevitable in a great Continental war. In much the same way the penalties of strikes tend strongly to become prohibitive. The old inequality between the adversaries has been in a manner redressed by the organization of labor. That they may value peace each has been made vulnerable by unplanned changes in the industrial system, — the employer through the sensitiveness of capital, the workmen through the simplification of labor and the introduction of machinery which make it easy to turn him adrift. Many persons have seriously attempted to find an analogy between strikes and disease with a view to discovering a remedy, and it seems not altogether fanciful to imagine that a real and important similarity will show itself, and that by an influence like the “curative power of nature,” of which the physicians tell us, and which surpasses all drugs, the distressed organism will spontaneously provide its own corrective.

Ambrose P. Winston.