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 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
 FROM THE 
 
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 1891 
 
 5901 
 
THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 NEW YORK STATE SCHOOL 
 
 OF 
 
 INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR 
 
 RELATIONS 
 
 AT 
 
 CORNELL UNIVERSITY 
 
yjj/ 
 
 ^i ^fl(ffU'\'b^ 
 
Organized 
 Labor and Capital 
 
 The William L. Bull Lec- 
 tures for the Year 1904 
 
 Being 
 The Past, by Rev. Washington Qladden, D. D., 
 The Corporation, by Talcott Williams, LL. D., 
 The Union, by Rev. George Hodges, D. C. L., 
 The People, by Rev. Francis G. Peabody, LL. D. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 GEORGE W. JACOBS & CO. 
 
 PUBLISHERS 
 3) 
 
^^/^/ 
 
 dio 
 
 
 ',\ . Copyright, 1904, by 
 
 George W. Jacobs & Company, 
 Published August, 1904 
 
 ^0 
 
The Letter Establishing the Lectureship 
 
 Bishop Whitaker presented the Letter of Endowment of the 
 Lectureship on Christian Sociology from Rev. William L. 
 Bull as follows : 
 
 For many years it has been my earnest desire to found a 
 Lectureship on Christian Sociology, meaning thereby the 
 application of Christian principles to the Social, Industrial, 
 and Economic problems of the time, in my Alma Mater, the 
 Philadelphia Divinity School. My object in founding this 
 Lectureship is to secure the free, frank, and full consideration 
 of these subjects, with special reference to the Christian 
 aspects of the question involved, which have heretofore, in 
 my opinion, been too much neglected in such discussion. 
 It would seem that the time is now ripe and the moment an 
 auspicious one for the establishment of this Lectureship, at 
 least tentatively. 
 
 After a trial of three years, I again make the offer, as in 
 1 .j my letter of January ist, 1901, to continue these Lectures 
 X for a period of three years, with the hope that they may 
 ', ,\ excite such an interest, particularly among the undergraduates 
 "^ of the Divinity School, that I shall be justified, with the ap- 
 proval of the authorities of the Divinity School, in placing 
 the Lectureship on a more permanent foundation. 
 ^■,5 I herewith pledge myself to contribute the sum of six 
 
 >V ;\ hundred dollars annually, for a period of three years, to the 
 \ payment of a lecturer on Christian Sociology, whose duty it 
 ' shall be to deliver a course of not less than four lectures to 
 > the students of the Divinity School, either at the school or 
 
 ■^^ S 
 
 H 
 
elsewhere, as may be deemed most advisable, on the appli- 
 cation of Christian principles to the Social, Industrial, and 
 Economic problems and needs of the times ; the said lecturer 
 to be appointed annually by a committee of five members : 
 the Bishop of the Diocese of Pennsylvania ; the Dean of the 
 Divinity School ; a member of the Board of Overseers, who 
 shall at the same time be an Alumnus ; and two others, one 
 of whom shall be myself and the other chosen by the pre- 
 ceding four members of the committee. 
 
 Furthermore, if it shall be deemed desirable that the Lec- 
 tures shall be published, I pledge myself to the additional 
 payment of from one to two hundred dollars for such purpose. 
 
 To secure a full, frank, and free consideration of the ques- 
 tions involved, it is my desire that the opportunity shall be 
 given from time to time to the representatives of each school 
 of economic thought to express their views in these Lectures. 
 
 The only restriction I wish placed on the lecturer is that 
 he shall be a believer in the moral teachings and principles 
 of the Christian Religion as the true solvent of our Social, 
 Industrial, and Economic problems. Of course, it is my 
 intention that a new lecturer shall be appointed by the com- 
 mittee each year, who shall deliver the course of Lectures for 
 the ensuing year. 
 
 WILLIAM L. BULL. 
 
Contents 
 
 I. The Past 9 
 
 Ebv. Washington Gladdbn, D. D. 
 T 
 
 II. The Coepobatiow 67 
 
 Talcott Williams, LL. D. 
 
 III. The Union 135 
 
 Bbv. Geobge Hodges, D. C L. 
 
 IV. The People 185 
 
 Ebv. Feancis G. Pkabody, LL. D. 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 924001 6051 99 
 
I 
 
 THE PAST 
 By Rev. Washington Gladden, D. D. 
 
THE PAST 
 
 In preparing the composite picture which 
 this brief course of lectures is expected to 
 present, the task which has been assigned to 
 me is simply that of painting in the back- 
 ground. It is not an unimportant task, for 
 in sociology as in pictorial art, backgrounds 
 are of great significance ; and it is a task of 
 such enormous difficulty, that if my wits 
 had not been wool-gathering when it was 
 proposed to me I should have promptly de- 
 clined it. In an unlucky moment for me, 
 and for you, I fear, I pledged myself to it 
 and am here to-night to expiate my temerity. 
 In justice to myself I ought to warn you 
 that the work assigned to me is a sheer im- 
 possibility. To set before you within the 
 space of an hour, ever so cursorily, the past 
 phases of the labor question would be a 
 
12 The Past 
 
 much more difficult undertaking than to 
 repeat, within the same space of time, the 
 whole of the Encyclopedia Britannica. To 
 state, in any adequate way, the labor ques- 
 tion as it presented itself in any single dec- 
 ade of the past two thousand years would 
 take a volume : to set forth the multitudi- 
 nous aspects which that question has as- 
 sumed since the toil of hand and brain be- 
 gan on this planet, would require a library. 
 All I can do is to bring before you a few of 
 the changes which have taken place in the 
 condition of the laborer in the progress of 
 the ages. It must be the merest sketch ; 
 neither in outline nor in shading will it 
 satisfy any student of history. But it may 
 help us a little in tracing the lines of social 
 development, in valuing the gains which 
 have been made, and in discerning the lines 
 along which industrial progress is likely to 
 move in the years before us. 
 
 For the primitive forms of human labor 
 we have to look elsewhere than to the 
 records of history. Men had been at work, 
 
The Past 13 
 
 probably, for many scores of centuries be- 
 fore they ever made any permanent record 
 of what they were doing. In the earliest 
 periods to which we are carried by the 
 documents and the monuments of old 
 Egypt and of the ancient Asiatic mon- 
 archies civilization was highly organized ; 
 the division of labor had been carried far ; 
 and the beginnings of industry were hid- 
 den, even then, in a remote past. The 
 lately discovered Code of Hammurabi, 
 which goes back to the twenty-third cen- 
 tury before Christ, names many classes of 
 laborers, — reapers, threshers, herdmen, shep- 
 herds, artisans, brickmakers, tailors, stone- 
 cutters, milkmen, carpenters, — and fixes 
 the daily or yearly wages to be paid them 
 by their employers. None of the oldest 
 peoples find in their annals any trace of the 
 earliest stages of industrial development. 
 
 Archaeology, with its collections of pre- 
 historic implements, gives us some hints of 
 these primitive industries, but most of what 
 we suppose that we know is inferred from 
 
14 The Past 
 
 our observation of the condition of back- 
 ward races now existing upon the earth. 
 From these sources we gather what seems a 
 fairly credible theory of the stages of indus- 
 trial progress. 
 
 The first is what may be roughly called 
 the hunting stage, in which labor is not 
 productive but appropriative ; in which 
 man subsists on the bounty of nature ; on 
 the berries, fruits, nuts and roots which the 
 earth provides him ; on the fish which he 
 takes from the water, and on the flesh of 
 beasts and birds which he ensnares. The 
 wages question has not yet arisen, for every 
 man works for himself The labor consists 
 in the gathering of the wild products of the 
 earth or the securing of fish and game ; in 
 the preparation of skins for garments ; in 
 the construction of rude shelters of earth or 
 bark ; in the fashioning of tools, or weapons, 
 from flint or wood, or from the bones of an- 
 imals. One considerable part of the labor 
 of this primitive man was the kindling of 
 fire by friction ; some of the methods foi- 
 
The Past 15 
 
 producing flame are still in use upon this 
 continent. 
 
 How long the earliest tribes remained in 
 this first industrial stage it would be profit- 
 less to conjecture ; doubtless for long periods, 
 for progress in such times is vastly slower 
 than under the conditions with which we are 
 familiar. In the order of nature — not al- 
 ways in the order of history — the next stage 
 is the pastoral stage, in which animals are 
 domesticated and shepherded, their flesh 
 and their milk furnishing a less precarious 
 supply of food than that obtained in the 
 chase. Now wealth began to be accumu- 
 lated in flocks and herds ; now tents were 
 constructed for those who must always be 
 leading their possessions to fresh fields and 
 pastures new ; now there were the begin- 
 nings of manufacture — the spinning and 
 weaving of sheep's wool and camel's hair. 
 Now there was division of labor, and wages 
 for shepherds and cowherds and swine- 
 herds; the labor question began to be 
 articulate. When Jacob comes to Laban's 
 
i6 The Past 
 
 house, and proposes to take his part as 
 a shepherd in the work of Laban's house- 
 hold, Laban declines to accept gratuitous 
 services ; he desires to put the matter 
 on a business basis. " Because thou art my 
 brother," he says, " shouldest thou serve mei 
 for naught ? tell me what shall thy wages 
 be ? " We need not dwell on Jacob's sharp 
 bargain ; Laban's question shows that men 
 in the pastoral stage worked for hire. 
 
 Now, also, through the strifes of herds- 
 men for springs and fresh pasturage petty 
 wars arise between nomadic tribes, and 
 slavery follows as the natural sequence 
 of war. Thus in the pastoral stages we 
 have the beginnings of enforced and unpaid 
 labor ; the captives in war are not all slain ; 
 some of them are spared and reduced to 
 servitude, in tending the flocks and herds 
 of their captors. 
 
 The pastoral stage, as I have intimated, 
 may not always directly follow the hunting 
 stage ; there are countries, like Australia, 
 where none of the native animals are suit- 
 
The Past 17 
 
 able for domestication. In such cases the 
 agricultural stage must precede the pastoral 
 stage, instead of following it. In the course 
 of time economic necessities are sure to 
 compel a more settled manner of life and 
 the cultivation of the soil. For hunting 
 purposes vast areas are needed for the sub- 
 sistence of a few ; even the pastoral life com- 
 pels large room and wide wanderings ; but 
 when labor is applied to the soil a small 
 tract will furnish abundant and varied sup- 
 plies for the wants of many people. Agri- 
 culture begins, of course, on a very rude 
 scale ; it is mingled more or less with the life 
 of the hunting and pastoral tribes ; it is long 
 before it becomes the main reliance of any 
 people ; but little by little men forsake their 
 wild and wandering life, and settle upon 
 the land, build permanent dwellings, and 
 develop their social life and their polit- 
 ical institutions. The land is not, in the 
 beginning, held in severalty ; there is com- 
 munal ownership regulated by the heads of 
 the village community. At first the village 
 
i8 The Past 
 
 rulers changed every year the lots assigned 
 to culture, but gradually the several families 
 came to occupy the same ground with more 
 or less permanency, and foundations were 
 laid for the principle of private ownership. 
 
 With this more settled manner of life the 
 arts of husbandry more rapidly developed, 
 new tools were invented, methods of culti- 
 vation were improved, there were great me- 
 liorations in the conditions of human life. 
 But between these settled groups and those 
 more restless and aggressive there were 
 constant collisions ; the rich lands tempted 
 the wild tribes ; the growing communities 
 needed new fields and their expansion led 
 to encroachment on neighboring territory ; 
 war thus became a chronic condition of so- 
 ciety, and slavery was the inseparable con- 
 comitant of war. Captives were enslaved ; 
 and the servile classes among all the 
 stronger peoples multiplied far more rapidly 
 than any other class in the population. 
 
 At the beginnings of what we may fairly 
 call history we find therefore that the larg- 
 
The Past 19 
 
 est share of the working classes are slaves. 
 In Egypt the nobles and the priests form 
 the ruling class, to all of whom every kind 
 of manual labor is utterly forbidden. At 
 the opposite social extreme are the slaves by 
 whom all the agricultural work is done, and 
 the shepherds, scarcely separated from them 
 in condition. There is also a middle class 
 of artisans, of small social consequence in 
 the early periods, but gradually gaining a 
 little more recognition upon the monu- 
 ments. In the later Empire when the 
 Kings began to cherish great architectural 
 ambitions frequent raids were made by 
 Egyptian armies into Asia and into the 
 regions to the south of Egypt, for the express 
 purpose of bringing back hordes of captives 
 to work upon the Pyramids. While, there- 
 fore, skilled artisans must have been needed 
 in the direction of this work, the result of it 
 must have been greatly to increase the slave 
 population. 
 
 In the great days of Greece its civilization 
 was built on slavery. In the earliest 
 
20 The Past 
 
 historic times there were hereditary slaves, 
 but the number of these did not increase 
 by propagation rapidly enough to supply 
 the constantly growing demand for labor, 
 so that the slave population had to be re- 
 plenished from various sources. Children 
 were sold into bondage by their free 
 parents ; captives taken in war were doomed 
 to slavery ; even Greeks, captured in civil 
 wars, were not exempt from this fate. By 
 piracy and kidnapping the bondmen were 
 multiplied, and a flourishing slave trade 
 brought from Italy and from Africa and 
 from the provinces of Asia Minor a con- 
 stant supply to the slave markets of the 
 Grecian Peninsula. 
 
 The servile population of Greece is va- 
 riously estimated by the historians, but the 
 best authorities agree that there must have 
 been three slaves for every freeman. Not 
 only the menial work of the fields and the 
 homes was performed by slaves, but much 
 of the skilled mechanical work. Slaves 
 were household managers, and superintend- 
 
The Past 21 
 
 ents of farms ; in commerce as well as in man- 
 ufactures slave labor was employed. There 
 were speculators who owned them and 
 trained them and hired them out ; the cities 
 were slaveholders ; the public work was 
 done by slaves ; Athens kept twelve hun- 
 dred of them as policemen ; they served in 
 the fleets and in the armies as drudges, not 
 often as soldiers. 
 
 In Rome the institution was systematized 
 and extended until it became the main sup- 
 port of the social order. In the earliest 
 days this slavery appears to have been of a 
 mild and humane type ; but in the later 
 years of the Republic and in the beginning 
 of the Empire, when the power of Rome was 
 expanding, every successful war added tens 
 of thousands of slaves to the population, and 
 as their numbers grew the degradation of 
 the bondmen waxed deeper and more dire. 
 " In Epirus," says Dr. Ingram, " after the 
 victories of ^milius Paulus, 150,000 cap- 
 tives were sold. The prisoners at Aquae 
 Sextiffi and VercillsB were 90,000 Teutons 
 
22 The Past 
 
 and 60,000 Cimbri. Csesar sold on a single 
 occasion in Gaul 63,000 captives ; Augustus 
 made 44,000 prisoners in the country of the 
 Sallassi ; after immense numbers had per- 
 ished by famine and hardship and in the 
 combats of the arena, 97,000 slaves were 
 acquired by the Jewish war." ^ 
 
 When most of the able-bodied male citi- 
 zens were marching around the world in 
 the conquering armies of the world's 
 mistress, it was needful that somebody 
 should do the work at home, and the 
 Roman conquests furnished the labor by 
 means of which the industries of the nation 
 were carried forward. But in Rome, as in 
 Greece, the supply of captives was inadequate 
 for industrial purposes, and a vast slave- 
 trade in which piracy and slave-catchers 
 co-operated, swelled the ranks of the bond- 
 men. In Rome, during the first two cen- 
 turies of the Empire, fully three-fourths of 
 the population were slaves. 
 
 Rome was the great organizer, and her 
 
 < Encyclopedia Britaunioa, XXII, 133. 
 
The Past 23 
 
 slaves were regimented, and trained and 
 carefully fitted into her industrial life. 
 There were public slaves and private slaves. 
 Many of the humbler offices of the State 
 were filled by them ; they built the roads, 
 they cleansed the sewers, they maintained 
 the aqueducts. Every rich private citizen 
 had multitudes of slaves for all industrial 
 and domestic purposes, and for the service 
 of his higher needs. " The slaves of a pri- 
 vate Roman," says Ingram, " were divided 
 between the familia rustica and the familia 
 urbana. At the head of the familia rustica 
 was the villicus, himself a slave, with the 
 wife who had been given him to aid him 
 and to bind him to his duties. Under him 
 were the several groups employed in the 
 different branches of the exploitation and 
 the care of the cattle and the flocks, as well 
 as those who kept or prepared the food, 
 clothing, and tools of the whole staff", 
 and those who attended the master in the 
 various species of rural sports. A slave 
 prison (ergastulv/in) was part of such an es- 
 
24 The Past 
 
 tablishment, and there were slaves whose 
 office it was to punish the o£Fenses of their 
 fellows. To the familia urhana belonged 
 those who discharged the duties of domestic 
 attendance ; the service of the toilet, of the 
 bath, of the table, of the kitchen, besides 
 the entertainment of the master and his 
 guests by dancing, singing, and other arts. 
 There were, besides, the slaves who ac- 
 companied the master and mistress out of 
 doors and who were chosen for their beauty 
 and grace as guards of honor, for their 
 strength as chairmen or porters, or for their 
 readiness and address in remembering 
 names, delivering messages of courtesy, and 
 the like. There were also attached to a 
 great household, physicians, artists, secreta- 
 ries, librarians, copyists, preparers of parch- 
 ment, as well as pedagogues and preceptors 
 of diflFerent kinds — readers, grammarians, 
 men of letters and even philosophers — all of 
 servile condition, besides accountants, mana- 
 gers, and agents for the transaction of busi- 
 ness. Actors, comic and tragic, pantomimi. 
 
The Past 25 
 
 and the performers of the circus, were com- 
 monly slaves, as were also the gladiators. 
 These last were chosen from the most war- 
 like races, as the Samnites, Gauls and Thra- 
 cians. Familiae of gladiators were kept by 
 private speculators who hired them out ; 
 they were sometimes owned by men of high 
 rank." ^ 
 
 Upon this stupendous institution of 
 slavery which has dominated the industrial 
 realm during the greater part of the historic 
 period, and which came to its culmination 
 in the Roman Empire, it is not possible to 
 dwell. It is only necessary to remember 
 that when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of 
 Judea the vast majority of all the people of 
 the most civilized lands were slaves : that 
 almost the whole of the manual work of the 
 world was done by slaves, and much of its 
 commercial and educational and artistic 
 work ; that all these people by whom the 
 world's work was done were regarded by 
 philosophers and legists as something less 
 
 ' Encyclopedia Britannica, XXII, 132. 
 
26 The Past 
 
 than human. It was not because they be- 
 longed to a diflferent race, for usually 
 they were of the same kindred and 
 the same color as their masters ; by the 
 very condition of slavery manhood was 
 extinguished. No matter by what injustice 
 or cruelty the man had been enslaved, the 
 fact that he was a slave proved that he was 
 no man. It is astonishing to read in the 
 philosophical discussions of Plato and Aris- 
 totle and Cicero and Cato their reasonings 
 about the servile condition. Their cool as- 
 sumption that a slave is a slave by nature ; 
 that he is born to this destiny ; that slavery 
 is a political necessity, since no man who 
 works for a livelihood could be fit for citi- 
 zenship — that would be fatal to the State ; 
 and in order that there may be free citizens 
 to rule the State there must be slaves to sup- 
 port them in idleness. All such arguments, 
 put forth with no dubitation by the most 
 enlightened men, indicate the social condi- 
 tion of the working people of the world at 
 about the beginning of the Christian era. 
 
The Past 27 
 
 Concerning the treatment of the slaves by 
 their masters no sweeping statement could 
 be made. The theory of slavery was bad 
 enough, as we have seen, to warrant any 
 amount of cruelty, but men are sometimes 
 better than their theories ; and between 
 Roman masters and their slaves, as between 
 masters and slaves in our own country and 
 our own time, there were instances of kind- 
 liness and aflfection. Manumission was not 
 uncommon, the class of freedmen increased 
 in numbers and rose in influence. But 
 after making due account of ameliorating 
 influences, the condition of the Roman slave 
 under the Empire was undoubtedly far 
 worse than the worst of our African slavery 
 upon this continent. Upon the latifundia 
 the field hands worked and slept in chains ; 
 sick slaves were cast out to die ; Cato the 
 Wise, the moralist and reformer, advises 
 agriculturists to get rid of their worn-out 
 slaves as of their old oxen ; in the mines 
 they wrought under the lash, and guarded 
 by soldiers ; worst of all they were kept 
 
28 The Past 
 
 by purveyors of bestial pleasure as gladiators 
 and as prostitutes and devoted to lives of 
 savagery and of shame. 
 
 The brutalizing effect of such relations 
 upon the lives of the ruling class can hardly 
 be exaggerated. One typical fact will throw 
 light upon the Roman character — ^the cus- 
 tom of enlivening the banquets of the rich 
 with the combats of gladiators. Your host 
 assumed that your anchovies would have a 
 better relish and your wine a finer flavor if 
 you could see one man cut another man's 
 throat or stab him to the heart while you 
 were partaking of his feast ! 
 
 " What a society was this of Rome," ex- 
 claims Dr. Schmidt, " tolerating orgies 
 where the blood of slaves mingled with the 
 wine of their flower-crowned masters, where 
 mortal combats mingled with impure 
 pantomime, where the guests were offered 
 in turns the grimaces of actors, the carnage 
 of gladiators and the kisses of courtesans — 
 where, indeed, the most monstrous cruelty 
 was allied with the most shameless liber- 
 
The Past 29 
 
 tinism ! " ^ It was such a society as slavery 
 is sure to produce. The seeds of its disso- 
 lution had been thickly sown, and the crop 
 was soon ripe for the harvesting. Slavery 
 and the Empire went down together. 
 
 To such a people the end of conquest 
 must come. Their vices brought debility 
 and effeminacy, and their enfeebled legions 
 melted before the power of more vigorous 
 races. War ceased to supply captives, and 
 servile insurrections made the tenure of 
 slave property precarious. The masters 
 were not strong enough to coerce the slaves, 
 and the institution upon which the whole 
 economic life of the Empire was founded 
 showed signs everywhere of falling beneath 
 its own weight. 
 
 What was the labor question in these old 
 Eoman days ? It was not the wages ques- 
 tion, for the free men who worked for 
 wages were few and utterly despised, even 
 by the slaves. It was not the question 
 about hours of labor or the right of the 
 
 ' " The Social Eesults of Early Christianity," p. 95. 
 
30 The Past 
 
 laborers to organize. On the part of the 
 masters it was the question, " How can we 
 compel these chattels of ours to serve our 
 needs and our whims ? " On the part of 
 the slaves it was the question, " How can we 
 safely evade the toil that springs from no 
 impulse and brings no recompense ? " 
 Portentous questions these, when they re- 
 veal the ruling motives of the classes con- 
 cerned in industrial production. Could any 
 sane man conceive that human society 
 could be held together with such deadly 
 antagonisms at the heart of it ? 
 
 Slavery in Europe was doomed, but it 
 took the owners of the slaves several genera- 
 tions to find it out. Gradually the fact be- 
 came evident that an industrial system 
 which makes your workman your natural 
 enemy is economically unsound ; and the 
 sentiments of Christianity slowly permeated 
 the minds of men and helped to create an 
 atmosphere in which slavery could not live. 
 A radical and immediate change from 
 slavery to free contract would have been 
 
The Past 31 
 
 impossible, in that society ; we have seen 
 how difficult it is in our own, with all the 
 laws and social institutions organized in the 
 interests of freedom. In the Middle Ages 
 it was absolutely needful that the transition 
 should be gradual ; and thus, in a process 
 which I cannot stop to outline, slavery was 
 gradually merged in serfdom ; and the 
 millions who had been chattels along with 
 many others who had had the name, and 
 little more than the name, of free laborers, 
 found themselves tied to the soil, as coloni, 
 or serfs, with some larger measure of per- 
 sonal liberty than slaves had enjoyed, but 
 still only half free. The owner of the land 
 could not sell them, nor drive them from 
 their homes, nor could they, on the other 
 hand, run away ; if they did, the master 
 could bring them back. Generally they 
 were required to pay him a portion, fixed 
 by law, of the product of the land which had 
 been assigned to them ; and they owed to 
 him also a certain yearly amount of labor 
 upon the land which he kept for his own 
 
32 The Past 
 
 purposes. The rent dues and the labor dues 
 could not be increased by the master. Ad- 
 saripti glebas, these laborers were called ; they 
 were tenants registered by the State and 
 fastened forever to the same spot of earth ; 
 for them there was no freedom of move- 
 ment and no choice of occupation. The 
 serf could not marry a wife who belonged 
 on another estate ; his children were tethered 
 to the same soil ; from generation to genera- 
 tion the family was " fixed in an eternal 
 state," as the hymn says ; that, indeed, was 
 the very term used respecting the perma- 
 nency of their tenure by an old law of 
 Theodosius, " quodam eternitatis jure." The 
 title of the property might pass from owner 
 to owner but the serf remained ; lords might 
 come and lords might go but he stayed on 
 forever. 
 
 I have spoken of the agricultural classes, 
 but similar relations existed also in the 
 towns and cities ; most laboring men in the 
 urban communities were attached in the 
 same way to masters, as menials or retain- 
 
The Past 33 
 
 ers. It seemed to be the natural thing for 
 the working man to be dependent upon and 
 subject to somebody above him ; for protec- 
 tion and guidance the weak gathered about 
 the strong and submitted to their control. 
 The feudal system was built upon this 
 idea of the subjection of the many to the 
 few. 
 
 Yet it was evident that this condition of 
 serfdom was transitional. It was a stage in 
 advance of slavery, but it was still at war 
 with the best elements of human nature, 
 and with all that is most vital in the 
 Christian religion. The beginning of the 
 end of it came when little groups of arti- 
 sans in the free cities bound themselves to- 
 gether for mutual aid and protection. Fugi- 
 tives from the manors swelled their number, 
 and charters from the King confirmed their 
 rights. The monarch, reaching over the 
 heads of the lesser lords, found his interest 
 in strengthening these unions of free work- 
 ing men ; they increased his revenues and 
 broadened the basis of his authority. Little 
 
34 The Past 
 
 by little, in all the European countries, 
 though in some much more slowly than in 
 others, serfdom crumbled away. The work- 
 men in the cities first won their freedom ; 
 afterwards their fellow toilers on the land 
 were loosened from their bond. Three 
 great causes, political, economical, ethical, 
 conspired for their deliverance. The Kings, 
 as we have seen, wished the support of the 
 common people for their thrones ; the mas- 
 ters began to see that a freeman is likely to 
 be a better workman than a bondman ; the 
 preachers of Christianity kept bearing wit- 
 ness that all men in God's sight were equal. 
 In all these years when the bondmen were 
 tied to the soil there was only one sure way 
 in which they could escape ; if the bishop 
 laid his hand on a serf in ordination, his 
 master could not interpose. The mediaeval 
 church, with all her sins and shortcomings, 
 did yet steadily and mightily testify against 
 human bondage. Within her pale there 
 have never been any barriers of caste : 
 there never was a day when a slave or a 
 
The Past 35 
 
 serf might not aspire to the highest honor 
 within her gift. 
 
 As the result of all these conspiring causes, 
 serfdom gradually disappeared from Europe. 
 ,In England it was moribund in the thir- 
 teenth century, and defunct in the fifteenth ; 
 in France it lingered and the last remnants 
 of it were swept away by the Revolution of 
 1789 ; in Germany it was not wholly extir- 
 pated when the nineteenth century began, 
 and in Russia its death-knell was sounded 
 in 1861. 
 
 What was the labor question in Europe, 
 during the centuries of serfdom ? On the 
 part of the raaster it was mainly the 
 question how his workman could be kept in 
 his place as the member of an inferior class, 
 how the restrictions upon his liberty could 
 be maintained and enforced, how he could 
 be coerced into rendering service to those 
 above him in the social scale. On the part 
 of the workman it was the question how he 
 could evade the burdens laid upon him, and 
 reduce the amount of his compulsory labor ; 
 
36 The Past 
 
 also, doubtless, as the centuries wore on, 
 and some sense of the primal rights of a 
 man began to dawn upon the minds of these 
 bondmen, the question began to arise in the 
 thoughts of some of them why the laborer 
 should not have the right to choose his own 
 employer and his own employment ; why 
 the men who do the world's work should 
 not be freemen ? 
 
 It is interesting to watch the sowing of 
 these seeds of revolt in the minds of the 
 common people of England, in the middle 
 of the fifteenth century. It was closely 
 connected with a great religious movement — 
 a movement which shook England to its 
 centre, and which, although for awhile re- 
 pressed, a century later issued in the Refor- 
 mation. It was the teaching of John Wyclif 
 which gave the coup de grace to serfdom in 
 England. It was his Doctrine of Dominion, 
 in which he taught that priest and king and 
 proprietor get their rights and powers di- 
 rectly from God, and are responsible to 
 Him, which swept away the foundations of 
 
The Past 37 
 
 feudalism as well as of sacramentalism. It 
 was the throngs of poor priests in their rus- 
 set gowns, who went everywhere preaching 
 the gospel of a secular and a religious de- 
 mocracy that stirred up the peasant revolt. 
 ' ' Wy clif 's poor priests, ' ' says Thorold Rogers, 
 " had honeycombed the minds of the up- 
 land-folk with what may be called religious 
 socialism. By Wyclif's labors the Bible 
 men had been introduced to the new world 
 of the Old Testament, to the history of the 
 human race, to the primeval garden and the 
 young world, where the first parents of all 
 mankind lived by simple toil, and were the 
 ancestors of the proud noble and knight as 
 well as of the down-trodden serf and de- 
 spised burgher. They read of the brave 
 times when there was no King in Israel, 
 when every man did that which was right 
 in his own eyes, and sat under his own vine 
 and fig-tree, none daring to make him 
 afraid." ^ Here is a sample of this preach- 
 ing — a bit of one of the sermons of John 
 
 ' "Six Centuries of Work and Wages," p. 254. 
 
38 The Past 
 
 Ball, the " mad priest of Kent," as Froissart 
 calls him : " Good people, things will never 
 go well in England so long as goods be not 
 in common, and so long as there be villeins 
 (serfs) and gentlemen. By what right are 
 they whom we call lords greater folk than 
 we ? On what grounds have they deserved 
 it ? Why do they hold us in serfage ? If 
 we all came of the same father and mother, 
 of Adam and Eve, how can they say or 
 prove that they are better than we, if it be 
 not that they make us gain for them by our 
 toil what they spend on their pride. They 
 are clothed in velvet, and warm in their 
 furs and ermines, while we are covered with 
 rags. They have wine and spices and fair 
 bread, and we oat-cake and straw, and water 
 to drink. They have leisure and fine houses ; 
 we have pain and labor, the rain and the 
 wind in the fields. And yet it is of us and 
 of our toil that these men hold their state." 
 The days of the cartoonist were not yet 
 but the rhymers had their innings in the 
 fourteenth century. Listen to them : 
 
The Past 39 
 
 " Now reigneth pride in price, 
 And oovetise is counted wise, 
 And lechery withouten shame, 
 And gluttony withouten blame. 
 Envy reigneth with treason, 
 And sloth is take in great season, 
 God do bote, for now is time." 
 
 Jack the Miller croons his ditty : 
 
 "With right and with might, 
 With skill and with will. 
 Let might help right. 
 And skill go before will. 
 And right before might, 
 So goeth our mill aright." 
 
 " Right before might " must mean the 
 doom of bondage. And how can serfdom 
 stand when a rhyme like this is running 
 round the land : 
 
 " When Adam delved and Eve span, 
 Who was then the gentleman ? " 
 
 These were the brands which kindled the 
 Peasant's Revolt, which was speedily 
 stamped out but which, in the midst of 
 seeming defeat, won an immediate and 
 complete victory. Like John Brown's mad 
 enterprise it was an ignominious failure ; 
 but, also like that failure, out of its ashes 
 
40 The Past 
 
 burst a flame that swept serfdom out of ex- 
 istence. Parliament peremptorily refused 
 manumission to the peasants, and imme- 
 diately began to loosen the bonds and let 
 the oppressed go free. The cry of humanity 
 had found articulate voice, and the end had 
 come to the system of enforced labor in 
 England. 
 
 Thus we have seen " the highway lifted up 
 over which the laboring classes of Europe," 
 in the phrase of Sir Henry Maine, " passed 
 from status to contract." From the end of 
 the fourteenth century in England, and 
 from later dates in other European coun- 
 tries, we see the working man choosing his 
 own occupation, his own place of residence, 
 and his own employer. He has ceased to 
 be a chattel or a dependent, and has become 
 in theory at least, and to a large degree in 
 fact, a freeman. In feudal countries the 
 classes above him for a long time retain 
 privileges which he has not ; he has little 
 or no part in the government of his coun- 
 try ; the avenues to honor are largely closed 
 
The Past 41 
 
 against him, but except for crime he cannot 
 be compelled to work against his will ; he 
 makes his own bargain with his employer ; 
 he is free to go where he will and to expend 
 the wages of his labor for what seems to 
 him good. It is true that there are at- 
 tempts, sometimes mischievous and inju- 
 rious, to establish by law the rate of wages ; 
 but these professed to fix, and probably 
 were meant to fix, a minimum wage, for 
 the laborer's protection. 
 
 The tremendous importance of this change 
 in his condition it is not possible for those 
 of us who have been accustomed all our 
 lives to a regime of free labor rightly to es- 
 timate. The spur that was given to indus- 
 try and thrift by the emancipation of the 
 serfs in England, was felt in every part of 
 the Commonwealth. Thorold Rogers says 
 that the century and a quarter following the 
 Peasant's Revolt, or the fifteenth and the 
 first quarter of the sixteenth century, was 
 the golden age of the English laborer ; that 
 at no time, before or since, have the labor- 
 
42 The Past 
 
 er's wages procured for him so much of the 
 necessaries of life; that at no time have 
 wages, relatively speaking, been so high, and 
 food so cheap.^ 
 
 From this day onward, until the middle 
 of the eighteenth century, the condition of 
 the laboring classes was substantially un- 
 changed. Artisans in the towns and labor- 
 ers on the farms pursued their occupations ; 
 industries were developed ; trades were per- 
 fected ; manufactories steadily advanced. 
 The iron business began to assume large 
 proportions ; the woollen business offered 
 employment to large numbers of men and 
 women, who spun the wool on their spin- 
 ning wheels at home, and wove it upon hand 
 looms. The domestic industries, as they 
 are called, were flourishing, and although 
 the condition of the toiler was by no means 
 uniformly enviable, and bad harvests often 
 brought famine, the working classes kept on 
 the even tenor of their way, making no im- 
 portant social or political gains, but certainly 
 
 » " Six Centuries of Work and Wages, " p. 326. 
 
The Past 43 
 
 holding their own, and rising, perhaps, in 
 the respect and consideration of the classes 
 above them. 
 
 The middle of the eighteenth century 
 found the wage-workers upon the threshold 
 of that industrial revolution which is still in 
 progress, whose vast consequences already ex- 
 perienced are sufficiently portentous ; whose 
 future overturnings no prophet can foretell. 
 
 The domestic system of industry to which 
 I have referred was fully intrenched at the 
 middle of the eighteenth century. It was 
 properly called a domestic system, not only 
 because nearly all the mechanical work was 
 done in the homes of the people, and was 
 united more or less with agricultural work, 
 most mechanics living in rural homes, and 
 raising a good share of their own food, but 
 also because most of it was done for the 
 home market, the foreign trade at that time 
 being an insignificant portion of the business 
 of the great European nations. Each neigh- 
 borhood, in fact, produced most of the sim- 
 ple supplies needed by its people ; the means 
 
44 Th^ P^t 
 
 of communication, even in England, were 
 so imperfect that the products of one part 
 of the country were with diflficulty trans- 
 ported to other parts. 
 
 The first step in the great march of in- 
 dustry was taken when canals opened the 
 way for exchanges of products, and liberated 
 trade from one of its fetters. 
 
 Then, one after another, came the great 
 inventions — the spinning jenny, the flying 
 shuttle, the mule, the power loom, the steam 
 engine, with railways and steamships, and 
 the vast development of the coal industry, 
 furnishing greatly augmented power, which 
 could be used in any locality ; so that the 
 strength of man was indefinitely multiplied, 
 and the applications of natural force to 
 simple processes of manufacture, under the 
 principle of the division of labor, made way 
 for that astounding development of indus- 
 trial organization which has been going for- 
 ward during the past century and a half, by 
 leaps and bounds, and which shows no signs 
 of reaching its culmination. 
 
The Past 45 
 
 Rapidly the entire system of production 
 was revolutionized ; the domestic industries 
 gave place to the factory system ; men and 
 women and children were drawn away from 
 their rural homes to great manufacturing 
 centres, and the social as well as the eco- 
 nomic life of the working people assumed 
 new phases, not always of the most hopeful 
 character. 
 
 This change from the domestic system of 
 industry to what may be called the factory 
 system, with its massing of laborers in indus- 
 trial centres, with its great specialization of 
 processes, and its regimentation of workers, 
 with its increasing consolidation of kindred 
 industries, and its enormous aggregations of 
 capital, is a phenomenon whose entire sig- 
 nificance no social philosopher of our time 
 can confidently estimate. It has affected, 
 already, in many ways, the entire social 
 fabric. We are living in a different world 
 from that which was moving in the same 
 orbit one hundred and fifty years ago ; the 
 conditions of life in the most civilized por- 
 
46 The Past 
 
 tions of it have greatly changed, and men 
 have changed not less than the times. It may 
 be said that human nature does not change, 
 but the customary thoughts and feelings 
 and hopes and fears of human beings may 
 greatly change from generation to genera- 
 tion ; and the ruling ideas and motives of 
 the working classes and of those who 
 employ them have been considerably modi- 
 fied since the invention of the spinning 
 jenny. 
 
 It is impossible in the time now at my 
 disposal even to hint at the transformations 
 which have been going on in the industrial 
 world during this period. The earlier 
 stages of the new industry were not encour- 
 aging to the friends of humanity. The 
 social and moral conditions of the laborers, 
 hurled together in the new manufacturing 
 centres were deplorable. In Mr. Hobson's 
 words : " The requirements of a decent, 
 healthy, harmonious individual or civic life 
 played no appreciable part in the rapid 
 transformation of the mediasval residential 
 
The Past i[j 
 
 centre or the scattered industrial village 
 into the modern manufacturing town. Con- 
 siderations of cheap profitable work were 
 paramount; considerations of life were 
 almost utterly ignored."^ "In the new 
 cities," says Arnold Toynbee, " denounced 
 as dens where men came together not for 
 the purposes of social life, but to make cali- 
 coes or hardware or broadcloths — in the 
 new cities, the old warm attachments, born 
 of ancient local contiguity and personal 
 intercourse, vanished in the fierce contest 
 for wealth among thousands who had never 
 seen each other's faces before. Between the 
 individual workman and the capitalist who 
 employed hundreds of ' hands ' a wide gulf 
 opened ; the workman ceased to be the 
 cherished dependent ; he became the living 
 tool of whom the employer knew less than 
 he did of his steam engine." ^ 
 
 Wealth was increasing at a prodigious 
 rate ; these great capitalist employers were 
 
 ' "The Evolution of Modem Capitalism," p. 325. 
 » " The Industrial Be volution," p. 190. 
 
48 The Past 
 
 heaping up large fortunes; but the tend- 
 ency of wages was downward ; the hours of 
 labor were long and women and children 
 were forced into the most degrading servi- 
 tude. Before the new industry was thirty 
 years old the working classes of England 
 had sunk into a miserable proletariat. Gov- 
 ernment reports of the first quarter of the 
 nineteenth century show that children of five 
 and six years were commonly found in the 
 factories. The day's work was from twelve 
 to fourteen and fifteen hours ; in some dis- 
 tricts it reached sixteen hours. Machines 
 that could be tended by women and chil- 
 dren drove the husbands and fathers out of 
 employment and forced them to stand idle 
 in the market-place. " Nor was this un- 
 measured abuse of child labor," says Mr. 
 Hyndman, " confined to the cotton, silk or 
 wool industries. It spread in every direc- 
 tion. The profit was so great that nothing 
 could stop its development. The report of 
 1842 is crammed with statements as to the 
 fearful overwork of girls and boys in iron 
 
The Past 49 
 
 and coal mines, which doubtless had been 
 going on from the end of the eighteenth 
 century. Children, being small and handy, 
 were particularly convenient for small 
 veins of coal, and for pits where no great 
 amount of capital was embarked ; they could 
 get about where horses and mules could not. 
 Little girls were forced to carry heavy buck- 
 ets of coal up high ladders, and little girls 
 and boys dragged the coal bunkers along 
 instead of animals. Women were com- 
 monly employed underground at the filth- 
 iest tasks." ^ 
 
 I have spoken of these women and chil- 
 dren as being forced to labor after this man- 
 ner ; I have named these conditions servi- 
 tude. Was not labor free in England, one 
 hundred years ago ? Were not these people, 
 one and all, male and female, enjoying 
 all the blessings of free contract ? Most as- 
 suredly they were. These employers had 
 no legal claim upon them. So far as the 
 laws of England were concerned they had 
 
 • " Historic Basis of Sooiallsm in England," p. 166. 
 
so The Past 
 
 the right to work for whom they pleased, 
 and to make their own bargains about 
 wages. It was while these burdens were 
 crushing the life of the English laborers 
 that Cowper was writing : 
 
 " Slaves cannot breathe in England ; U their lungs 
 Receive our air that moment they are free ! 
 They touch our country and their shackles fall." 
 
 The only compulsion to which these people 
 were subject was the compulsion of circum- 
 stance. The forces by which they were 
 driven were hunger and cold. The servi- 
 tude that galled them was that of pitiless 
 economic laws, and there is no oppression 
 more relentless. For even as Herbert Spen- 
 cer, the great champion of free contract, the 
 great antagonist of state regulation, has 
 said : " The wage-earning factory hand 
 can, indeed, exemplify entirely free labor, in 
 so far that, making contracts at will and able 
 to break them after short notice, he is free to 
 engage with whomsoever he pleases and when 
 he pleases. But this liberty amounts in prac- 
 tice to little more than the ability to ex- 
 
The Past 51 
 
 change one slavery for another ; since, fit 
 only for this particular occupation, he has 
 rarely an opportunity of doing anything 
 more than decide in what mill he will pass 
 the remainder of his dreary days. The 
 coercion of circumstances often bears more 
 hardly on him than the coercion of a mas- 
 ter does on one in bondage." ^ This was 
 the first great, outstanding fact developed 
 in the industrial revolution. It was not 
 indeed accepted as a fact, either by the 
 masters or by the political economists of the 
 day who furnished them their business 
 theories. It was strenuously and angrily 
 denied. It was maintained that individual 
 freedom of contract was the one thing pre- 
 cious and inalienable ; that it must in no 
 way be impaired, either by law or by combi- 
 nations of laborers. Business would be 
 ruined, these men predicted, and the national 
 prosperity destroyed if any attempts were 
 made to restrict by law the freedom of trade. 
 But all this economic dogmatism finally 
 
 ' "Priuciples of Sociology," III, 525, 
 
52 The Past 
 
 shrank to silence before the appalling fact 
 that the laboring classes of England were 
 steadily sinking. In the great industrial 
 centres the effects of this regime of so-called 
 free labor were visible in the wasted forms 
 and pallid cheeks of the operatives ; physi- 
 cal degeneracy was manifest ; children were 
 dying like flies ; the vigor of the nation was 
 being undermined. Parliamentary inves- 
 tigations revealed a state of things that 
 made the nation shudder. It was demon- 
 strated, in a manner that ought to be con- 
 vincing to all following generations, that 
 free labor and contract are not in them- 
 selves the entire solution of the labor 
 question ; that under their unhindered op- 
 eration, with pure selfishness as the motive 
 force, and competition as the regulative 
 principle, a condition of bondage and mis- 
 ery is sure to follow far worse than the serf- 
 dom of the Middle Ages. 
 
 Toward these forlorn conditions the 
 laboring classes in all countries have gravi- 
 tated, whenever the organization of labor 
 
The Past 53 
 
 has been put upon this basis. But in Eng- 
 land especially, and to some extent in other 
 countries also, means have been found of 
 resisting this downward pressure, and of 
 rescuing the working people from their 
 degradation. 
 
 The first, and by far the most important of 
 these measures is the combination of the 
 working people themselves for their own 
 protection. I cannot dwell upon the his- 
 tory of the trades-unions, for that is the 
 theme of one of the following lectures, but 
 nothing is more vital, under a wage system, 
 in the large industry, than this right of the 
 laboring men to organize and to secure, 
 through their organization, better conditions 
 of labor and better wages. This is a right 
 which has been disputed from the begin- 
 ning. By laws which absolutely forbade 
 working men to combine for any purpose 
 whatsoever, and which made it a criminal 
 conspiracy for two or three of them to con- 
 sult together for the purpose of securing 
 shorter hours or better wages, the employ- 
 
54 The Past 
 
 ing classes of England did their utmost to 
 outlaw the trades-unions. Much of the 
 violence with which they have been justly 
 charged has been due to this tyrannical 
 purpose to deprive them of the only means 
 by which they could protect themselves 
 from enslavement. 
 
 Nothing can be plainer than that there 
 can be no liberty for working men in these 
 days of great corporate combinations, 
 unless they are permitted to unite in the 
 enforcement of their demands for better 
 conditions. It is ridiculous to talk of free- 
 dom of contract between employer and em- 
 ployee, when the employer is a great cor- 
 poration, and the employee is a single in- 
 dividual. The freedom of the man outside 
 the gates is simply the freedom of taking 
 what is offered him or starving. The only 
 kind of bargaining by which the laborer can 
 preserve for himself a vestige of freedom is 
 collective bargaining. If all the employees 
 stand together to assert their claims, they 
 have some chance of getting them con- 
 
The Past SS 
 
 sidered. They have a right to stand to- 
 gether, and a right to be represented by the 
 men of their own choice in making their 
 bargains. They may make mistakes in 
 choosing their representatives, and mistakes 
 in urging their demands. Very well ; they 
 have a right to make mistakes ; that is one of 
 the inalienable rights of a freeman. What 
 would our condition be as citizens if our 
 political liberties were taken away from us 
 whenever we made mistakes? We have 
 learned most of what we know by making 
 mistakes, and having to suffer for them. 
 What the unions have no right to do is 
 to use violence, in any way, in enforcing 
 their demands. That is not only a crime, 
 it is a miserable and costly blunder. But 
 to unite, and to bargain collectively with 
 their employers through their own repre- 
 sentatives, with respect to wages and con- 
 ditions of work and hours of labor is their 
 right, which law must confirm and which 
 their employers must recognize. If the 
 wage-system is to be maintained, and the 
 
56 The Past 
 
 large system of industry is to continue, 
 this must be accepted as a fundamental 
 fact. The denial of it is not only unjust, it 
 is stupid. 
 
 It was a long time, as I have intimated, 
 before this right was even legally conceded 
 to working men ; but after much turbulence 
 and strife their cause prevailed; the old 
 laws against combination were swept from 
 the English statute books ; and in all the 
 English-speaking countries the unions are 
 now placed under legal protection. The 
 weapon thus put into the hands of the 
 working man has often been used recklessly 
 and sometimes brutally and tyrannically ; 
 but by means of it he has won and main- 
 tained his freedom ; in the use of it he has 
 gained intelligence, self-mastery, wisdom ; 
 and if we are often impatient with his abuse 
 of it, we must remember that without it he 
 would surely have sunk into a serfage 
 worse than that of the Middle Ages. 
 
 The second of the agencies which have 
 been at work for the rescue and elevation 
 
The Past 57 
 
 of the working man is that of restrictive 
 and directive legislation. Not even the 
 Parliaments and the Legislatures could 
 have helped the working men if they had 
 not helped themselves ; but there was much 
 that could be done, especially in protecting 
 women and children from the brutalizing 
 effects of unhindered competition, and in 
 safe-guarding the rights of the laboring 
 classes. The fact has come to be recog- 
 nized that freedom is a plant that does not 
 grow wild, any more than corn or wheat 
 grows wild ; that it needs wise husbandry, 
 enclosures well kept, and careful tillage ; 
 that it is the business of the state to provide 
 conditions under which freedom can come to 
 fruitage, and to exterminate the weeds and 
 parasites that choke its growth. This is 
 what the Labor Legislation of most civilized 
 lands has undertaken to do, and there can 
 be no doubt that it has been, on the whole, 
 an effectual agency in promoting the well- 
 being of the working classes. Age limits 
 are generally fixed, below which children 
 
58 The Past 
 
 may not be employed in workshops and 
 factories ; the hours of labor for children 
 and sometimes for women have been 
 limited ; sanitary conditions, and the safe- 
 guarding of dangerous machinery have been 
 required ; the regulation of sweat shops has 
 checked abuses that lurked in holes and 
 corners, and the factory and mine inspec- 
 tion for which most civilized States have 
 provided, has secured the enforcement of 
 salutary laws. In England, the Factory 
 Legislation was largely the work of mem- 
 bers of the aristocracy, first among whom 
 must always be named the Seventh Earl of 
 Shaftesbury. These true noblemen made 
 common cause with the working people, 
 and against the opposition of factory lords 
 and political economists, carried through 
 Parliament the protective measures which 
 have done so much for the emancipation of 
 the working classes. The Factory Legisla- 
 tion of all the civilized lands is one of the 
 trophies of civilization ; it bears witness to 
 the fact that the working man has not only 
 
The Past 59 
 
 been set free, but that his welfare and eleva- 
 tion have become the care of the whole 
 commonwealth ; that in some imperfect 
 way society has begun to understand the 
 meaning of Paul's apologue about the body 
 and its members. 
 
 And this brings us to the last of the 
 forces which have been at work for the up- 
 lifting and emancipation of the laboring 
 classes — the enthusiasm of humanity, a 
 slowly-gathering fire in human hearts, be- 
 fore which, in the process of the suns, all 
 injustice and oppression must surely melt 
 away. All these ameliorations on which 
 we have been looking — the disappearance 
 of slavery and of serfdom, the enfranchise- 
 ment of the laborer, the removal of the 
 hindrances to his progress, the broadening 
 of his path to freedom, have been due, in 
 the last analysis, to what Mr. Kidd calls 
 "the immense fund of altruistic feeling 
 with which our Western societies have be- 
 come equipped." " It is," he goes on, " the 
 disintegrating influence of this fund of 
 
6o The Past 
 
 altruism in our civilization that has under- 
 mined the position of the power-holding 
 classes. It is the resultant, deepening and 
 softening of character among us which 
 alone has made possible that developmental 
 movement whereby all the people are being 
 slowly brought into the rivalry of life on 
 equal conditions. And, in the eyes of the 
 evolutionist, it is by contributing the factor 
 which has rendered this unique process of 
 social development possible, that the Chris- 
 tian religion has tended to raise the peoples 
 aflFected by it to the commanding place they 
 have come to occupy in the world." ^ 
 
 This silent and subtle force of humane 
 sentiment, strong as the sunshine, resistless 
 as the south wind in April, has already 
 changed the social climate, but it has more 
 work to do before " all men's good " shall be 
 " each man's rule," 
 
 " And light shall spread, and man be liker man 
 Through all the circle of the golden year." 
 
 There is many a stronghold of greed and 
 
 • "Social Evolution," p. 165. 
 
The Past 61 
 
 heartlessness yet to be stormed in the hearts 
 of men who care m^ore for gain than for hu- 
 manity, and who are only too willing to 
 spoil the weak for their own enrichment. 
 We have no Roman patricians in these days 
 who sit at their feasts and see the blood of 
 slaves staining for their delectation the 
 floors of their banqueting halls ; but we 
 have giants of finance, not a few, who have 
 learned by masterful combinations to levy 
 tribute on the life and labor of millions of 
 toilers for the erection of fabulous fortunes. 
 To make the world ashamed of these colos- 
 sal egoists, and to make them ashamed of 
 themselves is one task now before us. It is 
 not a hopeless task ; as sure as icebergs melt 
 in southern seas that greed will yet be sub- 
 dued to the service of mankind. 
 
 And there are other tasks not less urgent, 
 not less hopeful. The men of toil them- 
 selves need to be brought under the influ- 
 ence of this same benign power. The reck- 
 less savagery with which the hosts of labor 
 sometimes conduct their combats, in their 
 
62 The Past 
 
 narrow partisanship making war on the de- 
 fenseless, in their mad pursuit of the in- 
 terests of their class trampling on the rights 
 of all other classes, reveals to us a crying 
 need of the softening of human hearts and 
 the broadening of human sympathies. But 
 that great " fund of altruistic feeling," which 
 the generations have been accumulating 
 will be strong enough to subdue these enmi- 
 ties and barbarisms, and to teach men how 
 to stand for their rights unswervingly, with 
 malice for none and with charity for all. 
 
 The labor question of to-day, when we 
 get at the heart of it, is simply this : What 
 can be done to bring employer and em- 
 ployed together upon a basis of genuine 
 good will ; to make them friends, comrades, 
 helpers of one another ? 
 
 What can be done to fill the heart of the 
 master with the passion of service and make 
 him see that his first and highest business 
 is the promotion of the welfare of the men 
 in his factory or his mine ; that this is a 
 calling which angels might covet — the no- 
 
The Past 63 
 
 bleat and divinest kind of work that men 
 can think of doing ? This is the first and 
 great question. 
 
 The second like unto it is this : What can 
 be done to inspire the men who do the work 
 with the same passion for service ; to show 
 them that the labor which enlarges the sum 
 of human good is its own exceeding great 
 reward ; to make them see that it is not by 
 contending but by cooperating that the 
 largest gains are made and each man's share 
 is multiplied ? 
 
 This is the labor question for the twen- 
 tieth century, and it is the question which 
 the twentieth century must answer. I am 
 not sure that the answer can be put into the 
 terms of the wage-system : I rather doubt 
 it. I think that some kind of cooperation 
 will have to be found by which the interests 
 of the men who direct the work and the 
 men who do the work will be more 
 perfectly and more consciously identified. 
 But the answer must be found, and it must 
 be an answer of peace. We are not going 
 
64 The Past 
 
 to solve the labor question by gathering 
 men into mighty armies and setting them 
 to fighting one another ; that is simply mad- 
 ness. All war is madness ; it is the climax 
 of unreason. Brutes and savages know no 
 better than to fight ; for men, for the men 
 of the twentieth century after Christ, it is 
 not only wicked, it is absurd. The time is 
 near when these industrial wars will appear 
 to be as senseless, as monstrous, as the wager 
 of battle and the ordeal by which disputes 
 were settled in the Dark Ages. 
 
 The answer must be peace. Among men 
 of good will there can be no other answer. 
 And there is no permanent place upon this 
 planet for any other kind of men. Men of 
 ill will are not wanted here. They do not 
 fit into the nature of things ; they do not 
 make sense ; they make confusion, discord, 
 chaos ; they must go. O bells of the new 
 year, of the new century, ring them out ! 
 ring them out ! Ring out the churl, the ego- 
 ist, the sect-man, the party-man, the class- 
 man ! Ring them out from church and 
 
The Past 65 
 
 school and council chamber and capitol, 
 from office and counting-room and shop and 
 factory ! 
 
 Bing in the valiant man and free, 
 The larger heart, the kindlier hand ; 
 King out the darkness of the land, 
 King in the Christ that is to be. 
 
II 
 
 THE CORPORATION 
 By Talcott Williams, LL. D. 
 
II 
 
 THE CORPORATION 
 
 The mere term " corporation " has many 
 meanings and much history. It can be ap- 
 proached from many sides and discussed 
 from many aspects, historical, legal, and 
 social, as it is considered a part of the past 
 of the race, the creature and product of law, 
 or an integral share of the development, 
 machinery, and working of society. In 
 presenting each of them it would be pos- 
 sible to detach ourselves from its human 
 relations, and by concentrating attention on 
 the impersonal character of the corporation, 
 on special phases of its vicious legal man- 
 agement, or on the extent to which, actually 
 or apparently, it moves towards monopoly, 
 to justify any preconceived view. 
 
 I prefer, instead, frankly to accept the 
 term " corporation " as it appears to have 
 
70 The Corporation 
 
 been intended to be used in this course, as 
 defining the current corporate organization 
 towards which the management and direc- 
 tion, the ownership and control, of capital 
 steadily seem to tend, supplanting, and in 
 some broad fields, altogether excluding, in- 
 dividual action, activity, and ownership. 
 Public corporations, properly so-called, from 
 the state down to the smallest town or the 
 least important board, corporations ecclesi- 
 astical, charitable, or in education — all the 
 wide category of incorporation which in 
 various forms, created by statute law or 
 recognized by common law, deals with the 
 non-profit-making ofldces of the corporation, 
 we sweep aside. They are beside our pur- 
 pose. Our attention is concentrated instead 
 on that specialized group of corporations 
 which principally engages our attention in 
 any companies' act, engaged in the work of 
 production, mining, manufacture, banking, 
 insurance, transportation, and distribution. 
 When Blackstone wrote, these corporations 
 played so small a part that he gives them 
 
The Corporation 71 
 
 less space than he lavished on the manifold 
 subtleties of the corporation sole. To-day, 
 when men speak of the corporation law or 
 write on corporation law, they think of 
 nothing else. These are the " corporations " 
 in the modern sense of the term. The issue 
 they present is whether the substitution for 
 the individual of the presence and existence 
 in dominant control of the corporation in 
 substantially all the activities of modern 
 society in production, transport and ex- 
 change, outside of agriculture (the farm is 
 still as individual in control, work and 
 ownership as was once the mine, shop, forge, 
 cart, stage and bank) is for better or for 
 worse. 
 
 The extraordinary phenomenon that a 
 form and mode of human association, exist- 
 ing for centuries and developed under all 
 law, once used almost exclusively for rela- 
 tions whose phenomenon demanded the 
 continuous life of some legal creation that 
 would carry on church, college, board, or 
 guild, has suddenly become the chosen ma- 
 
72 The Corporation 
 
 chinery for the swiftest, the most tem- 
 porary, and the most immediate needs of 
 society, has aroused controversy and created 
 alarm, quickened by no other change in the 
 modern organization of society. The cor- 
 poration in its new form overshadows so- 
 ciety. Men fear it. They attack it. It 
 plays the part which in the eighteenth 
 century, and even in the first half of the 
 nineteenth century, was taken by " tyr- 
 anny" and "superstition." Who hears of 
 these bugbears of the past to-day? But 
 when a newspaper draughtsman with a gift 
 for caricature and the artist's sympathy for 
 the fears and feelings of his fellow men, de- 
 sires to touch a common chord, he portrays 
 " the corporation" or " the trusts " in the vast 
 ogre before which the honest citizen shrinks 
 and cowers as the dinosaur might have 
 chased primitive man as his luckless 
 quarry, if the two had trod the earth to- 
 gether. 
 
 I count myself fortunate in being able to 
 take up this overmastering issue in this 
 
The Corporation 73 
 
 course on the platform of a Christian Sociol- 
 ogy, the only platform on which it can be 
 solved. Such a sociology recognizes no law 
 but love, and love as a law. It devoutly 
 believes that the universe is friendly, and 
 moves steadily forward in all its develop- 
 ment from star to society to make the work- 
 ing of universal love more visible and the 
 freedom of spiritual beings to love one an- 
 other, more complete. Rejecting selfishness 
 as the mainspring of social relations, it as- 
 serts selfhood and its development as a 
 guide. 
 
 If there are some things which challenge 
 this view, there are more that support it. 
 There is enough, at all events, in its favor 
 to make it a sound working hypothesis, to 
 which one can adjust partially known facts, 
 since most tend in this direction. Three 
 relations every man has ; one to the State 
 that rules, one to the faith that inspires, and 
 one to the economy that supports. In two, 
 a democracy based on free selfhood is al- 
 ready supreme. The last one great, power- 
 
74 The Corporation 
 
 ful despotism which survives, Russia, is 
 moving to an unequal conflict with a State 
 which within a generation has embraced 
 free constitutions, and owes all its strength 
 to its conversion from autocracy. The his- 
 tory of the modern State is a development 
 from an hereditary and more or less heredi- 
 tary executive, owning his power so nearly 
 as property, to take a familiar instance, that 
 the law of real estate is the one by which 
 the descent of the English throne is regu- 
 lated and gradually differentiated, into a 
 vast number of nearly equal holders of 
 political power whose consent regulates the 
 rule of the State. All civilized States have 
 not reached this democratic organization ; 
 but in this direction all States tend. 
 
 The Church in the broadest sense, the 
 visible body of man working and walking 
 by faith, as the State is man in rule, moves 
 along the same path. The priest, too, was 
 once absolute in his powers and hereditary 
 in his functions. He, too, once owned his 
 office, and his priestly functions are still 
 
The Corporation 75 
 
 treated by English law as closely akin to a 
 realty fee. Here, too, we are all aware that 
 under the influence of the democratic spirit 
 and a democratic development, an heredi- 
 tary priesthood disappears, and is succeeded 
 by priests chosen by their people. The Pope 
 himself is an elective monarch, in theory 
 chosen by the bishops, priests, and deacons 
 of the churches that once made his ancient 
 diocese. As with the State, the organiza- 
 tion of the Church in all its forms tends 
 more or less completely towards a demo- 
 cratic ideal in which the different powers 
 of the mass of the faithful come in various 
 forms to select, direct, and leave in control 
 the spiritual heads of the faith. 
 
 What is true of the State which rules and 
 the faith which inspires, must in due season 
 be true of the economy which supports. 
 Nor can we wander wide from the future 
 path of modern progress if we raise in either 
 hand these twin lamps of history to light 
 our way, and test present and future change 
 by the question whether the economic 
 
76 The Corporation 
 
 changes brought by the corporation tend 
 towards a democratic organization of the 
 economic structure of society in which self- 
 hood becomes more or less vital, visible, and 
 charged with recurrent volition. For the 
 essence of civil freedom is that will returns 
 to the individual periodically. By this 
 standard we judge the organization of the 
 State and the Church, and by this we have 
 a right to say the economic organization of 
 society must stand or fall. If it become 
 increasingly democratic as has the State and 
 the Church, it moves in the right direction, 
 and if not, not. By this democratic sign, 
 flourishing and flowering best under the 
 most democratic of faiths, Christianity, 
 man's selfhood conquers. 
 
 The corporation, like all other social phe- 
 nomena, must submit to this test. The 
 object of the democratic organization of 
 society is to give the individual initiative, 
 opportunity, and security. Unless the cor- 
 poration do this, the stars in their courses 
 fight against it. It is in its origin the joint 
 
The Corporation 77 
 
 product of Roman and English law. With 
 the general attributes of the body corporate, 
 its permanence, its artificial character as a 
 legal person, able to hold property, self- 
 governing, limited in its powers, activities, 
 life, and existence, by the State which 
 creates it, every intelligent person may be 
 assumed to be familiar. The structure of 
 the ordinary gainful corporation with its 
 shareholders, directors, and charters, is per- 
 haps more frequent in American life than 
 in any other. No one of us, not a tramp, 
 but has at some point, corporate relations, 
 and it is probable that a majority of Ameri- 
 cans to-day, directly or indirectly, own cor- 
 porate property. 
 
 The American development of the Cor- 
 poration is thus diffused because in part 
 the American theory and practice of the 
 corporation has blended the twin origins 
 from which it springs. The Roman col- 
 legium was a voluntary association, already 
 organized or existing, to which the imperial 
 rescript gave the permanence, powers, and 
 
7 8 The Corporation 
 
 standing of a corporation. Even this came 
 late. Earlier the mere existence of the as- 
 sociate body, the priests of a temple, the 
 brothers of an ancient rite, trade, guild, or 
 beneficial association, by virtue of its organ- 
 ization formed a collegium, for which later, 
 as the imperial power extended its im- 
 mediate supervision, a rescript was necessary 
 to give corporate powers to a body already 
 acting as a unit. In English law, borrowed 
 in this respect from the Roman, in its com- 
 pleted form, the charter creates the corpo- 
 ration. It exists solely because the State 
 gives it life, permanence, and power. It 
 has no other origin and no other authority, 
 and its powers all begin, live, move, and 
 have their being, within the area of action 
 provided and limited by this authority and 
 act of the State. 
 
 American law, more in practice than in 
 theory, which last indeed follows in Eng- 
 lish steps, has combined these two views, 
 and has been followed therein by more 
 recent English statutes. The State still 
 
The Corporation 79 
 
 stands as the source and fountain of origin 
 and authority for the corporation, but under 
 " general " corporation acts, any group of 
 citizens can obtain this power. By a blend 
 of the two methods in which the State in 
 Roman law recognized associations already 
 existing, and in English law created them 
 anew, the State leaves open to every associa- 
 tion and enterprise, which chooses by its own 
 initiative to use them, the sovereign powers 
 of creating a corporation. 
 
 Corporate powers and their franchise 
 have in their evolution and development 
 passed through the same stages as the va- 
 rious franchises of that greater corporation, 
 the State. Citizenship and the exercise of 
 the various " freedom " of the citizen was 
 once only secured by the act and grant of 
 the State. Within narrow limits — as in a 
 citizenship making one eligible to the House 
 of Commons — these limits still survive in 
 England. With us, the act and initia- 
 tive of the individual, subject to judicial 
 record and regulation, open all the " free- 
 
8o The Corporation 
 
 dom " of citizenship, save one — ^the presi- 
 dency, the last relic of the general rights 
 once jealously reserved, save as opened by 
 special statute, to the " native born." In 
 both countries, what was once a privilege, 
 has become a general right. 
 
 Parallel too with the changes by which 
 many of the rights of citizenship, the 
 practice even of certain crafts, once wedded 
 and limited to residence in a particular 
 place, a residence not to be acquired by mere 
 domicile, have now become general, acquired 
 at will, as men come and go, corporate owner- 
 ship and responsibility has been rendered 
 capable of passing from hand to hand. Any 
 man can acquire any franchise of citizenship 
 and count but for one. Shares are the 
 franchise of a corporation. Once they only 
 passed under various restrictions. They pass 
 now with a constantly increasing freedom, 
 and constantly approximate in their powers 
 to the rule of a majority. French law retains 
 the continuous responsibility of the holder 
 of corporate shares, whose losses can in cer- 
 
The Corporation 81 
 
 tain cases be followed back through past 
 holders of record, a responsibility evaded by 
 selling a registered right of ownership, in- 
 stead of the share itself. 
 
 Corporate shares carry with them under 
 these conditions a liability akin to that of 
 our national bank shares, but reaching all 
 past holders and not the present holders 
 only. Corporate credit and corporate sta- 
 bility is promoted ; but at the cost of the 
 free use of corporate powers under a re- 
 sponsibility limited in amount to the pres- 
 ent holder and defeasible. Here again, as 
 in the State, the tendency in the corporation 
 is to relieve the individual of risks for exer- 
 cising a franchise, (that is owning shares), 
 once hedged about with responsibilities, as 
 the franchise of citizenship was itself once, 
 in fact, and not, as now, only in name, 
 burdened with certain responsibilities in 
 war and in public levies. 
 
 For good or for evil, therefore, exactly as 
 citizenship has been diffused and freed from 
 immediate personal limitations so through 
 
82 The Corporation 
 
 manifold changes in American corporate 
 law, some the work of legislation and some 
 the work of the courts, the creation and use 
 of the corporation has become a privilege 
 free to all for every purpose, and the owner- 
 ship of shares in a corporation, or the direct- 
 tion of its affairs, has been lightened of 
 almost every past burden which rendered 
 the transfer of this property difficult or a 
 part in its management perilous. Whether 
 this be wise or not, I am not now discuss- 
 ing. The last English Companies Act re- 
 cords a distinct reaction towards increased 
 fiduciary responsibility in promoters and 
 managers, and increased powers of control 
 in shareholders. Our own legislation will 
 doubtless take a like course. But for the 
 present, I am only pointing out that under 
 a development as complete as it has been un- 
 conscious, we have carried to their farthest 
 limit the emancipation of these artificial 
 persons. They do business under any 
 sovereignty and are, in New Jersey at least, 
 expressly endowed with powers which they 
 
The Corporation 83 
 
 can exercise only outside the sovereignty 
 which creates them. Their shareholders 
 have a responsibility so limited that in 
 practice it is of the rarest for creditors to 
 seek to levy upon it and as difficult for the 
 shareholder to exercise it in his own pro- 
 tection. Lastly, the directors and mana- 
 gers, while in theory bound by a strict and 
 enforceable fiduciary responsibility — as are 
 so many public ofl&ces — have, like them, 
 come in practice to be free from the attempt 
 to enforce these responsibilities. At all 
 points, as will not escape the attentive, the 
 corporation, once limited, rigorous, and 
 crowded at all points with burdensome re- 
 sponsibilities for corporation, manager, and 
 shareholders, has gone through changes 
 akin to those with which we are familiar in 
 the democratic State which, while it has 
 laws and penalties to enforce its working 
 and the responsibility of its citizens and 
 public ofiicers, yet, as we all well know, really 
 depends for its working on the power of 
 public opinion, rather than on statutory 
 
84 The Corporation 
 
 penalties. One might almost say that trials 
 for treason and the once familiar proceed- 
 ings of quo warranto against the life of a 
 corporation, once frequent, have both disap- 
 peared together in practice, though both re- 
 main in full force, in the analogous changes 
 which have affected the State and the cor- 
 poration. 
 
 Corporations were infrequent, and their 
 creation was treated as a matter of solemn 
 moment a century ago in any English- 
 speaking legislature. Even charitable cor- 
 porations were challenged before they were 
 given life, and so innocent a step as a 
 charter to the first missionary society. The 
 American Board of Commissioners for For- 
 eign Missions, led to days of debate in the 
 Massachusetts Legislature. Corporations 
 are to-day free of these trammels. Yet few 
 realize or comprehend the extent to which 
 the entire property of the country is passing 
 under a direct corporate title or corporate 
 titles to mortgages on property. It may be 
 doubted if, a century ago in this country, 
 
The Corporation 85 
 
 more than one per cent, of its wealth was 
 held by a corporate title. Some sixty to 
 seventy years ago, when the transactions of 
 the New York Stock Exchange began to 
 have a newspaper record and a rude list be- 
 gan to be made of its securities, the aggre- 
 gate of all securities which could be dealt 
 in upon its floor cannot have been much 
 over 1500,000,000. A very simple calcula- 
 tion will cover them all, at a time when 
 public debts were small, banks and insur- 
 ance companies few, and railroads had not be- 
 gun to be, while the manufacturing and trad- 
 ing corporation was substantially unknown. 
 In 1850, the wealth of the country was 
 $5,000,000,000. It was not over |3,000,- 
 000,000 between 1830 and 1840, and may at 
 the utmost have reached $4,000,000,000. 
 Public and corporate securities in all their 
 forms were then in all probability from an 
 eighth to a fifth of the wealth of the country. 
 They may have been less. They could not 
 have been more. This was true within the 
 lives of men to-day figuring on the boards of 
 
86 The Corporation 
 
 corporations whose aggregate capital is more 
 than the gross valuation of the United 
 States, when they were born. 
 
 The wealth of the United States in 1900 
 is placed at |93,000,000,000 and may four 
 years later have reached a round $100,000,- 
 000,000. Figures like these, let us not for- 
 get, are approximations, mere measures of 
 relative value. They are not to be accepted 
 as exact statistical statements, but they af- 
 ford some means of comparison. Railroad 
 capital, shares and bonds, and the capital 
 of the new manufacturing and trading cor- 
 porations, known as Trusts, and various 
 forms of public indebtedness, aggregate some 
 $25,000,000,000.^ By no means are all these 
 " listed " on the New York Stock Exchange. 
 Some could not be. But the possible ag- 
 
 ' The aggregate capitalization of the railways of the United 
 States on June 30, 1902, was $12,134,182,964, $6,024,201,295 in 
 stocks and $6,109,981,669 in bonds. Abont one-sixth of this, 
 $2,208,518,793, is owned by raib-oad corporations. " Trusts " 
 are subject to no exact statistical showing. Their aggregate 
 capital is variously estimated from $4,000,000,000 to $6,000,- 
 000,000. The public debt of the United States in all forms is 
 about $2,000,000,000. 
 
The Corporation 87 
 
 gregate is not less than the sum named. 
 Nor is this extraordinary. The aggregate 
 listing of the London Stock Exchange is 
 about $30,000,000,000, and includes a wider 
 range than our own of foreign securities. 
 From a fifth to a fourth of the aggregate 
 wealth of the country is therefore repre- 
 sented by shares and obligations of larger 
 corporations which are either on the Stock 
 Exchange or can be placed there whenever 
 desired.^ If we add to this the banks with 
 a capital of $1,000,000,000, savings banks 
 whose depositors own (1902) $2,750,177,290 
 and whose liabilities are $2,893,172,980, life 
 insurance companies (1903) with assets of 
 $2,091,872,831, and fire insurance companies 
 with stock and assets of $481,548,288, we 
 have in this round aggregate some $6,500,- 
 000,000 of corporate possession. Besides 
 these great groups of railroads, manufactur- 
 ing corporations, public debts, banks, and 
 
 ' For many years, as is well known, the Pennsylvania Bail- 
 road Company, the largest railroad corporation in the country, 
 was not listed on the New York Stock Exchange. 
 
88 The Corporation 
 
 insurance companies, there are the myriad 
 lesser companies in every city, town, and 
 hamlet, each year engrossing a larger and 
 larger share of the business of the land. 
 Every year and every place sees the indi- 
 vidual and the firm succeeded by the cor- 
 poration. Their number, no one knows. 
 No statistics include them. Not even the 
 tax gatherer reaches all. The corporations, 
 so to speak, visible in great masses, cover 
 more than a quarter of the national wealth. 
 Add the lesser and more numerous corpo- 
 rations, and it is not improbable that half 
 the wealth of the country is held by a cor- 
 porate title, direct or indirect. 
 
 Realty remains as yet under private own- 
 ership, except as it is held by corporations 
 for the purpose of carrying on their busi- 
 ness. But realty cannot long escape the op- 
 eration of causes which have engulfed, in 
 due order, the banking, the insurance, the 
 transportation, the manufacturing, and the 
 distribution of the country. Great realty 
 corporations own a large part of the area 
 
The Corporation 89 
 
 of Paris. Their shares are favorable forms 
 of small investment. They give those of 
 small capital their part in the profits of city 
 realty and the unearned increment. The 
 realty corporation has begun to appear here 
 in New York. It takes no prophetic in- 
 stinct to predict that here, as in other fields, 
 the corporation will take the place of the 
 individual. The great estate and the indi- 
 vidual owner will both disappear before the 
 corporation in the ownership and manage- 
 ment of city real estate, as the individual 
 has disappeared in each of the other great 
 fields. The department store and the news- 
 paper, the hotel and the restaurant, have 
 already gone through this change in Eng- 
 land and are visibly passing through this 
 change here. The farm may for a season 
 resist the movement, and may remain the 
 last example of direct personal ownership 
 when the other four-fifths of the property 
 of the country is held by corporations. 
 
 The number and capital of corporations 
 has a steady proportional growth in all 
 
go The Corporation 
 
 lands. Under all laws, there is a want 
 of correspondence between the nominal 
 capital of corporations and the real value 
 of the property they represent ; but the 
 capital in new companies is a measure, 
 if no more, of the steady progress of prop- 
 erty from individual or personal to cor- 
 porate titles. It is now sixteen years since 
 a Belgian journal {Monitewr Interete Materiels) 
 published a return of the issue of new se- 
 curities in this country and Europe for six- 
 teen years, 1871-1886, inclusive. The ag- 
 gregate in this period was $21,366,000,000. 
 Of this sum, only a third ($7,005,000,000) 
 was represented by railroads and industrial 
 enterprises ; twelve per cent. ($2,563,920,000) 
 by bonds ; and the remainder, a little over 
 half ($11,807,608,000), was of public issues. 
 But it is noticeable that through this 
 period, these decreased, and railroads and 
 industrial enterprises increased. In the 
 first year recorded, 1871, of issues of $3,118,- 
 000,000, seventy-four per cent, were public 
 loans ; ten per cent., banks ; and but sixteen 
 
The Corporation 91 
 
 per cent., railroads and factories. In 1886, 
 out of $1,341,000,000, only forty-six per cent, 
 were public loans ; eight per cent., banks ; and 
 forty-six per cent., railroads and factories. 
 The first year was, one must remember, the 
 period of heavy issues of public loans by 
 France, Italy and other European countries, 
 and the last a period of industrial expansion ; 
 but this is the course new issues have taken for 
 thirty years. They were once three-quarters 
 public loans. They are to-day, in almost this 
 proportion, the shares and bonds of com- 
 panies, in transportation, production, manu- 
 facture and distribution. In 1903, the same 
 authority gives the total world issues 
 (United States, Japan, and China incom- 
 plete), as $3,602,434,100, evenly divided 
 into reissues $1,758,942,330 and new de- 
 mand $1,913,491,728. Of the last, govern- 
 ments issued but 26.84 per cent. In all, the 
 world's new issues in full years are $2,000,- 
 000,000 to $2,500,000,000 ; but in poor years, 
 1894 or 1895 for instance, as low as $1,000,- 
 000,000. 
 
92 The Corporation 
 
 These issues are, in a large measure, in 
 exchange for shares and bonds already is- 
 sued, but on the average this re-issue can- 
 not be more than a third of the whole, and 
 is in general less. The London Economist, 
 1881-1890, gave the new capital placed on 
 the English market at £1,326,000,000, of 
 which £1,083,000,000 were money calls or 
 seventy-nine per cent, of the whole. The 
 aggregate of these issues has reached a level 
 in England, no longer exceeded. The ag- 
 gregate in 1881, £190,000,000, and in 1889, 
 £207,000,000, has not since been exceeded, 
 but the average for the five years 1897-1901, 
 was £155,097,000, and in the five years 
 1881-1885, £100,600,000. The large recent 
 totals are, it is true, due to government 
 issues, sixty-one per cent, in 1901, and forty 
 per cent in 1900, but even these mark the 
 conversion of private funds into a public 
 mortgage and the proportion of govern- 
 ment loans was as large in earlier years. In 
 round numbers, each year in England sees, 
 on the average, $500,000,000 go into new 
 
The Corporation 93 
 
 corporations, railroads and industrials, 
 against $300,000,000 some twenty years ago. 
 These are, however, literally from compan- 
 ies the world over. The corporations organ- 
 ized in the last ten years in the United 
 Kingdom numbered 38,928, and had a cap- 
 ital of $2,800,000,000. 
 
 In Germany, the aggregate of new cap- 
 ital asked for was $500,000,000 in 1902; 
 $452,150,000 in 1901 ; and $394,800,000 in 
 1900; but three-fifths of them are public 
 loans (in 1902, sixty-two per cent.) and the 
 commercial corporations, industrial, rail- 
 way, etc., are small compared with those 
 of England or this country, in 1902, $23,- 
 590,000. Where, in 1896, there were in 
 Germany, 376 companies with a capital of 
 128,483,700 marks ($32,120,925), there were, 
 in England, 4,291 joint stock companies 
 with a nominal capital of £264,517,977. 
 A like disparity exists with other European 
 countries, Russia, in 1896, having companies 
 with a capital of 239,424,000 roubles. In an 
 Asiatic country, like India, with fourfold the 
 
94 The Corporation 
 
 population of the United States, and nearly 
 the population of Europe, there were, in 1896, 
 1,309 with a nominal capital of 41,891,447 R., 
 and a paid up capital of 27,668,773 R. 
 
 Whether the corporation be or be not the 
 measure of civilization, there is no question 
 that property tends to pass under corporate 
 title, in a tolerably close relation to the ad- 
 vance in the social, industrial, and financial 
 organization of any country. Under Ori- 
 ental law and custom, as under early Ro- 
 man law, and at many points in civil law, 
 as finally summed up in the Code Napoleon, 
 the family itself has a certain corporate 
 unity, is, if one do not press this legal ter- 
 minology too far, a quasi corporation. The 
 child, by birth, acquires certain property 
 rights, a quasi franchise in the family prop- 
 erty and succession of which no testamen- 
 tary act can divert him. In Hindu and 
 Mohammedan family law, in the usage and 
 custom of Chinese society, the family is a 
 continuous succession, whose living mem- 
 bers hold little more than a life interest in 
 
The Corporation 95 
 
 the family property. Custom and prescrip- 
 tion render its free transfer and sale diffi- 
 cult in habit and practice, though possible 
 at law, and no parent can deprive his chil- 
 dren of all their inheritance. The wife's 
 dower right in realty is the last shred in 
 our common law of this continuous suc- 
 cession and property right, and it will 
 doubtless, like the right of courtesy enjoyed 
 by the husband, be gradually retired by 
 statute. With the disappearance of this 
 vested family interest won by descent, of 
 which recent English legislation has left so 
 little, and to which our own statutes and 
 decisions are so unfriendly, there steadily 
 grows the mobile corporate title which, in 
 the bond, passes by delivery ; in the case of 
 the share, passes by registry ; and when in- 
 dorsed in blank, under a long series of de- 
 cisions (not of late altogether consistent), 
 giving legal force to the law merchant's 
 usage or the custom of the Stock Exchange, 
 the share itself passes from hand to hand 
 by delivery. If of persons, we can say with 
 
96 The Corporation 
 
 Sir Henry Maine that the progress of society 
 is measured by the change from status to 
 contract, so of property we may say that 
 another measure of civilization is the prog- 
 ress of property from an immobile title un- 
 der the joint ownership of that natural and 
 indissoluble corporation, the family, created 
 by status and in the earlier stages of society, 
 knowing no transfer for realty, to the mobile 
 title of the artificial corporation created by 
 law. These corporate titles to property tend 
 more and more to pass from hand to hand 
 by delivery, their testamentary disposition 
 is in this country and in England unre- 
 stricted. No status acquired by birth gives 
 control of them. It doubtless still remains 
 true that they and their usufruct can be en- 
 tailed for a life and lives in being ; but the 
 courts regard this with no friendly eye and 
 are perpetually seeking to limit the exercise 
 of this power. Exactly as political power was 
 once a concomitant of descent, blood and 
 race, not to be acquired through any indi- 
 vidual or personal act by the peregrinus or 
 
The Corporation 97 
 
 metoilcos, and has come to be a right acquired 
 over a great area like our own national ter- 
 ritory made up of associated sovereignties 
 by a mere change of domicile, and is, among 
 most civilized nations, gained by naturali- 
 zation or the territorial birth of the chil- 
 dren of the alien, so property under the in- 
 fluence and working of the corporation, 
 tends to develop and change from condi- 
 tions under which it passed chiefly and as 
 far as realty was concerned only by birth, 
 to a corporate title which passes at will and 
 in whose ownership and on whose transmis- 
 sion birth has no necessary influence or claim 
 whatsoever. From status to contract for the 
 person, from immobile titles indissolubly as- 
 sociated with the family bonds to mobile titles 
 created by corporate ownership — these are the 
 twin changes, parallel, analogous, and similar, 
 through which persons and property pass in 
 the development of society. 
 
 Nor, since this is true, since status for 
 persons matches family ownership in prop- 
 erty, and contract, corporate titles, is it sur- 
 
98 The Corporation 
 
 prising that the corporation overshadows 
 widely as it develops and its title engrosses 
 a larger and larger share of the gross prop- 
 erty of any community? In its develop- 
 ment, we are plainly contemplating not the 
 m^ere accretion and aggregation of property 
 to be represented by some shapeless pre- 
 historic and semi-savage figure stalking 
 around about, over and on, the rights of the 
 " common people," but the final and inevi- 
 table form in which property rights are to be 
 cast. Exactly, as the democratic republic is 
 one in which political right and power are 
 diffused among " the people " and is period- 
 ically exercised at recurrent intervals by the 
 general body of qualified citizens, so the 
 great reservoir of national property, which 
 matches the reservoir of stated national 
 political power, is destined to be steadily 
 and continuously divided into a great mass 
 of corporate titles, represented by bonds and 
 shares, whose transfer becomes easier and 
 easier, for which law and custom steadily 
 create a readier sale and which might, if 
 
The Corporation 99 
 
 their diffusion is actually in progress, finally 
 give an ownership of property by corporate 
 title as complete, as general, and as evenly 
 distributed as the right of suffrage. Men 
 are alike in having but one vote ; but men 
 vary greatly, for good reasons and ill, 
 through the justifiable exercise of their 
 powers and their unjustifiable use, in their 
 influence over votes cast. So also, it is 
 plain, that there might come a time, first 
 in great corporations, and later in corporate 
 property as a whole, in which the diffusion 
 of property was extreme, though its con- 
 trol was in the hands of a few. Something 
 like this is already apparent in corporations 
 with many thousands of shareholders, but 
 whose real control remains in a small gov- 
 erning group, holding but a small share of 
 the total aggregate of shares individually, 
 though voting an overwhelming majority 
 of the shares held by others. They con- 
 stitute, in short, a corporate " machine," 
 which matches in its development the 
 political machine. 
 
loo The Corporation 
 
 Yet whatever analogies may be drawn 
 between the development of personal rights 
 and corporate property titles, we are all 
 aware, that the widening shadow of the 
 corporation which has eclipsed individual 
 ownership for half the property of the 
 United States and is plainly destined to em- 
 brace all, except possibly farm lands, is re- 
 pugnant to our industrial ideals. Exactly 
 as the Greek philosopher saw in the small 
 city, where every citizen could be known 
 to every other responsible participant in the 
 common sovereignty, the ideal state, so our 
 industrial and economic ideal looks to the 
 small and individual property or business 
 unit. Exactly as we deem the State hap- 
 piest, where land tends to divide and sub- 
 divide into the small farm held by the 
 single farmer and capable of being worked 
 by him with a hired man or two, so our 
 economic ideal is the shop or the factory, 
 which has been created by one individual, 
 is owned by one man or a small firm, has 
 its small force of hired operatives, and is 
 
The Corporation loi 
 
 throughout personal and individual in its 
 inception, management, and ownership. In 
 spite of the fact that the number of mercan- 
 tile firms in thirty years has grown three 
 times as fast as population or twice as fast 
 as wealth,^ there is a perpetual lament, often 
 by college professors from whom one might 
 at least expect some effort to learn the facts, 
 of the disappearance of the days when a 
 man could, with a small capital, start a 
 small business, see it grow, and enjoy an 
 independent economic activity akin to that 
 of the small farmer or, one may add, the 
 small Greek city of the fifth century be- 
 fore Christ or the mediaeval borough of 
 the twelfth or thirteenth century after. 
 Public feeling, ordinary editorial and popu- 
 lar discussion, and even economic theory 
 
 ■ The number of mercantile concerns engaged in business in 
 the United States in 1866, according to the best obtainable in- 
 formation, was about 160,000. During the past twenty-five 
 years, the number of mercantile concerns has about doubled, 
 and is now 1,300,000 (Dun's Eeview, April 9, 1904, p. 7). 
 The increase in number, 1866 to 1904, thirty-nine years, is 
 eightfold. Population in this period has a little more than 
 doubled, and wealth has quadrupled. 
 
102 The Corporation 
 
 contemplate the vast growth of corporate 
 wealth, much as we can imagine Aristotle 
 aghast at the United States as an arena for 
 self-government. Its size would appal, its 
 bulk affright, and he would regret the disap- 
 pearance of the small city with its vivid 
 life, its immediate responsibility and its 
 individual civic activity. It is probably 
 true, in spite of the very great increase of 
 separate firms, an increase so much faster 
 than population or wealth that there never 
 was so good or so easy a chance to start in 
 business as just now (except to-morrow), 
 that the relative importance of the firm 
 and the individual man has very greatly 
 decreased, is diminishing, and tends to dis- 
 appear. The modern career is not there. 
 It is in the great corporation, in its man- 
 agement or in its service, in its ownership 
 or in being owned by it. Sometimes both. 
 No men are often more completely the 
 slaves of great corporations, than those at 
 their head. Many of them, though fabu- 
 lously rich, work hard all their lives on 
 
The Corporation 103 
 
 board wages, and enjoy no fruit but the 
 sense of accretion which is quite as un- 
 conscious when a man is about so rich as 
 when a man is about so fat. 
 
 The corporation, especially in its later de- 
 velopment in the " Trust," — which is after 
 all only a very big corporation with a very 
 loose constitution as exactly suited to 
 arbitrary power as is a new overgrown em- 
 pire — is therefore held by all instinctively 
 to be opposed to the individual. Since the 
 small business begun on a small capital is 
 less and less the accepted career of success, 
 though more numerous than ever, the 
 general conclusion is that as the corporation 
 grows, the individual withers. Yet so far 
 as the ownership of property goes, the 
 corporation has enormously added to the 
 individual opportunity. In a primitive 
 community, there is nothing for any one to 
 own but a few personal implements. All 
 are poor and starving. This condition 
 existed for seons. Its gates can always 
 be reopened by destroying the delicate 
 
104 The Corporation 
 
 and organized activities on which rest the 
 general supply of the necessities of life so 
 widely enjoyed by all to-day that famine 
 has ceased to be a peril in civilized com- 
 munities. 
 
 As society develops there is little but land 
 to own, and this is worth little to any but 
 those who cultivate it. In our colonial 
 communities, disposable wealth was owned 
 by very few and they made money very 
 rapidly. Banking and business profits were 
 inordinately large and the man who got a 
 little the start of his neighbors could early 
 retire and sweat heavy interest out of the 
 community on a small capital. The small 
 worker, mechanic or professional man, had 
 next to nothing in which he could invest, 
 one hundred or one hundred and fifty years 
 ago. There were no savings banks, no life 
 insurance and no corporation shares. Banks 
 and business were all on a family basis. 
 The whole country was in the condition of 
 some rural southern communities where 
 there is nothing in which to invest and no 
 
The Corporation 105 
 
 one can make money except the small shop- 
 keeper, and relative to the savings of the 
 rest of the community, he makes a great 
 deal. This early industrial condition has 
 left its depressing record in the long succes- 
 sion of legislation from Solon down — to use 
 the name as the .convenient designation 
 of a group of facts — which seeks to ame- 
 liorate the condition of debtors. Such laws 
 always come in the period between the early 
 organization of industry and of the eco- 
 nomic state and the creation in some form of 
 mobile titles to property in which every one 
 can share. Until the corporation makes in- 
 vestments possible for the individual, no one 
 has any chance to share in the general 
 growth and uplift of the community, but 
 the banker and business man who loans 
 and manages his own capital charging the 
 heavy interest and making the heavy profits 
 familiar in our colonial period and in all 
 new countries. 
 
 The corporation, instead of rendering more 
 difficult the position of the average indi- 
 
io6 The Corporation 
 
 vidual man with only the average initiative 
 and average earnings, gives him the only 
 hope he has had from the beginning of a 
 general share in the profit-making activ- 
 ities of society. Under the organization of 
 society where the individual started in busi- 
 ness, banking and manufacture, and in- 
 dividual ownership was the rule, the owners 
 of the industrial agencies of society were 
 few and those employed by them were 
 many. The reverse comes to be true under 
 the corporation. The stage coach lines of 
 seventy and eighty years ago were owned by 
 small firms and had hundreds of employees. 
 The railroads of the United States in 1902 
 had 1,189,315 employees, and the number 
 of persons owning shares and bonds were 
 950,000, as estimated in 1897. As will be 
 shown below, the number of shareholders 
 grows faster than that of employees. It is 
 altogether probable to-day that the number 
 of railroad employees is little greater than 
 the number of share and bondholders, 
 an equality which never existed in the 
 
The Corporation 107 
 
 ownership of the instruments of transporta- 
 tion earlier.^ The older the company, the 
 more numerous the shareholders. In the 
 Old Colony Railroad, the average holding 
 is twelve shares. The Boston and Albany 
 in 1894 had 8,220 shareholders and 5,902 
 employees. It is true of most of the New 
 England railroads to-day that the share- 
 holders exceed in number the employees. 
 It is probably a mere question of time when 
 first railroads and later industrial corpora- 
 tions will have more owners than employees. 
 A great trading company, like Lipton's, in 
 England, has already reached this point, 
 with 75,000 shareholders in 1898. A great 
 department store in this country will usu- 
 ally have six to ten owners and from 3,000 
 to 7,500 employees. To-day, these are 
 
 •Sereno S. Pratt, World's Work, December, 1903, quotes 
 an estimate in 1897 of the holders of stocks of railroads, as 
 950,000. This would be only half the capital and call for twice 
 this to own the bonds as well. The Michigan Bailroad Com- 
 missioner, in 1893, gave $372,761,847 of shares of railroads in that 
 state as held by 16,627 jmrsous of whom 1,038 lived in the state. 
 This was an average of 224 shares. Extending this for the 
 country would give about 550,000 owners of shares and bonds. 
 
io8 The Corporation 
 
 either firms or small family corporations. 
 Let them once take the corporate form, 
 their shares become a field for investment 
 and, like Lipton's, the shareholders will be 
 more numerous than the employees. In 
 the Pullman Palace Car Company, in 1894, 
 at the time of the great strike, there were 
 4,497 employees on the average for 1893 
 and 3,200 shareholders. Of these, 1,600 
 were women and 300 trust estates and insti- 
 tutions. No fair-minded man, called to 
 consider the conflicting claims of capital 
 and labor, could fail to weigh the claims of 
 1,600 women, 300 trusts and institutions 
 and 1,300 other shareholders as numer- 
 ically representing interests as important to 
 the thrift, stability, and well-being of the 
 community as the employees. Increasingly, 
 under the great corporation, the view that 
 the community has to consider the few in 
 dealing with the profits of capital and the 
 many in apportioning wages is destined to 
 disappear. 
 
 This distribution of corporate wealth is 
 
The Corporation 109 
 
 universal. The corporations of France are 
 owned by about 7,000,000 holders, a num- 
 ber about as large as the realty holders in 
 the Republic. The average holdings of 
 French railroad shares range from twelve 
 of five hundred francs each in the Western 
 Company to eighteen in the Northern. 
 This is a proportion far below our average 
 holding, which may be roughly estimated 
 at from thirty to forty shares for most of the 
 New England roads, about ninety in the 
 Middle States and in railroads like the Il- 
 linois Central, and twice this in other 
 Western lines. In France the registered 
 railroad debentures, $2,000,000,000 in par 
 value, have 656,194 certificates, an average of 
 $3200 to the certificate. About two-thirds of 
 French railroad securities are registered, and 
 the rest pass from hand to hand. At the 
 close of 1889, when these facts were collected 
 by M. Neymarck, the holders of French 
 railroads, whose market value was $32, 
 000,000,000,must have beennearly 1,000,000. 
 This property reverts to the state between 1 953 
 
no The Corporation 
 
 and 1960, when the concessions expire.^ It 
 is certainly a grave question whether the gen- 
 eral stability of society will be best promoted 
 by the presence of this army of small 
 holders (whose average holding in 1890 
 yielded $87.60 a year), or by state ownership. 
 Where the corporation is large, the in- 
 crease in the number of shareholders goes 
 on with inexorable regularity. The Penn- 
 sylvania Railroad had in 1880, 13,867 share- 
 holders, in 1890, 21,200, and in 1904, 44,- 
 500. The average holding remained for 
 many years almost unchanged, new issues 
 meeting the increase in shareholders. The 
 average holdings were 99.33 in 1880 ; sank 
 to 86.73 in 1884 ; rose to 108.72 in 1889, 
 and sank from this point to 97.20 in 1893. 
 Panic came and the return of large blocks 
 from England, and in 1903, the average was 
 sixty shares, in spite of large purchases by 
 insurance companies. In every period of 
 depression there comes the increase in the 
 number of the small holders, and no in- 
 
 > Paris Statistical Society, 1890. 
 
The Corporation 1 1 1 
 
 crease in shares can greatly alter this rela- 
 tive position.^ The New York, New Haven 
 and Hartford had in 1887, 3,545 share- 
 holders, with a capital of $15,500,000 ; in 
 1893, 5,319, with a capital of $32,938,000, 
 and in 1904, 11,032, with a capital of $54,- 
 685,000. Holders and capital have trebled 
 together, and the average holding has re- 
 mained substantially unchanged. Where 
 one can go back earlier, the increase is still 
 more remarkable. The New York Central 
 and Hudson River Railroad was consoli- 
 dated in 1869, with 1,212 shareholders. By 
 1891, twenty-two years later, they had 
 grown almost eightfold to 9,505. The Il- 
 linois Central had, in 1884, 2,217 share- 
 holders (exclusive of the Dutch Trust), an 
 average of 110, and in 1893, 4,823, an aver- 
 age of ninety-three. 
 
 All corporations show this steady in- 
 crease in the number of their owners. The 
 American Express Company, founded by 
 
 ' See acoonnt of increase in shareholders in the panic of 1893, 
 New York Sun August 8, 1893. 
 
112 The Corporation 
 
 two or three men, had recently 4,080 share- 
 holders, forty shares to the holder. The 
 shareholders in the Bell Telephone Com- 
 pany were 3,639 in 1896, and 6,882 in 1898.^ 
 In 1881, the Western Union Telegraph 
 Company had 1,701 shareholders; in 1891 
 4,645, and in 1904, 12,242.^ It is also note- 
 worthy that in 1881 brokers held 391,054 
 shares and investors 408,946 ; while ten 
 years later brokers held 178,666 shares and 
 investors 683,334, a proportion more than 
 maintained since, so that the increased own- 
 ership was accompanied by a decrease as 
 constant in the use of these shares as 
 counters in the stock market. 
 
 The distribution of ownership is in prog- 
 ress more rapidly in industrial corporations 
 than in any other. The Standard Oil Com- 
 pany, when first organized, had forty-five 
 shareholders. In 1891, it had 1,675. In 
 1901, it had 4,000, and the number now is 
 considerably larger. A newspaper list, in 
 
 'Boston News Bureau, September 10, 1896, and April 28, 
 1898. 
 'Official Betnrn, Mss. 
 
The Corporation 113 
 
 1901, gave the shareholders of twenty-five 
 trusts, with a capital of $850,105,725, at 
 56,208.^ Among these was the Standard 
 Oil, and its increase of nearly one hundred- 
 fold in its owners was probably equaled by 
 the other corporations. From twenty to 
 thirty years ago, five hundred or six hundred 
 persons probably owned the various prop- 
 erties to which 56,208 holders enjoyed title 
 in 1901. When the Sugar Trust was first 
 organized in 1885, the refineries consoli- 
 dated had not over 250 to 300 owners.^ At 
 its last meeting, the American Sugar Re- 
 fining Company had 11,000 shareholders. 
 The Trust, when organized, melted ninety 
 per cent, of the sugar used in the United 
 States, and the separate refineries divided 
 the profits among some three hundred per- 
 sons. The Trust melts now about half the 
 sugar used in the United States, and pays 
 dividends to about thirty -sevenfold more 
 persons. A small hall, nineteen years ago, 
 
 'New York Commercial Bulletin, December 6, 1901. 
 'This statement is made on the highest personal authority. 
 
114 Th^ Corporation 
 
 would have seated the owners of all the 
 sugar refineries. To-day, no two opera- 
 houses could hold them. In 1885, their 
 250 to 300 owners employed about 6,000 
 wage-earners. In 1903, the 11,000 share- 
 holders of the Sugar Trust were hiring from 
 7,000 to 8,000 wage-earners, if those em- 
 ployed were in proportion to the sugar 
 melted. In all the sugar-refining industry 
 in 1900, only 14,262 wage-earners were em- 
 ployed. 
 
 This is the general experience. The total 
 number of iron and steel establishments in 
 1870, were 808, and in 1880, 1,005. The 
 primary iron and steel establishments, fur- 
 naces, ingot and rail mills, were owned by 
 not over 1,500 persons in 1870, and by 
 2,000 or more in 1880. A decade ago, when 
 a number of iron and steel plants were un- 
 der corporate ownership, the total number 
 of owners was probably from 5,000 to 10,- 
 000, at a most liberal estimate. The Steel 
 Trust, American Steel Corporation, was or- 
 ganized with 15,000 common and 10,000 
 
The Corporation 115 
 
 preferred shareholders, in the companies it 
 absorbed.^ In two years this number has 
 trebled. It is a mere question of time 
 when even in this corporation, the share- 
 holders will exceed the wage-earners. If 
 the purchase of shares by those employed 
 by the company continues as it has begun, 
 in spite of the surrender of many shares, 
 the plant, in the end, will be owned by 
 those who work in it. Steadily, this great 
 change takes place. The men employed in 
 a plant know its capacity and condition. 
 They have confidence in it. The country 
 over, in railroads and industrial corpora- 
 tions, the purchase of shares by employees 
 continues, just as the local ownership of 
 railroads mounts and increases. Each year 
 sees Western States owning more of their 
 own railroads. 
 
 What is true of these greater corporations 
 is true of lesser ones. Two-thirds of the 
 manufacturing product of Massachusetts, or 
 1594,112,374 out of a total of $945,183,889, 
 
 ' Wall Street Summary, February 18, 1903. 
 
1 16 The Corporation 
 
 is produced by 1,347 corporations and 
 013,319 by nineteen industrial combina- 
 tions.^ The corporations are owned by 45,- 
 649 persons, over a tenth as large a num- 
 ber as are employed in manufactures, 395,- 
 294. About one-fourth ($261,068,199) of 
 the product is produced by 3,139 firms, 
 which have 4,846 members. If these two 
 classes employ wage earners in proportion 
 to their product, the corporations have 45,- 
 649 owners, and 245,000 employees, and 
 the firms, 4,846 owners and 106,000 em- 
 ployees. 
 
 The difiusion of ownership through cor- 
 porations is in progress in all fields. The 
 National Banks of the country in 1876, were 
 owned by 146,000 persons when they had a 
 capital of $501,568,564. In 1902 their capi- 
 tal had risen not quite one-half, to $701,- 
 990,554, and the owners were 330,124, over 
 double. Nor does this express all, for two- 
 fifths of the National Bank stock in Boston 
 is held by savings banks. Life insurance 
 
 ' statistics of Manufactures, Massachusetts, 1902. 
 
The Corporation 117 
 
 policies rose from 679,690 in 1880 to 4,160,- 
 088 in 1902, sixfold, and the sum insured 
 only fivefold, from |1,564,138,532 to |8,- 
 701,587,912, a decrease in the average 
 policy. 
 
 Between them the holders of 17,608,212 
 life insurance policies, regular and indus- 
 trial, and 6,666,672 savings bank depositors, 
 own assets to the amount of $4,841,000,- 
 000, and of this $2,000,000,000 is corpora- 
 tion shares and bonds. Making every 
 allowance for duplications, there is still 
 here a broad base of ownership which 
 widens by millions the diffusion of property 
 rendered possible by the corporation and its 
 mobile titles. 
 
 This distribution has its sharp limits. 
 The average holding in savings banks is 
 |418 ; in life insurance is |2,090 ; in Na- 
 tional Bank shares, twenty-four, or $2,400 ; 
 and in our larger railroads, from $3,000 to 
 $9,000, with some having an average holding 
 in par value of $1,200 to $3,000. These are 
 low averages, measured against the past, but 
 
ii8 The Corporation 
 
 they do not penetrate far into the mass of 
 the community. Figures like these exclude. 
 The savings bank account is often the ref- 
 uge of the well-to-do. The other sums 
 measure accumulations above the average. 
 But the size of these holdings steadily di- 
 minishes. Each decade sees them smaller. 
 They are sweeping through the community. 
 With all their manifold duplications, they 
 mark the elevation of entire strata of the 
 community to the level of a divided but 
 real share in capital, and the work of the 
 employer. 
 
 The diffusion of ownership is, so long as it 
 is restricted to these larger sums, of less im- 
 portance to the great mass than freedom of 
 employment. Initiative, opportunity, and 
 security are the three requirements of a free 
 life. Life must be open to a man, to begin 
 for himself. There must be opportunity for 
 advance. Security must be created for the 
 steady wage and provision for age. Unless 
 these things exist, any economic system 
 must be held wanting. 
 
The Corporation 119 
 
 So far as mere employment goes, the case 
 could be unhesitatingly rested on the last 
 census. The assertion is constantly made 
 that the gate of employment is closing. 
 Yet those engaged in gainful occupations in- 
 creased one-half faster than the population, 
 from 1880 to 1900. These are the twenty 
 years in which the corporation has cast its 
 shadow over the land. In these years, 
 population has grown one-half, from 50,- 
 155,783 to 76,303,387. Those engaged in 
 gainful employments have risen from 17,- 
 392,099 in 1880, to 29,285,922 in 1900, over 
 two-thirds. The share at gainful work 
 yearly grows. It was a bare third in 1880. 
 It was over this fraction by 4,000,000 in 1900. 
 It was twenty-nine per cent, in 1880. It 
 was thirty-eight per cent, in 1900. Yet the 
 increased demand of a more complete or- 
 ganization with this increase, raised the per 
 cent, employed from 47.3 per cent, to 50.3. 
 Plainly there is more work for any man 
 willing to seek it. 
 
 The mere opening of work is, however, 
 
120 The Corporation 
 
 but little, unless a man can rise and ad- 
 vance. Opportunity must second initiative. 
 The substitution of corporate for family 
 ownership has done for industry what the 
 abolition, by the French Revolution, of 
 privilege in the army did for the advance 
 of able men. The family firm or corpora- 
 tion holds the gate against ability. The 
 Trust, the great corporation, opens it. Its 
 chiefs come from the ranks and the dinner- 
 pail. Thirty years ago, the scientific and 
 technical schools saw their graduates hunt- 
 ing jobs. To-day, the Trust job hunts them. 
 The schools cannot graduate them fast 
 enough. The entire class will be engaged 
 before commencement. The greater corpo- 
 rations are looking for the abler young men 
 and using systematic reports to secure them. 
 When a family plant is absorbed into a 
 Trust, the disappearance of son and cousin, 
 and the appearance of the friendless young 
 man to take charge, is constantly noted. 
 For the technically educated young man of 
 parts and push, of head and hustle, the new 
 
The Corporation 121 
 
 mammoth corporation has brought both in- 
 itiative and opportunity. 
 
 For men less high and less well-equipped 
 in the industrial scale, the result is relatively 
 less fortunate. Wage is steadier. There is 
 more of it. The relations with the union 
 and with organized labor generally are more 
 easily conducted. Bigger men are employed 
 in the adjustment on both sides. The hori- 
 zon is wider. There is more desire for a 
 working settlement than for a personal vic- 
 tory. But the man, for any reason dis- 
 charged and blacklisted, finds all avenues 
 closed by a great Trust monopolizing a trade. 
 Pension systems are easier for the large cor- 
 poration ; but once in operation, no new 
 man is taken on over thirty-five years old. 
 The man past his first youth finds all doors 
 closed under the pressure of a new organiza- 
 tion which seeks to run its plant at its high- 
 est speed. In this new militant organization 
 of the armies of industry, the educated 
 technician finds himself in the position of 
 an officer. His commission and rank are 
 
122 The Corporation 
 
 good anywhere. The mechanic and laborer 
 have something of the security and the limi- 
 tations of a private. He cannot safely re- 
 sign. If collision comes, perhaps with some 
 captious foreman, and a man is discharged 
 or leaves, he is likely to be treated as a de- 
 serter. He is not wanted unless he is young 
 and strong, and equal to modern pressure. 
 These differences explain much of the op- 
 position to Trusts among laboring men, and 
 their acceptance by the technically educated. 
 Manifestly, as the pace increases, and work 
 grows hard to bear and harder to get for 
 mechanic and laborer by fifty years of 
 age, the old age pension by the State and 
 not by the employer, paying only, his 
 own, must be necessary to maintain a just 
 balance. 
 
 Neither ownership nor employment, how- 
 ever, gives control ; and control is security. 
 Initiative and opportunity, without security, 
 lead straight to disaster, to the loss of the 
 investor and the capricious or uncertain em- 
 ployment of labor. Control and ownership 
 
The Corporation 123 
 
 are no longer wedded. In twenty-four 
 Trusts which Mr. J. D. Jenks examined, 
 there were only five in which the five 
 largest owners held a majority of the com- 
 mon stock, and but eight in which this was 
 true of the preferred. In not one did any 
 one man hold a majority. Mr. J. D. Rocke- 
 feller is not credited with holding a major- 
 ity of Standard Oil. In many industrials 
 and railroads to-day, the governing group 
 no longer holds a majority. The man or 
 group controls as does the strong man armed 
 who holds his new-made empire. The par- 
 allel is close. A business genius for com- 
 mand, plan and organization creates a trade, 
 as conquerors once carved kingdoms. An 
 industrial peace and stability is established. 
 Those who prosper by it in dividends, sur- 
 render control, as France gave up her liber- 
 ties to Louis XIV, and never regained them. 
 All about, this is in progress, where supine 
 stockholders let some Rockefeller exercise a 
 secret industrial despotism as long as divi- 
 dends are lavish and secure. 
 
124 The Corporation 
 
 This is the old fight in a new form and 
 on a new field. What are the evils of the 
 trust and of the modern corporation ? Se- 
 crecy, irresponsible autocracy and personal 
 privilege. What is this but the old work 
 of despotism ? The absence of corporation 
 reports matches the closed and personal 
 public treasuries of the despot. The con- 
 trol of a man or men, independent of a 
 majority — this irresponsible autocracy is as 
 old as the history of despotism. The special 
 contracts and side profits of those in corpo- 
 rate control — what are these but the monop- 
 olies, the grants, the imperial and royal 
 plunder of past centuries? These all run 
 parallel to the evolution of the state in the 
 past. First an era of plundering, cut-throat 
 competition. Peace is created by some strong 
 man. His empire is organized. There grow 
 up suffrages and rights. The despotic ex- 
 ecutive seeks to treat the organized State 
 like a family or personal property. 
 
 Two opposed and different perils are cre- 
 ated by these conditions, often confused, 
 
The Corporation 125 
 
 both calling for reformatory legislation and 
 new criminal statutes, but both precisely 
 analagous to the risks and the dangers to 
 Society which have been in the past success- 
 fully surmounted in the creation of the 
 political organization of the State. A vast 
 mass of corporate property owned by thou- 
 sands of individual shareholders, whose 
 control rests with their tacit or expressed 
 consent in the hands of a few men, more 
 interested in the exploitation of the prop- 
 erty and its uses, for their personal fortune, 
 than in either the profits of shareholders or 
 the public service of the community, gives 
 on the one hand opportunities to corrupt 
 the State, and on the other to plunder the 
 shareholder. 
 
 The State, its executive authority, its 
 judiciary, and its legislation, are all three 
 under the shadow not of mere individual 
 property holders, which would be serious 
 enough, but of the vast aggregate created by 
 the fact that a few such holdings will con- 
 trol a corporation manifold larger, or a few 
 
126 The Corporation 
 
 able men with but little personal interest 
 in a corporation, maintain themselves in a 
 position of command as long as shareholders 
 receive dividends, as to whose source not 
 one of them cares to be careful. The prac- 
 tical result is, as every one is aware, that 
 there are in every city reformers denouncing 
 the bribery of legislators and the corruption 
 of the judiciary, who themselves hold shares 
 in corporations whose profits rest on, or are 
 promoted by, these acts. Deprived of the 
 power to protect himself by corporation 
 acts which render it easy for the promoter 
 to establish, and the astute manager to con- 
 trol a corporation, the shareholder ceases 
 to feel a moral responsibility, and there are 
 in every American community a large num- 
 ber of men and women who with every pay- 
 ment of dividend or interest, are sharing in 
 profits drawn from methods which they 
 denounce and abhor. 
 
 Exactly as modern European states in 
 their early stages found themselves forced 
 to deal with private wars, carried on by 
 
The Corporation 127 
 
 noble or condottier, whose body of armed 
 men was kept together by plunder which 
 the military genius of its leader enabled him 
 to secure, and with the destructive industrial 
 effects of vast monasteries and guilds which 
 constituted an industrial imperium in im- 
 perio, threatening the sovereignty, limiting 
 the power of taxation, and paralyzing the 
 industrial functions of the State, so the 
 modern State finds itself facing precisely 
 similar dangers from predatory industrial 
 and financial warfare, carried on by the 
 managers of great corporations, and from 
 the success with which they can levy toll 
 on great industries and aid a body of share- 
 holders living on capital earlier amassed, 
 as did the monk and nun, on property ac- 
 cumulated from a period when the monas- 
 tery and convent was, as it was from the 
 eighth to the twelfth centuries, an indis- 
 pensable instrument of civilization and edu- 
 cation. Here again, the conditions of the 
 past repeat themselves, and the instrument 
 of the past, adequate law, is the only sure 
 
128 The Corporation 
 
 method by which like evils can now be re- 
 dressed. 
 
 The real issue in both these cases is that 
 the State has failed to extend over these 
 new corporations the authority of its own 
 laws. It permits their reports to be secret, 
 their operations to be veiled, untouched by 
 its inspection or scrutiny. It has left the 
 shareholder on his side, without knowledge 
 of the accounts of the corporation and with- 
 out power either to control its aflfairs, or re- 
 dress his own grievances. The shareholder 
 himself occupies a double position. He is 
 on the one side, a citizen, suffering from 
 whatever injuries the state suffers, and on 
 the other, the owner of property which he 
 is unable to control and whose management 
 he is prevented from scrutinizing. Under 
 our system we have permitted the useful 
 fiction of state sovereignty to introduce on 
 a large scale corporations, which, except in 
 the field of interstate commerce, are acting 
 in sovereignties, whose authority they 
 evade. In England, the shareholders of 
 
The Corporation 129 
 
 the larger corporations live within an area 
 which makes their annual meeting a real 
 gathering for discussion on the affairs of the 
 corporation. Here, shareholders are so 
 scattered that this has ceased to he possible 
 in some cases, and, in all has ceased to be 
 usual. These differences, often forgotten, 
 and never fully considered in the discussion 
 of the corporation, do not, however, change 
 the essential issue. The State faces, in all 
 the various forms of the problem presented 
 by corporations, essentially the same factors 
 which from the beginning have beset its de- 
 velopment ; — the question whether the vari- 
 ous agencies which society employs shall be 
 more powerful than the State or shall be 
 under its control. It was this issue which 
 was raised by the executive or " crown " 
 until it was brought within the bounds of 
 law. The religious organization of society 
 once raised the same issue. The industrial 
 organization has passed through the same 
 steps and it faces a situation in which the 
 three factors concerned, the sovereignty of 
 
130 The Corporation 
 
 the State, the duty of the citizen, and the 
 responsibility of the shareholder are joined 
 in a common moral obligation to see to it 
 that the sovereignty of the State continues 
 in fact, as well as in name, a sovereignty 
 working through law, and not through 
 men, to the end that this be a government 
 of laws, and not of men. 
 
 Those who share the national or corporate 
 citizenship, burgher and noble in the past, 
 shareholder and bondholder to-day, have 
 the old choice — a struggle for liberty 
 through law or the acceptance of personal 
 despotism. Nor can despotism be more suc- 
 cessful in industry than in the State. Out 
 of liberty alone comes lasting security. 
 The rule that rests on a man dies with him. 
 The small shareholder can do little ; but 
 he can urge on the state laws which will 
 curb the despot in industry as other like 
 laws once curbed another executive. Re- 
 ports can be required, publicity enforced, 
 and personal responsibility imposed. These 
 in the past have freed the State. They will 
 
The Corporation 131 
 
 free the corporation. They were needed by 
 the one. They are needed by the other. 
 In a new scene, the old battle is again 
 joined. The real issue presented by modern 
 corporations is whether the State, by its laws, 
 and the new corporation citizen, holding 
 the franchise as shareholder in these new 
 industrial empires, shall be strong, one by 
 passing laws and the other by using their 
 legal powers, to complete the cycle of in- 
 dustrial rule and empire by introducing the 
 reign of law. No State can remain lawless 
 and under personal tyranny in its industry 
 and enjoy liberty through law in its polit- 
 ical institutions. The corporation must be 
 subject to law or law will be subject to the 
 corporation. Nor is it to be thought of that 
 the stream of liberty which from high an- 
 tiquity has flowed, having won political 
 freedom, is to lose itself in the sands and 
 mire of industrial tyranny. Instead, law 
 will bring liberty and liberty law in this 
 field as in the other. Regular reports, a 
 gradual training in self-government, an 
 
132 The Corporation 
 
 awakening sense of civic responsibility in 
 the corporation, as earlier in the State, will 
 cure the evils we now see. But this re- 
 quires in the corporation the same sacrifice, 
 the same courage and the same resolute 
 battling for rights which the same struggle 
 has always demanded in the State. The 
 New Jersey charter is an attempt to keep 
 the forms of self-government in an industrial 
 state and provide no constitutional instru- 
 ment for their exercise. A sound compan- 
 ies' act in England has bred a spirit and 
 habit of responsibility. It will here, and 
 such an act will come here. It will make 
 the corporate executive subject to law and 
 penalty as has been done earlier for the ex- 
 ecutive in the State. The problem is the 
 same, the solution the same, and the tri- 
 umph will be the same. Where the fathers 
 won political self-government, this great 
 population of shareholders will win indus- 
 trial self-government. This security once 
 gained for this advantaged class, it will 
 broaden down as civil security did. There 
 
The Corporation 133 
 
 will be the same succession of the strong 
 ruler, the privileged class, and the wider 
 and wider sway of common rights. Out 
 of it all will come a democratic industrial 
 economy, giving as has the State, initiative, 
 opportunity, and security to all its indus- 
 trial citizens. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE UNION 
 By Rev. Geokge Hodges, D. C. L. 
 
in 
 
 THE UNION 
 
 The Trade Union will probably occupy 
 a long chapter of our social history. It 
 will enlist a majority of the skilled work- 
 ers, and a great multitude — perhaps even- 
 tually a majority — of the unskilled. It 
 will be taken into partnership, reluctantly 
 but inevitably, by most employers, and 
 will be the conventional medium of com- 
 munication between the master and the 
 man. It will enter into politics, where it 
 will be a totally new factor, — presenting 
 itself as a new party with new interests and 
 demands, or affecting and perhaps domi- 
 nating one or both of the old parties. The 
 effective organization of the working peo- 
 ple under a democratic form of government, 
 with manhood suffrage, is a new phenome- 
 non. Nobody knows how it will work. 
 
138 The Union 
 
 It would be too much to say that the 
 long chapter which the union will con- 
 tribute to our social annals will last to the 
 end of the book. It is but one in a series 
 of chapters which contain the story of the 
 progress of the hand-worker. He was for 
 many centuries a slave, having no rights 
 except such as he shared with other domes- 
 tic animals. Then he was for centuries a 
 serf, in some measure free, but bound to 
 his feudal lord, and attached indissolubly 
 to the soil. Then he became a wage- 
 earner, with enlarged independence, and 
 even some power as a member of a guild, 
 but with no voice in the nation ; and pres- 
 ently, when steam and the machine pro- 
 duced the mill, he was worse off" than the 
 serfs, or even than the slaves, his ancestors. 
 Out of this depression he emerged, at the 
 end of the first quarter of the nineteenth 
 century, as a member of a trade union. 
 It is probable that there will be other, 
 higher, and better stages. The working 
 man, disciplined by the union, raised from 
 
The Union 139 
 
 the condition of dependence into which he 
 was thrust by the great industry, and im- 
 pelled by new ideas, new ambitions and 
 new opportunities, is likely to advance still 
 further. There is a dramatic element in 
 the story of his progress which predicts a 
 crisis and a culmination far in the future. 
 Indeed, what we are studying here is the 
 ascent of man, the steady march of the 
 plain man, out of a social state akin to that 
 of his cousins in the jungle, into the king- 
 dom of heaven. It is that for which we 
 pray in the Lord's prayer, and in which we 
 affirm our faith when we say in the Creed 
 that we believe in the Catholic Church. 
 It is the slow realization of that universal 
 commonwealth of God, into whose privi- 
 leges of citizenship all people, even the 
 least, shall be admitted. 
 
 Meanwhile, here is the union, the con- 
 temporary stage of this long progress, per- 
 haps the most significant of present social 
 facts, demanding consideration. It is as 
 inevitable as the weather; to refuse to 
 
140 The Union 
 
 recognize it is like refusing to recognize the 
 wind and the rain. To imagine that it 
 may be disregarded, or that by some proc- 
 ess of legislation it may be happily abol- 
 ished, is as idle as the endeavor to keep 
 back the rising tide with the kitchen mop. 
 This I infer not so much from the great 
 multitude of working men, increasing every 
 year, who are making their way into the 
 union, as from the persistent growth of the 
 union movement in the face of the most 
 powerful opposition. It has met the full 
 force of English law, interpreted and ap- 
 plied by hostile Parliaments and hostile 
 judges, and has taken the law captive. It 
 has faced an almost universally adverse 
 public opinion and has steadily converted 
 its enemies. It has encountered the de- 
 termined resistance of employers, and has 
 gone into battles, coming out, in the main, 
 victorious. It has had its martyrs and con- 
 fessors, and its humblest people have mani- 
 fested in its behalf a spirit of sacrifice such 
 as is commonly aroused by love of country 
 
The Union 141 
 
 or by love of God. It has even gained im- 
 portant victories over itself, learning the 
 lessons of experience, growing in self- 
 restraint and in wisdom. These are mat- 
 ters which make for permanence. In the 
 presence of so serious a movement, grounded 
 so deep in history and in human nature, 
 enlisting the religious devotion of such mul- 
 titudes of men and steadily progressing 
 over every hindrance, we do well to enquire 
 what the trade union means. This is the 
 question to which this lecture is an answer. 
 Certain aspects of the union are such as 
 to meet the unhesitating approval of most 
 persons. I mean particularly the pro- 
 visions which are made for the care of 
 working men in the time of sickness and 
 when out of work, and for the relief of 
 their widows and orphans. These bene- 
 ficiary features are a part of the life of a 
 majority of the unions, especially in Great 
 Britain, where more is made of them than 
 in this country. During the ten years 
 which began with 1890 one hundred 
 
142 The Union 
 
 English unions distributed among the dis- 
 abled, the superannuated, and the needy, 
 forty-five millions of dollars. The union, 
 in this aspect of it, is a huge insurance com- 
 pany. It relieves the poor man from some 
 of the stress of anxiety. Every member 
 knows that if he is hurt, he will be nursed ; 
 when he gets too old to work, he will be 
 cared for at home without fear of the alms- 
 house ; and when he dies, the brethren will 
 support his family. The sum which the 
 individual receives is small, but it often 
 makes the difference between distress and 
 comfort. 
 
 There is, however, an element of uncer- 
 tainty in these beneficent arrangements. 
 The funds which are in the treasury of the 
 union, no matter for what purpose they 
 were originally collected, nor what name 
 they bear in the accounts, are all liable to 
 be taken for the maintenance of a strike. 
 They are contributed with that understand- 
 ing. It is true that the occasion for such a 
 general levy comes very rarely. It may be 
 
The Union 143 
 
 compared to the sale of the altar vessels in 
 a time of extreme emergency. But it is a 
 constant possibility. That is, all the bene- 
 ficiary features of a union, to which even 
 opponents give their approbation, are dis- 
 tinctly subordinated to another purpose for 
 which essentially the union exists. That 
 purpose is the maintenance of a certain 
 standard of living. This is the goal of all 
 trade-union efforts. Lit is the formula of 
 the trade-union ideal. It is the heart of the 
 whole matter. The unionist would gain 
 and preserve for himself and his brethren 
 such rates of wages, such regulation of the 
 length of the working day and such condi- 
 tions under which his tasks and theirs may 
 be performed, as shall best conduce to the 
 happiness of his life, the growth of his 
 body, mind, and soul, and the welfare of his 
 family. The man who toils with his hands 
 was once treated as an animal, then as a 
 machine ; now he demands to be considered 
 as a man. \ 
 
 The willingness of the union to sacrifice 
 
144 'Th^ Union 
 
 to this purpose such sacred funds, to subor- 
 dinate to it the interests of the sick, the 
 aged, the widow and the orphan, is largely 
 due to a conviction on the part of the work- 
 ing man that he belongs to a separate and 
 immutable social class. The time was when 
 every man of parts felt that he might rise 
 above the conditions into which he had 
 been born. He might, indeed, for the 
 moment, be working with his hands under 
 the obedience of a master, but to-morrow, 
 or the day after, he would himself be in a 
 position of authority. He would have his 
 apprentices under him. That time seems 
 to have passed : or, at least, the working 
 man believes that it has passed. It is true 
 that conspicuous men are now living who 
 have made their way into high places from 
 the humblest beginnings. It is true also 
 that careful observers, such as Mr. John 
 Graham Brooks, hold that the " solidified 
 group consciousness that constitutes class 
 feeling " is difficult to maintain in this 
 country. It is noticed, for example, that 
 
The Union 145^ 
 
 the labor official, making his way upward 
 out of the ranks of the manual workers, 
 easily enters into business or into politics. 
 A certain flux is undoubtedly in progress, 
 so that the class lines are not yet rigidly 
 drawn. There is probably less class feeling 
 among those who constitute what we com- 
 monly call the " better classes " than ever 
 before. 
 
 On the other hand, the conditions of 
 profitable industry have changed even in a 
 generation. It is increasingly difficult for 
 the workman to own the tools which are 
 necessary for his work. The tool is a 
 machine, and its belts run to a great engine 
 or its wires to a great dynamo. The largest 
 salary of the skilled worker will not permit 
 him to aspire to this new ownership. It is 
 true, morever, from this and other reasons, 
 that the hand-worker himself is more and 
 more convinced that he is a member of a 
 class. Mr. John Mitchell's book, " The Or- 
 ganization of Labor," rests the whole trade- 
 union movement upon the foundation of 
 
146 The Union 
 
 this asserted social fact. The working man 
 belongs to a social class, out of which he 
 does not expect to rise. There he is, and 
 there he will remain. When he expected to 
 be a capitalist, or at least a master, the 
 pains of hard labor were endured as an ap- 
 prenticeship, as an unpleasant initiation, as 
 a bearing of the yoke in one's youth. Now 
 he is convinced that both he and his neigh- 
 bors must go on under these burdens forever, 
 unless something can be done to lighten the 
 burdens. Thus he comes to have class in- 
 terests, into which he enters as naturally, 
 and to which he brings as strong and de- 
 vout an enthusiasm, as did ever ecclesiastic 
 to his order. He is persuaded that what- 
 ever affects his class, for good or for ill, af- 
 fects him ; and that he can get no relief for 
 himself or his children except by measures 
 which concern the welfare of the whole 
 working class. 
 
 Fixed thus, as he believes, in a social 
 class, he perceives that the level of life 
 is like the level of water. When the 
 
The Union 147 
 
 level of the lake is lowered in any part, the 
 whole lake seeks that level ; and according 
 to a similar law, the low wage affects all 
 other wages. Accordingly, the working 
 man, knowing the immediate relation be- 
 tween a low wage and a low standard of 
 living, finds a personal peril in the inor- 
 dinate cheapening of labor in any locality. 
 By the sure operation of the law of indus- 
 trial gravitation, such cheapening menaces 
 his own pay and with it the comfort of his 
 home, the health of his family, and the ed- 
 ucation of his children. A familiar illustra- 
 tion is the opposition of the union to the 
 importation of Chinamen. The Chinaman, 
 the union says, has an oriental standard of 
 living, which is very diflFerent from the 
 American standard. He has no domestic 
 life, no interest in books and pictures, and 
 no appetite, and is willing to subsist on next 
 to nothing. Once he is established here, he 
 constitutes a lower level of living ; and to 
 that lower level the working man in Fall 
 River and Manchester must eventually ad- 
 
148 The Union 
 
 just himself. Whoever will compete with 
 the Chinese will have to live in the Chinese 
 way. 
 
 That the working man is a member of a 
 separate social class is thus the initial asser- 
 tion of trade-unionism. All its plans and 
 policies are based upon it. "The wage- 
 earner has made up his mind that he must 
 remain a wage-earner. He has given up 
 the hope of a kingdom to come where he 
 himself will be a capitalist, and he asks that 
 the reward of his work be given him as a 
 working man." Belonging thus to a dis- 
 tinct social class, he is intent on raising and 
 maintaining the standard of living of his 
 class. This he purposes to do by combina- 
 tion. Thus his social theory passes into 
 action. 
 
 The working man clearly perceives that 
 as an individual he is at a disadvantage in 
 dealing with his employer. All the busi- 
 ness odds are on the side of the business 
 man. He is the better educated of the two, 
 is commonly more shrewd in bargaining, 
 
The Union 149 
 
 and has incomparably less at stake. The 
 employer is concerned about his profits ; 
 the working man is concerned about his 
 living. To the employer it matters little 
 whether this man or another stand at the 
 machine. He need be at no pains to attend 
 to his complaint or consider his petition. 
 If the man is not satisfied, let him go out 
 and give place to another. But suppose 
 that the man has bought a piece of ground 
 and put a house on it ; suppose that he has 
 a family ; suppose that his interests and his 
 friends are in the neighborhood of the mill, 
 and his children are at school around the 
 corner. These are reasonable suppositions, 
 being the natural inferences from a normal 
 human life. Under these circumstances the 
 man cannot go, except at a bitter sacrifice. 
 That is, in the bargain between the employer 
 and the individual workman, the employer 
 has little or nothing to lose ; the individual, 
 if he loses, loses everything. Moreover, the 
 man, having no money in reserve, cannot 
 hold off for better terms, but must take 
 
150 The Union 
 
 what he can get. It is at the profound dis- 
 advantage of a forced sale that he disposes 
 of his time and his strength, making a bar- 
 gain which affects his body and his soul. 
 
 To the answer that while this is perhaps 
 theoretically true, yet as a matter of fact the 
 employer may be trusted to do the thing 
 that is right, the union appeals to history 
 and to experience. A good many employers 
 and capitalists have dealt fairly and fra- 
 ternally with their men. But a good many 
 have not. They have taken every ad- 
 vantage of the situation. They have beaten 
 wages down and hours up without the least 
 regard to the kind of life which is thereby 
 made inevitable. They have done nothing, 
 absolutely nothing, for the needs of their 
 men, as men, until compelled by law. They 
 have left dangerous machines unguarded, 
 careless of accidents, until they were obliged 
 by law to guard them. They have made 
 no reparation for loss of limb or life till 
 they were forced to do so by the courts. 
 They have paid no attention to the con- 
 
The Union 151 
 
 ditions under which men and women and 
 little children labored until they were or- 
 dered to do so by the State. These things 
 are written in statistics. The working man 
 has learned to read, and he knows about the 
 factory acts and all the rest of it. Even 
 without a book, he knows what life is in a 
 great many mills. And the result is that 
 he dare not commit himself as an individ- 
 ual to the loving kindness of his employer. 
 He has tried it and he knows that it is not 
 safe. 
 
 He must combine, then, with his brethren. 
 They must form a union. This is the 
 genesis of the union . Only thus can the men 
 make their voices loud enough to reach the 
 master's ear. Now the employees in a body 
 will present their petitions and make their 
 complaints. The men demand that the 
 new union be " recognized." That is, for 
 their own reasonable protection, for the 
 proper safeguarding of the right of collective 
 bargaining, they require to be represented 
 by attorney. If they send their own officers 
 
152 The Union 
 
 to deal with the employer they will probably 
 be under a swift necessity to elect new 
 officers. This is why the union asks to be 
 ' ' recognized . ' ' The employer prefers to deal 
 with his own men, but the men feel, with 
 reason, that such dealing keeps them at a 
 disadvantage. Let him hear their com- 
 plaints from a representative who cannot 
 fall into disfavor in the mill and lose his 
 job. Thus the union comes fully into being. 
 The first step is the theory of the existence 
 of a distinct working class ; the second step 
 is the defence of the interests of this class 
 by combination. We are now ready for an 
 authoritative definition of the trade union. 
 Thus they describe it. " A trade union, in 
 its usual form, is an association of workmen 
 who have agreed among themselves not to 
 bargain individually with their employer or 
 employers, but to agree to the terms of a 
 collective or joint contract between the em- 
 ployer and the union. The ideal of trade 
 unionism is to combine in one organization 
 all the men employed or capable of being 
 
The Union 153 
 
 employed, at a given trade, and to demand 
 and secure for each and all of them a 
 definite standard of wages, hours, and con- 
 ditions of work." " It is this principle," 
 says John Mitchell, " the absolute and com- 
 plete prohibition of contracts between em- 
 ployers and individual men, upon which 
 trade-unionism is founded." 
 
 The definition states the three matters 
 with which this combination is concerned : 
 wages, hours, and conditions. These are the 
 basis of that standard of living for the sake 
 of which the union exists. In its collective 
 bargain with the employer, the union 
 establishes a minimum amount of wages, for 
 less than which no union man may work ; 
 and a maximum number of hours, which 
 no man may be required or permitted to 
 exceed ; and certain distinctly specified con- 
 ditions under which the work is to be per- 
 formed. All this is stated with such 
 clearness that there is no difficulty in 
 understanding precisely what the union 
 asks. 
 
154 1^ Union 
 
 As to wages, it would prescribe a mini- 
 mum for the unskilled workman of six 
 hundred dollars a year. It is understood 
 that this supposes a man capable of honestly 
 earning that amount. It does not include 
 incompetent persons who are physically, 
 mentally, or morally unfit. It rejects va- 
 grants, the vicious, and the constitutionally 
 idle. For the lower strata of society the 
 union has no remedy. It has no use for 
 any man who is not fairly worth six hun- 
 dred dollars a year. But it contends that 
 any able-bodied, industrious, and diligent 
 man who is willing to give his time and 
 strength for the common life is entitled in 
 return to a decent living. He ought to 
 have a house of six rooms, with carpets and 
 sufficient furniture, made comfortable with 
 plenty of coal in the cellar and plenty of 
 meat on the table, and made attractive with 
 pictures. He and his family ought to be 
 seasonably clad in all weathers ; his chil- 
 dren should be kept at school till they are 
 sixteen years old ; and there should be 
 
The Union 155 
 
 some money in the bank for illness and old 
 age. This, it is reckoned, can be had, except 
 in the largest cities, for six hundred dollars, 
 that is, for two dollars a day. If a business 
 is so badly managed, or its products are so 
 little wanted, that it cannot pay even its 
 unskilled men a living wage, then it had 
 better stop. If it can pay a living wage, 
 but will not for the sake of a larger profit, 
 then the sooner the attention of the public 
 is called to this state of things, the better. 
 The second requirement sets the number 
 of hours. This demand is made for the 
 sake of humanizing the working man's life. 
 The question is how many hours can a man 
 work at a diflScult, exacting, and monoto- 
 nous task, and still have time to be a good 
 husband and father, a good citizen, and 
 a good man. It is of course plain that the 
 standards of professional life, or of com- 
 mercial life in its better positions, do not 
 hold here. The physician, the lawyer, the 
 minister, the merchant, the architect, the 
 engineer, the men of large affairs, work 
 
156 The Union 
 
 long hours. But the work is varied ; it is 
 personally and absorbingly interesting ; and 
 they do it because they will. They are in 
 a very different case who work because they 
 must, and are, for the time being, little 
 more than a part of a machine, filling with 
 their nerve and muscle a place which the 
 inventor has not yet succeeded in filling 
 with wires and wheels. It is true that a 
 hundred years ago in this country, men 
 were commonly at work from sunrise to 
 sunset ; but the character of the work was 
 for the most part different. More of it was 
 out of doors ; more of it was naturally in- 
 teresting to the workman. It was done in 
 smaller groups, so that it had the spirit of 
 comradeship. And the machinery was not 
 so complicated and imperative as it is at 
 present. Under such conditions a man 
 might be content to work all day. The 
 day's work is now a more nervous matter ; 
 the pace is much faster ; the machine is 
 more continuous and peremptory in its de- 
 mands. The work takes more out of the 
 
The Union 157 
 
 worker than ever it did. Even under ex- 
 cellent conditions, a task which occupies 
 day after day the hours from six to six 
 leaves little time for rest and recreation, for 
 personal betterment, for family life, for nor- 
 mal human happiness. Therefore the 
 working man, enabled by combination in 
 the union to make his wishes known, is 
 diminishing the working day. From 
 twelve hours he has brought it gradually 
 down to ten, to nine, and now to eight. He 
 has proved that this decrease of hours is 
 good not only for himself but for his em- 
 ployer. It means a more efficient and a 
 more contented man, who does more now in 
 the short day than ever he did in the long. 
 Eight hours is the figure set by the union 
 as consistent with the American standard 
 of living. 
 
 Along with this regulation of hours and 
 of wages, the union makes a third require- 
 ment. It would improve the conditions 
 under which the work is done. This means 
 the placing of guards around dangerous 
 
158 The Union 
 
 machinery, the liability of the employer 
 for accidents, the provision of clean and 
 ventilated workrooms with proper sanitary 
 arrangements, and the protection especially 
 of women and children from the abuse of 
 foremen of bad character. It means the 
 careful limitation, and, in the case of chil- 
 dren, the eventual abolition, of such forms 
 of labor as are destructive of American 
 family life. It means that the men shall 
 not be over-rushed by the setting of an in- 
 ordinate pace, and that they shall not be 
 subjected to fines imposed at the arbitrary 
 word of the foreman. In general, the union 
 is against all such conditions as tend to- 
 wards the degradation of humanity. It in- 
 sists upon a constant recognition of the fact 
 that the men and women of the mill are 
 men and women, children of God and not 
 cattle. It declares that the preservation of 
 the health, of the comfort, of the integrity 
 and of the happiness of human beings is of 
 supreme concern to the entire community : 
 and that whoever is responsible for a degra- 
 
The Union 159 
 
 dation of the human stock is thereby an 
 enemy to the common good. It puts per- 
 sonality above profit. 
 
 These, then, are the purposes for which 
 the trade union exists. Its whole reason 
 for being is that by combination, especially 
 by collective bargaining, it may set a gen- 
 eral minimum beneath which wages may 
 not be depressed, and a general maximum of 
 hours which may not be exceeded, and 
 universal fair conditions ; and may thus 
 maintain for the working class a proper 
 standard of living. 
 
 Into the process of attaining these pur- 
 poses, enter of necessity great varieties of 
 human nature. There is as much meanness 
 and as much nobility of character, as much 
 of the spirit of selfishness and as much of 
 the spirit of sacrifice, as much vice and as 
 much virtue, among the working folk as 
 may be found in other sections of society. 
 This is a discovery which surprises every 
 new resident in the social settlement. The 
 result is a great difference in the temper 
 
i6o The Union 
 
 and method of different unions. They are 
 as unlike as churches. Some are radical, 
 some are conservative ; some are disposed 
 to listen to the socialists, most are stoutly 
 opposed to socialism ; some are inclined to 
 go into politics, most are convinced that a 
 combination of the trade union with the 
 political party would defeat the best plans 
 of each ; some are on terms of amicable 
 understanding with the employers, others 
 are fighting them every way they can. It 
 is observed, however, as an encouraging 
 and significant fact that a union is self- 
 restrained and conciliatory, like an in- 
 dividual, in proportion to the number of 
 its years. For example, the Brotherhood 
 of Locomotive Engineers is commonly ap- 
 plauded, even by opponents of unionism, 
 who are sometimes heard to say that union- 
 ism would not be so bad, if all the unions 
 were like that. The fact is that the Brother- 
 hood had a very turbulent youth, in which it 
 did a great many most objectionable things, 
 and settled down into its present steady 
 
The Union 161 
 
 habits as the consequence of hard expe- 
 rience. The hasty strikes are mostly pre- 
 cipitated by the newest unions. They are 
 the acts of men who have not yet learned 
 discipline, and good judgment, and patience, 
 and the value of reason, in the school of the 
 union. 
 
 These wide differences among the unions 
 account for some of the differences among 
 the critics. For example, the presentation 
 of the union which is made in this lecture 
 is derived from the statements of its most 
 sober and representative leaders. It ex- 
 presses its best ideals, and is the orthodoxy 
 rather than the heresy of unionism. It 
 will easily be contradicted by the actual 
 experience of many persons towards whom 
 this union or that has behaved impudently 
 or arrogantly, without consideration or 
 courtesy or justice. This, however, is no 
 more true of the unions than it is of the 
 churches. The Christian church, in its long 
 history and in its contemporary life, is open 
 to this diversity of criticism. It may be 
 
i62 The Union 
 
 judged by its best or by its worst, by its suc- 
 cesses or by its failures, by its ideals or by 
 its blunders. Shall the fair critic of the 
 churches draw his conclusions from the 
 saints or from the sinners ? from the con- 
 servative communions or from the eccentric 
 sects ? 
 
 To this wide difference in the method and 
 the spirit of the existing unions, is to be 
 added a certain roughness of manner which 
 must be reckoned with in making up our 
 minds regarding them. This rudeness, 
 which sorely prejudices the polite, is as 
 natural and as inevitable as the hardness of 
 the men's hands. It is what we must ex- 
 pect from this constituency. The demands 
 of the union are phrased with an unpleasant 
 bluntness ; the strikes which the union or- 
 ders not only interfere with the serene 
 course of our lives but have an unhappy 
 fascination for the more disorderly of the 
 people, until we cannot tell the striker from 
 the ruffian ; and non-union men are treated 
 in a manner which is cruel and savage to 
 
The Union 163 
 
 the last degree. The truth is that the 
 unionist, whether he is engaged in his toil 
 or in his contentions with his employer, is 
 not a pleasant person to the eyes of a 
 stranger. All this, however, must be taken 
 quietly into account by one who would es- 
 timate the union and its ways aright. 
 
 These brutal proceedings are all bad and 
 must be stopped by might of law ; if need 
 be, by might of arms. But while this salu- 
 tary suppression is going on, we may prop- 
 _erly remember that it is not so very long 
 ago since exceedingly reputable persons 
 were engaged in much the same business. 
 The spirit in England, for example, in the 
 course of the ecclesiastical disturbances of 
 the reigns of Henry, Edward, Mary, and 
 Elizabeth, was closely akin to that which 
 animates the union at its worst. The mat- 
 ter then at stake was the religious suprem- 
 acy in England. The establishment for the 
 time being was to all intents and purposes 
 a union. In the reign of Mary, the union 
 was the United Catholics of England. 
 
164 The Union 
 
 They were determined that no non-unionist 
 should hold ecclesiastical office in that 
 realm, and that no citizen should be bap- 
 tized, or confirmed, or receive the sacrament 
 of the altar, or be married, or be buried, ex- 
 cept at the hands of an official of the union. 
 Non-unionists were insulted, fined, forbid- 
 den the right of assembly, and boycotted. 
 Some of the more obstinate and aggressive 
 were put to death. Cranmer, Ridley, and 
 Latimer were burned at the stake as non- 
 union bishops. In Elizabeth's day the 
 union was the Brotherhood of Anglican 
 Churchmen. In Cromwell's day, it was the 
 Amalgamated Association of Congregation- 
 alists and Presbyterians. They all behaved 
 alike, doing the same kind of thing for 
 which we now reprobate the working man. 
 So they did in New England, when they 
 whipped the non-union Baptists and the 
 non-union Quakers. It all belongs together. 
 Whoever would understand what the union 
 means to the working class, has but to read 
 Church history. The unionist is actuated 
 
The Union 165 
 
 by the same motives which made good men 
 persecute their brethren', We have now 
 grown wiser. We have many of us come to 
 understand that no cause is advanced by 
 that sort of strife. The unionist will learn 
 the same lesson. In the meantime, let 
 every offense of his against the law and or- 
 der of the community, and against the 
 liberty of the citizen, be sharply punished ; 
 but let us remember how our fathers acted, 
 how conscientiously and how mistakenly. 
 
 A further consideration is also helpful in 
 order to have a right judgment of the union. 
 To the fact that there is a great difference 
 between the unions, some of them being 
 good and others not so good, and to the fact 
 that the ways of many unions betray the 
 natural roughness which accords with rough 
 labor, and the natural infirmities of temper 
 and errors of judgment from which even 
 saints and sages are not free, must be added 
 a sharp suspicion, often amounting to ani- 
 mosity, which is the result of hard experi- 
 ence. The working man is pretty firmly 
 
i66 The Union 
 
 convinced, on a sttbstantial basis of proved 
 facts, that his esAployer will get the better 
 of him if he cans^ It is true that these facts 
 do not implicate the employers of our own 
 acquaintance, \ihom we know to be just 
 men, perple3£:Sd and often exasperated by 
 the difficulties of the present distress, but 
 totally resoT^d to do the thing that is right. 
 These honorable employers, nevertheless, 
 fall under a general distrust for which, as 
 they themselves confess, there is abundant 
 reason. It is this justifiable suspicion 
 which impels the union, in common self- 
 defense, to courses of action which often dis- 
 commode and annoy the public, and anger 
 the employer. 
 
 Thus, the hour strikes and the workman 
 gathers up his tools, deaf to all persuasion. 
 Another ten minutes and the job will be 
 completed. No, not a minute, not a second ! 
 This is most unpleasant, but it is the logical 
 result of the discovery that an inch widens 
 easily into a yard. The precious leisure 
 gained by long effort and sacrifice is in 
 
The Union 167 
 
 danger of being encroached upon, ten min- 
 utes at a time, till the eight hours of labor 
 have become nine. 
 
 So with the company store. Why not 
 trade cheerfully at the company store ? 
 Because the working man has found that 
 these purchases are made an occasion 
 whereby his wages may be reduced without 
 his knowledge. The amount of money in 
 the envelope is as large as ever, but by means 
 of higher prices or of lower quality the 
 company gets more of it back at the store. 
 
 A like suspicion attaches to the demand 
 that the union be incorporated. The objec- 
 tion of the men is only in part to the con- 
 sequent financial liability. This they feel 
 is inevitable, and the better of them feel 
 that it is just. It will be brought to bear 
 upon the union, and ought so to be brought 
 to bear, whether it is incorporated or not. 
 The " Taff Vale " decision sets a universal 
 precedent. The chief objection is that in- 
 corporation means court interference : it 
 means that the law can dictate how the 
 
i68 The Union 
 
 affairs of the union may be managed. This 
 diversion of beneficiary funds, for example, 
 to the promotion of a strike, — what will the 
 judge say to that? The union, after long 
 experience, suspects the judge. He is a 
 person, let us say, of probity and a fair 
 mind, but he is a member of a social class 
 administering the business of members of 
 another social class. He may escape the 
 prejudices but he can hardly escape the pre- 
 possessions of his education and environ- 
 ment. 
 
 So with the opposition of some unions to 
 the enlistment of their members in the ranks 
 of the militia. With this opposition the 
 leaders of the general union movement are 
 not in sympathy. They deprecate it. I 
 quote from a representative statement : " The 
 number of unions discriminating against 
 militiamen is extremely small, but it would 
 be far better if there were none at all. . . . 
 The trade union movement in this country 
 can make progress only by identifying itself 
 with the State, by obeying its just laws, and 
 
The Union 169 
 
 by upholding the military as well as the 
 civil arm of the government." Neverthe- 
 less the feeling exists, and increases with 
 every strike in which militiamen fire on 
 strikers. The men perceive that at any mo- 
 ment they may be ordered to shoot their 
 own brethren. 
 
 Another case in point is that of piece work. 
 The objection to this method of payment is 
 that it is found to lend itself to the syste- 
 matic quickening of the pace and shortening 
 of the rate. The men, let us say, are mak- 
 ing three pieces a day, for which they get 
 three dollars. It is proposed to them to 
 make four pieces a day, for which they are 
 to receive four dollars. This is quite satis- 
 factory until the conditions of the market 
 make it desirable to cut them down to three 
 dollars. Then they make four pieces for 
 three dollars. Presently, when times are 
 more prosperous, a pace setter — that is, an 
 uncommonly fast worker — is put in who 
 shows them that they can actually make 
 five pieces a day. For this they are prom- 
 
170 The Union 
 
 ised four dollars. Then, when the tide is 
 again at ebb, they are reduced once more to 
 the original three-dollar rate, for which they 
 are now making five pieces, to the profit of 
 the employer, but to the detriment of their 
 health. 
 
 I cite these various cases, in which at 
 first sight the union seems to be unreason- 
 able, to show from the working man's point 
 of view the basis of his opposition. He is 
 convinced by experience that his employer 
 is bound to get as much as he can and to 
 give as little as he can, and he defends him- 
 self. It is a game of fence. The master 
 quickens the pace, the man slows up. The 
 master limits the amount of output that he 
 may increase the price of his goods, the 
 man limits the number of apprentices that 
 he may maintain the price of his labor. 
 The master introduces new machinery that 
 he may cheapen production by discharging 
 men, the man demands an increase of wages 
 that he may get some part of the common 
 advantage of the improved machine. It is 
 
The Union 171 
 
 an inevitable partnership, for neither can 
 dispense with the other. The master can- 
 not possibly do business without the man, 
 nor can the man without the master. But 
 it is a partnership embittered by suspicion. 
 In its contention with the employer the 
 union uses two stout weapons : the strike 
 and the boycott. Neither of these was 
 made by the union at its own forge. In 
 some essential particulars the exodus of the 
 people of Israel out of Egypt was a strike. 
 It was an industrial revolution of the work- 
 ing men of a great nation. They stopped 
 work and betook themselves out of the land, 
 to the consternation of capitalists. A simi- 
 lar foreshadowing of modern manners is 
 to be found in the Book of Judges in the 
 agreement of the tribes to have no dealings 
 with the sons of Benjamin. They boycot- 
 ted the Benjaminites. That is, the strike 
 and the boycott are implements of warfare 
 which are common to human nature, and 
 are as ancient as hands and feet. Our at- 
 tention is attracted to the employment of 
 
172 The Union 
 
 these cudgels by the union, not on account 
 of their novelty, but on account of the ef- 
 fective way in which they are wielded. 
 
 When the two parties to an industrial 
 agreement, the employer and the employed, 
 are unable to agree, each has open to him a 
 peremptory argument. If the aggrieved 
 party is the employer, he dismisses, or as the 
 phrase is, locks out the men ; if the ag- 
 grieved party is the employed, he and his 
 companions strike. The lockout and the 
 strike are two sides of the same act, and 
 each rests on the same basis of reason. The 
 diflS-Culty comes to the notice of the public 
 when the men on strike are not content 
 simply to stop work but try to keep other 
 men from working in their places. And 
 this is desperately aggravated when the ar- 
 guments whereby the striker would dissuade 
 his non-union brother are the arguments of 
 violence. 
 
 It is the young union, as I said, which 
 rushes merrily into a strike. To the more 
 experienced unionist, and especially to the 
 
The Union 173 
 
 ofl&cers of the union, the strike is a serious 
 matter. It is undertaken with the most 
 sincere reluctance, at the demand of what 
 seems a social necessity, and only after ar- 
 bitration has been proposed and refused. 
 The policy of the union is to keep the 
 peace, if possible. A long strike means 
 general hardship. It takes money out of 
 the workman's pocket. It costs the em- 
 ployer something, but never so much as it 
 costs the striker. His wages stop. He re- 
 ceives, it is true, a pittance from the funds 
 of the union ; but it is no more than a 
 meager fraction of his customary earnings, 
 and it may come from the provision which 
 he and his companions have made for a 
 time of sickness and old age. It means 
 immediate and severe sacrifice. It means 
 that the man and his family must suffer. 
 To the officials of a union, a strike brings a 
 multiplication of their cares and labors, 
 and a diminution of their salaries. The 
 older a union is, and the stronger it is, the 
 more reluctant it is to strike. On the other 
 
174 The Union 
 
 hand, the refusal of the employer to arbi- 
 trate — that is, to submit the matter of dif- 
 ference to just judges — seems to the work- 
 ing man, and to an increasing number of 
 disinterested citizens, a needless provoca- 
 tion. It is the result in part of a belated 
 sentiment whereby the employer regards 
 his men as his servants. Under the illusion 
 of this sentiment, the action of the protest- 
 ing men appears a piece of impudence. 
 The fact that they presume to protest is an 
 argument against them. The refusal of the 
 employer is also, in part, a survival of an 
 idea of the nature of industrial business 
 which is no longer applicable. The fact is 
 that all large business under modern con- 
 ditions is an actual partnership to which 
 there are three parties : one is the employer, 
 another is the employed, the third is the 
 public. The employer who says " This is 
 my business," misreads the compact under 
 which in the nature of things he operates. 
 Then comes the strike. At the beginning 
 of it, two of the partners, the union and the 
 
The Union 175 
 
 people, are commonly united against the 
 employer. If this union is maintained, the 
 strike succeeds. If it is broken, if the pub- 
 lic turns against the union, the strike is lost. 
 This defeat is ordinarily brought about — 
 unless the strike is manifestly unfair — by 
 one or both of two strategic blunders. 
 The first is the extension of the strike so as 
 to call out men in occupations more or less 
 allied who themselves have no grievance. 
 This puts the strikers in the wrong. It 
 brings great hardship upon persons who are 
 in no way concerned in the original con- 
 tention, and alienates the public. It is 
 called a sympathetic strike, but its effect is 
 to deprive the movement of the sympathy 
 of the people. It has been tried a good 
 many times, and has almost always failed. 
 The second blunder is the use of force. It 
 is, indeed, to be remembered that the 
 strikers are not educated men, or ac- 
 customed to polite manners, or naturally 
 self-restrained. It is also a fact that the 
 violence which attends strikes is of a 
 
176 The Union 
 
 dramatic sort which attracts general at- 
 tention and is easily exaggerated. It is said, 
 for instance, and probably with truth, that 
 more men are injured on the Fourth of 
 July than are hurt in all the strikes of all 
 the rest of the year. Moreover, the turbu- 
 lence of most strikes is chiefly the work of 
 mischievous and criminal persons who find 
 here an occasion of licen se. These considera- 
 tions, however, do not release the union 
 from its responsibility ; they do not excuse 
 the man who flings his lighted match into 
 this heap of fireworks. Nor do they win 
 the strike. When the violence begins, the 
 failure of the strike is imminent. The third 
 partner, the public, joins the first partner, 
 the employer, and the second partner loses. 
 The union is learning this lesson of ex- 
 perience. " The employers," says the fore- 
 most labor leader in this country, " are per- 
 fectly justified in condemning as harshly as 
 they desire the acts of any striker or strikers 
 who are guilty of violence. I welcome," he 
 says, " the most sweeping demonstration of 
 
The Union 177 
 
 such acts and the widest publicity that may 
 be given to them by the press. In this the 
 employers and the newspapers are simply 
 supplementing the work of the trade union- 
 ists themselves who are endeavoring to 
 stamp out all incentives to acts of violence." 
 The union would do much to convince the 
 general public of the sincerity of these prot- 
 estations by vigorously disciplining every 
 union man who is guilty of such acts. If 
 this discipline has been anywhere enforced, 
 the instances have not come to the knowl- 
 edge of people in general. 
 
 Amidst the many perplexities of the indus- 
 trial situation, one thing is plain ; and that 
 is, that no man nor association of men may 
 be permitted to interfere by force with the 
 liberty of any man to hire whom he will, to 
 work for whom he will, or to agree to such 
 pay and such hours as please himself No 
 man may with impunity, on any pretext, 
 break the public peace. The offense of steal- 
 ing another's job is indeed great, as Mr. Car- 
 negie has well said ; and the provocation 
 
178 The Union 
 
 touches the very limit of endurance. But the 
 way out — the only way out — is the persua- 
 sion and conversion rather than the persecu- 
 tion of the non-union man . The civil power, 
 and, if necessary, the military power, must 
 be summoned to protect the person and the 
 property of the citizen, and to suppress 
 disorder. The union must be free to strike, 
 but for its own good as well as for the 
 general good, it must build its plans on the 
 foundation of law and of reason. 
 
 The other instrument of the union is the 
 boycott. This comes to reenforce the 
 strike. As the strike corresponds to the 
 employer's lockout, so the boycott corre- 
 sponds to the employer's black-list. The 
 employer says on his side, " Nobody shall 
 hire this objectionable servant whom I dis- 
 miss." And the working man says, " No- 
 body shall do business with this objection- 
 able master whose service I renounce." 
 Everybody boycotts something. The tem- 
 perance man boycotts the saloon. The 
 patriots pf Boston, on the eve of the Revo- 
 
The Union 179 
 
 lution, in the midst of the tea troubles, 
 issued this broadside : " William Jackson, 
 an Importer, at the Brazen Head, North 
 Side of the Town House and opposite to 
 the Town Pump, in Corn Hill, Boston. It 
 is desired that the Sons and Daughters of 
 Liberty would not buy any one thing of 
 him, for in so doing, they will bring Dis- 
 grace on Themselves, and their Posterity, 
 forever and ever. Amen." The Con- 
 sumers' League, with its lists of fair houses, 
 and its label, maintains an indirect boy- 
 cott, amidst the commendation and grati- 
 tude of all good people. The union is quite 
 within its rights when it withdraws its 
 trade and the trade of its friends from men 
 who seem to them to be enemies of the 
 working man. The boycott, like the strike, 
 attracts general attention by the vigorous 
 manner in which the union applies it, and 
 by the hardships which are thus occasion- 
 ally imposed upon the unoffending public. 
 The impolitic enforcement of the boycott 
 has probably done more even than the 
 
i8o The Union 
 
 strike to discredit the union and to make 
 people distrust and detest it. " To boycott 
 a street railway which overreaches its em- 
 ployees and pays starvation wages is one 
 thing ; to boycott merchants who ride in the 
 cars of the company is another thing ; and 
 to boycott people who patronize the stores 
 of the merchants who ride in the boycotted 
 cars is still another and a very different 
 thing." Therein Mr. Brooks, from whom I 
 quote the sentence, speaks, I suppose, the 
 general mind. And the sober leaders of 
 the union substantially agree with him. To 
 leave a church in which a man who worked 
 in a strike is saying his prayers, to carry a 
 teamster's grievance into the house of 
 mourning and insult a non-union funeral, 
 to get a girl dismissed from her place as a 
 teacher in the public schools because her 
 father did not obey an order to give up his 
 job, or to encourage little children to carry 
 the contentions of the mill or of the mine 
 into the playground, — such brutalities as 
 
The Union 181 
 
 these are discountenanced by labor leaders ; 
 discountenanced, but not punished. 
 
 In these dramatic ways the union invites 
 general disfavor — and gets it. To these it 
 adds other and even more serious offenses. 
 Its initial proposition that the working men 
 are and ought to be a distinct social class is 
 an offense against our common democracy. 
 For this, it is true, the union is not alto- 
 gether responsible. The fact exists, whether 
 we like it or not. But it is neither a uni- 
 versal nor an established fact as yet. The 
 union is steadily establishing it, against the 
 true welfare of the republic. 
 
 The interference of the union with the 
 transaction of business is an offense. Some- 
 times it is a minor offense, subjecting the 
 citizen to nothing worse than discourtesy 
 and inconvenience. It is probably untrue 
 that the agent of a Roofer's Union called 
 down a man who was engaged in mending 
 the shingles of his own house, but the story 
 illustrates a procedure whereby the union 
 is at present seriously defeating its own pur- 
 
i82 The Union 
 
 poses by converting friends into enemies. 
 Sometimes the offense passes the limits of 
 petty annoyance and becomes an obstacle 
 in the way of honest prosperity. I refer 
 to the unions which keep men back from 
 doing their decent best, which make idle- 
 ness a precept, and restrict the output, and 
 resist the introduction of improved ma- 
 chinery, and limit unduly the number of 
 apprentices, and watch for opportunities to 
 take advantage of an employer's necessities, 
 and aggravate all these injuries by insolent 
 dictation. Sometimes even these offenses 
 are exceeded by an exercise of power which 
 for a moment paralyzes the traffic of the 
 whole community, stops transportation, 
 empties the market, shuts the mines, and 
 puts the public in peril of cold and hunger. 
 Concerning this situation there are two 
 things to be said. One is that the tyranny 
 of the union cannot be endured. The 
 American citizen will not submit to it. 
 The union is mighty, but the popular senti- 
 ment is mightier, and is sure to assert itself 
 
The Union 183 
 
 The union is intoxicated with new power, 
 and is exceeding the control of its best lead- 
 ers. It is listening to the man who has the 
 loudest voice, and who pounds the table 
 with the heaviest fist. It is likely in this 
 condition to conduct itself in such a man- 
 ner as finally to arouse the patient public. 
 And the end will be loss instead of gain for 
 the union. This country is largely in- 
 habited by men who will maintain their in- 
 alienable right to work for whom they will 
 on terms of their own making, to hire whom 
 they please to do their service, and to carry 
 on any lawful business so long as they con- 
 duct it in a lawful way. This is fundamen- 
 tal. The union must pursue its purposes 
 by persuasion, not by persecution. Here 
 the churchman speaks from the conclusions 
 of a long history. The church has tried 
 these union methods, even to the laying of 
 a whole kingdom under an interdict. It 
 understands the devotion, the enthusiasm 
 and sacrifice which underlie even the worst 
 of the working man's ofienses. But it 
 
184 The Union 
 
 knows by bitter experience that the king- 
 dom of heaven is not to be attained by that 
 sort of violence. This is as certain as a law 
 of nature. It is a fact whose foundations 
 are in the heart of humanity. Not even 
 for the sake of a righteous cause may a man 
 yield to tyranny. 
 
 The other thing to be said is this : the 
 union cause is righteous. The union 
 stands for the progress of the plain 
 man. Its word is personality. It has done 
 much and will do more to make the multi- 
 tude happi er and better. To critici se it apart 
 from a recognition of this purpose is to ag- 
 gravate the situation. To oppose it without 
 discrimination as a common enemy is to 
 emphasize all that is worst in it, to discredit 
 its wise leaders, and eventually to force it 
 into a hostile and portentous socialism. 
 What is needed is criticism of the union 
 when it lapses into error and opposition 
 when it is in the wrong, with fair coopera- 
 tion, on a basis of sympathetic understand- 
 ing. 
 
IV 
 
 THE PEOPLE 
 
 By Rev. Francis G. Peabody, LL. D. 
 
IV 
 
 THE PEOPLE 
 
 The story of the modern industrial con- 
 flict has been impressively told in preceding 
 lectures, first, in the language of the em- 
 ployers and then in the language of the em- 
 ployed. It is an extraordinary story of in- 
 dustrial transformations which have created 
 a new economic world. Fifty years ago the 
 orthodox economists of Great Britain found 
 a solution of the labor problem in what they 
 defined as " the free competition of equal 
 industrial units." There is now scarcely 
 such a thing in existence as free competi- 
 tion ; and the industrial units, instead of 
 being represented by individual producers 
 and hand-workers, have expanded into vast 
 aggregations of capital and vast organiza- 
 tions of labor, in which the individual is 
 little more than one cog in a huge machine. 
 
i88 The People 
 
 On the one hand has proceeded the evolu- 
 tion of the employer, from the person to the 
 corporation, and from corporate ownership 
 to the massing of the capital in an entire in- 
 dustry in the combination, the trust, the 
 monopoly. On the other hand has pro- 
 ceeded the organization of the employed, 
 from personal loyalty of the workman to his 
 employer to the union within the trade, 
 and from the trade union to the federation 
 of unions ; until at last a combination of 
 hand-workers confronts a similar combina- 
 tion of employers, and the elementary ad- 
 justment of hours and wages between equal 
 industrial units is supplanted by the whole- 
 sale methods of the trade-agreement and the 
 automatic action of the sliding-scale. 
 
 It is a story which describes in the lan- 
 guage of industry the process of evolution 
 and concentration which has occurred in 
 its political form among the nations of 
 Europe. From primitive feudal groups 
 with their intimate relations of lord and 
 serf, there emerged the larger principalities 
 
The People 189 
 
 with princes and vassals ; and from these 
 in their turn issued the greater units of 
 monarchies and empires ; until at last there 
 are evolved the great European Powers, 
 with their consolidated forces, massed along 
 the frontier to enforce their claims. Each 
 increase in the army of the Czar is met by 
 new enlistments in the army of the Kaiser, 
 until the most approved insurance against 
 war is discovered in the very magnitude of 
 preparations for war, and the monarch who 
 is most ready for battle claims the promise 
 of the peacemaker, that he shall inherit the 
 kingdom. Much the same scene confronts 
 one as he surveys the world of modern in- 
 dustry. Two vast hostile nations seem to 
 occupy the land, each maintaining itself 
 on a war footing, each claiming belligerent 
 rights, each enlarging its alliances and 
 strengthening its treasury, each insisting 
 that it is a peacemaker while it busily ac- 
 cumulates the munitions of war, each speak- 
 ing a language of its own and hardly able 
 to understand that view of the issue which 
 
IQO The People 
 
 within the other camp seems the most ob- 
 vious truth. The days of free competition 
 of equal industrial units are vanished like 
 the days of independence of some minor 
 German State ; and the combinations of 
 capital and of labor are the war measures 
 of modern industry, as the unification of 
 Germany or Italy is a defense against for- 
 eign foes. One of the most important 
 leaders of the trade union movement in 
 America has said with entire candor, that 
 the schemes for mutual insurance and be- 
 nevolent aid maintained in these organiza- 
 tions, and often regarded as their chief 
 justification, do not in any degree repre- 
 sent their primary purposes. They are, he 
 said, not philanthropic societies, but fight- 
 ing machines. Their purpose is not mutual 
 benevolence, but war. 
 
 If, however, the field of modern industry 
 is thus a battle-field, where great powers by 
 every means of organization, strategy, diplo- 
 macy, and arms are contending for control, 
 there forces itself upon the mind of the 
 
The People 191 
 
 looker-on a further inquiry. How is it, one 
 asks, with the rest of us, the stay-at-homes, 
 the workaday majority, the people? What 
 part in this great conflict have those who 
 are not immediately enlisted on either 
 side ? It is easy to report what the captains 
 of industry and the labor leaders have to 
 say concerning industrial peace. Give us, 
 says each of them in turn, complete con- 
 trol and peace will be secure. It is the 
 method described by Tacitus : " Solitu- 
 dinem faciunt, pacem appellant." Yet 
 these contending leaders, though each rep- 
 resents a formidable force, have behind them 
 armies quite insignificant in number com- 
 pared with the great body of population, 
 the unorganized public, the consumers of 
 every station. What is the relation to the 
 labor struggle of this peace-loving and unen- 
 listed mass, the doctors, lawyers, engineers 
 and ministers, the clerks and small traders, 
 the women and children, the great multitude 
 of farmers, the representatives of individ- 
 ualized labor, of expert labor, and of labor 
 
192 The People 
 
 unorganized even in organized trades? 
 Has this vast majority of the people noth- 
 ing to say or to do about the industrial 
 situation ? Are they mere lookers-on at a 
 conflict in which they have no personal 
 concern ? 
 
 On the contrary, the slightest reflection 
 indicates that these stay-at-home citizens 
 have at least one important part in this 
 game of war. They constitute in fact the 
 seat of war. They are the table on which 
 the game of war is played. It has been 
 said of Germany that each productive la- 
 borer carries a soldier on his back. The 
 same burden falls on the quiet, much-en- 
 during people in a time of industrial 
 war. A lockout raises the price of a com- 
 modity ; a strike reduces its quantity ; and 
 the people finally pay the bill. They are, 
 as one student of modern society has very 
 aptly remarked, the forgotten millions. 
 Precisely as the controversies of European 
 States appear to be between monarchs and 
 armies, while in reality it is the tax-paying, 
 
The People 193 
 
 wheat-growing, shop-keeping millions who 
 maintain these royalties and support these 
 armies ; so the great, long-suffering, tax- 
 paying multitude of consumers pays in 
 the end the cost of industrial warfare in 
 higher prices, derangement of business, per- 
 sonal inconvenience and domestic distress. 
 The people carry both the employer and 
 the employed on their backs. 
 
 A striking evidence of the final disposi- 
 tion of the economic burden has been lately 
 supplied by the last step of industrial war- 
 fare. When the nations of Europe find 
 themselves on the edge of bloodshed, a new 
 resource presents itself in the form of inter- 
 national alliances. Two nations, naturally 
 rivals, conclude that more may be gained 
 by mutual understanding than by war, and 
 proceed to substitute combination for con- 
 tention, through dual alliances, reciprocity 
 treaties, or tri-partite agreements. The same 
 substitution of a trade alliance for a trade 
 war has already been here and there accom- 
 plished by the hostile forces of industry. 
 
194 The People 
 
 War being imminent, as between the Coal- 
 Team Drivers' Association of Chicago and 
 the Coal-Teamsters' Union, or between the 
 Glass-Producers' Association and the Glass- 
 Workers' Union, — it occurs to some indus- 
 trial statesman that the purpose of both 
 parties may be better served by combina- 
 tion than by war. Why should wages be 
 lost in the struggle to raise wages, and sales 
 be stopped in the effort to raise prices, when 
 both wages and prices might be raised at 
 the cost of the consumer? Instead of 
 further contention, therefore, a coalition, 
 or, as its critics call it, a conspiracy, is 
 planned ; cartage is raised in price forty per 
 cent, for the sake of team owners, wages are 
 raised from ten to fifteen per cent, for the 
 sake of the teamsters ; and the people, taken 
 unawares and dependent for the necessities 
 of life on prompt distribution, pay the cost 
 of both advances. This is the last, and cer- 
 tainly one of the cleverest, devices of mod- 
 ern industrialism. Some persons welcome 
 it as a solution of the labor problem. It 
 
The People 195 
 
 has come to be described as the " Birming- 
 ham idea," as though it were a beneficent 
 measure of practical reform. " The notion 
 of antagonism," it is said, " between capital 
 and labor is apparently giving way to a 
 very different division of industrial life 
 . . . in which each industry, closely 
 knit, combining both employer and em- 
 ployees, may stand solid against the world." 
 When, however, we strip this device of its 
 dignity as an idea or a solution, what does it 
 mean? It means that the Trust and the 
 Union are to dictate terms, and that the 
 people are helpless. The Chicago coal car- 
 riers, or the Birmingham bedstead-makers, 
 may set their own prices, distribute the 
 higher percentage of profit to the various 
 parties concerned, and the people have 
 but to submit, or, as the case may be, must 
 burn their bedsteads for lack of coal, or 
 burn coal all night for lack of bedsteads. 
 Whether it be war, then, between capital 
 and labor, or peace, the issue for the 
 people seems much the same. Whatever 
 
196 The People 
 
 happens, the price of products advances, 
 and the innocent third party, the lookers-on, 
 the consumers, the people, finally pay the 
 bill, whether that bill be created by passion- 
 ate conflicts, or ingenious strategy, or down- 
 right conspiracy, or sheer stupidity. 
 
 It becomes therefore interesting to inquire 
 whether the only part in the problem of 
 industry which the people may assume is 
 the payment of the bill for a controversy 
 not their own. Are there but two parties 
 to the labor question? Are the people a 
 mere corpus vile for industrial vivisection 
 and experiment ? Are they the mere spoils 
 of two contending forces, captured in turn 
 by each, as homes along a European frontier 
 are captured by the raids of each army in 
 turn? I remember once remarking to a 
 German officer that the private soldiers of 
 his army had many grievances to bear. 
 The private soldiers, he answered, are not 
 the German army ; the officers are the army, 
 and the private soldiers are the weapons 
 with which they fight. Must it be said 
 
The People 197 
 
 with the same cynicism concerning modern 
 industry that the organizations of capital 
 and labor are the armies, and the incomes 
 and needs of the great mass of consumers 
 are simply the weapons with which they 
 fight? 
 
 The answers which are just now most 
 frequently given to these questions proceed 
 from two opposite and extreme views of the 
 case. On the one hand it is said that this 
 sense of helplessness is justified, that the 
 people have nothing to do with the labor 
 question, that they are simply the spoils of 
 the conflict, or clinical material for social 
 operations. On the other hand, with more 
 sanguine confidence, it is insisted that the 
 people are masters of the situation, that they 
 have but to assert their power, take control 
 of industry, appropriate the machinery of 
 production, and the labor question will cease 
 to exist. Each of these views, of impotency 
 and of supremacy, demands consideration. 
 
 There are certainly many incidents of 
 modern industry which fortify the first 
 
198 The People 
 
 view. The contending forces appear as a 
 rule to be quite unaware of any third party 
 with whom they have to reckon. The in- 
 dustrial war goes on at many points with 
 as little consideration of the rights of the 
 people as two armies exhibit for the farms 
 and crops which they pass on their march. 
 Organized capital raises rates with as little 
 apparent regard for popular opinion as a 
 vivisector has for the pains of a rabbit ; 
 labor organizations not infrequently obstruct 
 the welfare of the people as boldly as an or- 
 ganized gang of robbers holds up a railway 
 train. What but this can be said of the 
 proposal to unionize the business of the na- 
 tional government, or to delay the prepara- 
 tion for the St. Louis fair? The one is a 
 government of the people and by the people, 
 yet it has been proposed to convert it into a 
 weapon with which some of the people shall 
 control others of the people. The other is 
 an enterprise to which the honor and credit 
 of all the people is now pledged, yet it is 
 reported that none but union labor is ad- 
 
The People 199 
 
 mitted to the grounds, and that even union 
 workmen, coming from other cities to sup- 
 ply the pressing demand, must contribute 
 to the funds of the unions of St. Louis. 
 Both of these proposals assume that an alert 
 minority can surprise and disarm a careless 
 majority, as a whole train load of sleepy 
 passengers may be controlled by a half dozen 
 determined men. 
 
 Startling however as are these evidences of 
 temporary power, it is impossible to imagine 
 that the people are permanently helpless. 
 Mr. Lincoln's homely aphorism is as true of 
 industry as it was of politics, " You may 
 fool all of the people some of the time and 
 some of the people all of the time, but you 
 cannot fool all the people all the time." The 
 condition of public affairs reflects in the 
 end the sentiment of the people. Popular 
 opinion is the final arbiter of popular move- 
 ments. When a European war is declared, 
 it appears to happen through the decrees of 
 kings and cabinet ministers, but in fact 
 these agents of the people are quite aware 
 
200 The People 
 
 that behind them there must stand the 
 force of popular enthusiasm or passion to 
 fortify their cause. It is the same with the 
 war of industry. Back of the two armies 
 directly engaged stands always the source of 
 supply, in public sympathy, and the final 
 judge, in public opinion ; and defiance of 
 the general welfare either by capital or by 
 labor, while it may have temporary success 
 is but courting final defeat. 
 
 In the industrial struggle moreover, one 
 means of self-defense is in the hands of the 
 people which a nation hesitates to use 
 when it is suddenly called to war. It is the 
 weapon of complete abstinence. Let capital 
 become too grasping, or labor too aggressive 
 and the people, except in the case of the bare 
 necessities of life, may simply refuse to buy 
 or to consume. A corporation may an- 
 nounce the most- roseate conditions of trade 
 and allure employees by tempting schemes 
 of profit-sharing, but let public confidence 
 once slacken and the securities decline in 
 the face of reported earnings, and the corpo- 
 
The People 201 
 
 ration instead of dictating terms to the pub- 
 lic must await the restoration of public 
 faith. This same passive defense may be 
 illustrated in the smallest operations. A 
 householder proposes to make a contract for 
 painting his house. The Painters' Union 
 however has raised wages and restricted 
 hours so that the bids for the job are all ex- 
 travagant. What is the defense of the house- 
 holder? He simply declines to contract. 
 He strikes against both parties. He can wait. 
 His house may remain unpainted. In short, 
 the people in such a situation unconsciously 
 organize what is called in English politics a 
 " Passive Resistance League," the association 
 of those who resolve to do nothing, and it is 
 as though two armies advancing to battle 
 found themselves without a base of supplies, 
 and must stop fighting, not because they are 
 at peace, but simply because they are hungry. 
 The consumer, though he seems to 
 carry the producer on his back, as we 
 have before remarked, may, if he so 
 please, stop short and throw his eques- 
 
202 The People 
 
 trian master over his head. That is pre- 
 cisely what is happening just now in the 
 building trades. Wages and material are 
 costly ; the people seem successfully taxed on 
 both sides ; but, of a sudden, building stops, 
 and through the whole long series of persons 
 who live by building, from the architect 
 down to the mortar mixer, runs a conscious- 
 ness that their livelihood is finally depend- 
 ent on the great silent majority whose 
 strength is to sit still. There is a saying 
 among charity workers that a town may 
 have as many poor people as it can afford 
 to pay for. This same saying may be ap- 
 plied to the conflicts of modern industry. 
 A community may have as many strikes 
 and lockouts as it can afford to pay for ; but 
 when the people consciously or uncon- 
 sciously conclude that they cannot indulge 
 themselves further in these luxuries, then 
 a new form of strike begins, silent, un- 
 ostentatious, yet effective ; and more im- 
 pressive than the rising tide of labor 
 struggles and the noise of many agitators, 
 
The People 203 
 
 is this quiet ebbing away of the people's 
 support. 
 
 When, however, one thus recalls the latent 
 capacity of the people, he is easily led to an 
 opposite and equally extreme view of the 
 industrial situation. Instead of a confession 
 of impotency he may turn to a conviction 
 of supremacy ; instead of the admission 
 that the people have no part in the labor 
 problem he may conceive that they should 
 take over its administration to themselves 
 and bring the conflict to an end. If, it is 
 urged, the issue of the present competitive 
 system is nothing better than organized war, 
 if these consolidated armies of capital and 
 labor show no evidence of mutual under- 
 standing and disarmament, why should not 
 the people take possession of the machinery 
 of business, and as they have learned to 
 govern for themselves, now learn to produce 
 and distribute for themselves? Does not 
 the degeneration both of capitalism and of 
 unionism prophesy the triumph of Socialism? 
 What indeed are these vast aggregations of 
 
204 The People 
 
 capital and of labor but social experiments, 
 which by a single farther step bring us to 
 the Socialist Commonwealth? If for ex- 
 ample, the trunk railway lines of the 
 country are already controlled by a half- 
 dozen men through community of interest, 
 or if the rate of wages is already determined 
 in great sections of industry by the author- 
 ity of a few leaders, does not, it is asked, 
 this situation both demonstrate the possi- 
 bility and present the opportunity of col- 
 lective control ? Shall not the railroads be 
 nationalized, and the labor supply union- 
 ized, and the rights of people secured, not 
 by protest but by ownership ? 
 
 It must be admitted that many signs of 
 the present situation reasonably encourage 
 this faith of the socialist. Whatever may 
 have been, for instance, the temporary con- 
 sequences of the anthracite coal strike, in 
 inconvenience or loss, the most serious con- 
 sequence was beyond doubt the conversion 
 of great numbers of citizens to the belief 
 that the best issue from this conflict was the 
 
The People 205 
 
 control of such monopolies by the people 
 themselves, and that a programme of social- 
 ism was not beyond the sphere of practical 
 politics. It is an easy process of logic 
 which leads one to argue that if under the 
 present system of industry the people may 
 freeze or starve, it is better to take the 
 chances of a plan which at least holds out 
 the promise that the people shall be 
 warmed and fed. 
 
 Further reflection, however, on these 
 signs of the times, instead of justifying this 
 programme of collective control, leads to 
 quite an opposite conclusion. Two years 
 ago, in the rush of business inflation, when 
 no enterprise seemed too vast or too shad- 
 owy for successful promoting, it was easy to 
 dream of a universal trust in whose econo- 
 mies and profits all the people might share. 
 The reverses of the last year, however, have 
 roughly wakened many people from this 
 pleasant dream. We have learned the ex- 
 treme difficulty of perpetuating these colos- 
 sal enterprises even when selected adminis- 
 
2o6 The People 
 
 trators are paid prodigious salaries, and 
 when industrial monopoly is practically as- 
 sured. The people, instead of expecting 
 social salvation through this combination 
 of forces, have become thoroughly alarmed 
 at the possible disasters which threaten 
 these schemes. To this nervous reaction 
 induced by costly experience must be added 
 a further aspect of the case which repels 
 many minds from the movement towards 
 socialism. It is the tendency, perceptible 
 in both parties concerned, to transfer their 
 warfare from the field of industry to the 
 field of politics. The vaster the interests 
 on both sides become, the more tempting 
 becomes the chance of winning the victory, 
 not by economic advantage, but by the con- 
 trol of legislatures and courts. The labor 
 vote and its influence on lawmakers are 
 portentous enough, but the influence of 
 corporations both on elections and on legis- 
 lation is not less grave though much less 
 noisy. The American Federation of Labor 
 has indeed by an overwhelming vote repu- 
 
The People 207 
 
 diated direct attempts to convert their organ- 
 ization to political socialism ; and the cor- 
 porations insist, on their part, that their 
 entrance into politics is not to procure fa- 
 vorable legislation, but to expose and thwart 
 blackmail legislation. Yet it is evident 
 that both forces of industry stand on the 
 edge of direct political activity, and are 
 gravely tempted to use their industrial 
 power for an invasion of popular liberty. 
 
 What shall be said then of a social pro- 
 gramme which deliberately transforms pro- 
 ductive industry into practical politics, and 
 proposes to administer business as a part of 
 the national or municipal government? 
 Are the conditions of our politics such as to 
 encourage this venture? Would the coal 
 industry or the railways be better adminis- 
 tered as spoils of the party in power ? Do 
 the corporations or the trades unions de- 
 velop better leaders and cleaner methods 
 when they turn from industrial service to 
 political wire-pulling ? Does not the very 
 hope of popular government depend on its 
 
2o8 The People 
 
 detachment from special interests, and its 
 representation of the entire people in their 
 human rights and duties ? 
 
 Reflections like these deter thoughtful 
 citizens from any wholesale venture of the 
 people into the sphere of industry. The 
 socialist programme, except in occasional ex- 
 periments, is, in the light of present tenden- 
 cies in this country rather a warning than 
 a destiny. The people, as Mr. Spencer once 
 remarked, are not ready to give to the un- 
 faithful stewards of our present public life 
 the further care of our business affairs. 
 The strength of the people lies in their de- 
 tachment from the details of business, and 
 their judicial attitude towards its principles 
 and methods. The force of public senti- 
 ment is strongest when it stands apart from 
 the warfare of commercialism, and esti- 
 mates, stimulates, or arrests its progress by 
 wholesale judgments of justice, compassion, 
 and peace. The people are neither the 
 helpless spoils of industry, nor are they on 
 the other hand the best directors of in- 
 
The People 209 
 
 dustry. It is their place to control the 
 final issue as a great people finally deter- 
 mines the issue of a great war — by the 
 direction of the nation's sympathy, and the 
 education of the nation's conscience, with- 
 out whose support no modern monarch can 
 long sit on his throne and no modern army 
 can win a prolonged campaign. 
 
 If then the place of the people in the in- 
 dustrial programme is that of the dispas- 
 sionate observer who is at the same time the 
 final judge, we may go on to ask what are 
 the means by which this attitude may be 
 maintained and this authority exercised. 
 There are, it may be answered, three ways 
 in which the power of the people may be 
 made effective, and in the end decisive, in 
 the issues of industry. The first is the way 
 of education ; the second is the way of leg- 
 islation ; the third is the way of spirituali- 
 zation. As they advance along these three 
 ways, the people come to their own. 
 
 The first step of the people towards in- 
 dustrial authority will be taken when they 
 
210 The People 
 
 become aware of the new conditions of the 
 modern economic world. There has oc- 
 curred within a single generation a trans- 
 formation in business methods which is not 
 only unprecedented in its character, but 
 which has been accomplished with such ab- 
 ruptness as to leave many persons either 
 unaware that the old order is extinct, or 
 dreaming that the new order may be 
 abandoned. I asked a friend in Chicago not 
 long ago whether his father was still in 
 business with him, and he answered that 
 this man of the earlier order had found 
 himself incapable of adjustment to the new 
 methods, and had withdrawn from a world 
 which he could not understand. Just as 
 the first Atlantic cable revolutionized in a 
 day the whole system of foreign trade, so 
 the principle of combination has abruptly 
 modified the competitive system of industry 
 and has introduced new grouping, new 
 sources of profit and economy, and an un- 
 dreamt-of range of administrative power. 
 The first organized recognition of the new 
 
The People 2n 
 
 industrial opportunity disclosed itself, not, 
 as might have been anticipated, among the 
 employers, with their larger range of ob- 
 servation, but among the wage-earners with 
 their keener sense of need. Nothing in- 
 deed is more striking in industrial history 
 than the contrast which has existed between 
 the prevailing indiflference and inertia of 
 the great mass of employers, and the eager 
 efforts for economic education which have 
 been made by hand-workers. Limited as 
 their education has necessarily been, and 
 often directed to no other end than the pro- 
 curing of ammunition for industrial war, 
 it is none the less significant that the work- 
 ing people in all countries have been the 
 most diligent students of economic proc- 
 esses and laws, and that while many an 
 employer was blundering along in the old 
 way, the hot debates of the trades unions 
 and the large responsibilities of the coop- 
 erative system in Great Britain, were edu- 
 cating plain people for a new economic 
 world. The education of the employers as 
 
212 The People 
 
 a whole did not become far advanced until 
 they were forced to learn their lessons from 
 a few masters of their own craft. Here and 
 there — as in the extraordinary instance of 
 the Standard Oil Company — a few acute 
 observers of the situation perceived the new 
 power of combination, and proceeded to 
 create the hydra-headed and omnivorous 
 organizations of the new time. Then at 
 last the employers awoke and the era of 
 promoting, inflating, and reorganizing be- 
 gan. It was as though thirsty men woke to 
 find themselves at a well stocked table and 
 began a very orgy of excess. Nor have the 
 hand-workers been restrained from a similar 
 intoxication. Monopoly of labor has come 
 to be regarded as the deliverer from mo- 
 nopoly of capital. Unionizing appears to be 
 the remedy for patronizing. Why should 
 not every vocation and profession in the 
 world, asks one enthusiastic labor-leader, 
 be unionized, and the principle of mo- 
 nopoly made universally imperative ? 
 
 What is it, however, one asks himself, 
 
The People 213 
 
 which has given this extraordinary advan- 
 tage to the principle of monopoly ? It is at 
 bottom the ignorance, insensibility, and 
 apathy of the people. The people are not, 
 as a whole, even now aware that this revo- 
 lutionary change has taken place. They do 
 not know that the labor movement now in- 
 volves not only uncertainties of wages and 
 hours, but a completely new stratification of 
 society, that it is, at bottom, a class-move- 
 ment, proposing to array the whole of mod- 
 ern society into two hostile camps. The peo- 
 ple have even not become thoroughly aware 
 that, in many forms of business, they are at 
 this moment absolutely without defense 
 from the power of a monopoly which unites 
 contractor and workman, and is in a position 
 to dictate whether work shall be done or 
 not done even in one's most personal affairs. 
 The people have been simply taken by sur- 
 prise, and captured by one after another of 
 these devices of combination, and must pay 
 their ransom. They have not reckoned 
 with the world as it is. They have 
 
214 The People 
 
 fancied that producers and workers were 
 the servants of the people, and of a sud- 
 den have discovered them to be the mas- 
 ters of the people. The people are with- 
 out coal or cotton or oil or some other com- 
 modity, and this improvidence becomes the 
 opportunity for the monopolist whether he 
 monopolizes material, or tools, or labor. 
 
 How then are the people to protect them- 
 selves ? First of all by the way of educa- 
 tion. The defenselessness of the people is 
 in their ignorance ; and ignorance, as Dr. 
 Curry once said of education at the South, 
 is not a remedy for anything. The educa- 
 tion of the people in the industrial question 
 is often acquired through slow and severe 
 experience. They are often caught nap- 
 ping, but they are not likely to be caught 
 napping twice at the same point. Few 
 householders whose bins were empty in 
 1902 are without a winter's stock of anthra- 
 cite coal in 1903. Experience, however, is 
 a costly and embittering form of education, 
 and a more systematic scheme of popular 
 
The People 215 
 
 training is necessary to give to the people 
 that same knowledge of economic laws which 
 both employers and employed have now 
 learned to apply for their own advantage. 
 Here is the new province of the school, the 
 college, and the university. A considerable 
 part of the education of the people, as it has 
 been arranged by earlier generations, has but 
 slight relation to the world as it now is. 
 New tracts of knowledge must be opened to 
 the public mind. Instruction in the laws 
 of economic welfare, in the principles of 
 democracy, in the obligations of civic 
 righteousness, are an essential part of the 
 new education — the education of the citizen, 
 the consumer, the people. No change in 
 modern education is so hopeful as the in- 
 creased provision for such studies. The era 
 of social panaceas, of Utopian States, of 
 short cuts to prosperity, seems almost at an 
 end, and the era of sober and patient educa- 
 tion seems to be near. It has become plain 
 to great numbers of students in all condi- 
 tions of life that the industrial problem is 
 
2i6 The People 
 
 not to be settled in a day or in a generation, 
 and that the remark of one of the best in- 
 formed observers of the matter was justi- 
 fied — " When I hear a man bring forward 
 a solution of the labor question I move to 
 adjourn." The solution of the labor ques- 
 tion, if it is to be reached, must be reached 
 not through the hastily devised remedies 
 either of near-sighted employers or of hand- 
 to-mouth wage-earners, but through the pa- 
 tient education of the people, the increase 
 of popular understanding of economic 
 aflfairs, the training of the people in indus- 
 trial usefulness, the development of the 
 people's conscience and the quickening of 
 the people's heart. 
 
 The second safeguard of the people 
 is an immediate consequence of their 
 education. It is the application of better 
 knowledge to better legislation. The labor 
 laws of the last fifty years, both in Great 
 Britain and in this country, have done 
 much to correct the abuses and ameliorate 
 the condition of wage-earners ; but the 
 
The People 217 
 
 great majority of such laws have dealt with 
 abuses which were easy to trace, and with 
 conditions which all observers could under- 
 stand. They have concerned themselves 
 with the special cases of women's labor and 
 child-labor, with limited questions of safety, 
 health, and inspection, with definite issues 
 of hours and payments. With the new ex- 
 pansion of industry, however, a new series 
 of legislative problems confront us which 
 are far more difficult to grasp, and which 
 call for quite an unprecedented degree of 
 sanity, patience, and wisdom. How to con- 
 trol monopolies without checking private 
 initiative ; how to regulate rates without 
 obstructing enterprise ; how to ensure Fed- 
 eral control without involving Federal own- 
 ership ; how to guarantee the right of wage- 
 earners to unite, without destroying the 
 right of other wage-earners not to unite; 
 how to defend the right of injunction with- 
 out permitting injunction to fortify wrong ; 
 how to guard the integrity of the legisla- 
 ture which makes the laws, and the purity 
 
21 8 The People 
 
 of the judiciary which enforces the laws — 
 these and many other questions concerning 
 the law of labor are either absolutely cre- 
 ated by new conditions, or have assumed 
 under new conditions a wholly new degree 
 of significance. Questions so comprehen- 
 sive and so portentous as these are not to 
 be answered by impulsive, excited, or ig- 
 norant legislation, but must be dealt with 
 by new forms of law wrought out by the 
 intelligent discussion and reflection of an 
 educated public. 
 
 In this new extension of the possibilities 
 of legislation there are but two alternative 
 ways of procedure : one is the way of pub- 
 lic ownership, the other is the way of pub- 
 lic supervision. We have for the present 
 boldly struck into the second path, by the 
 establishment of Boards of scrutiny, such as 
 railway commissions, gas commissions, fac- 
 tory inspectors, Boards of health, inter-State 
 commerce commissions, bank examiners, 
 having access to accounts and representing 
 the interest of the public welfare. It is often 
 
The People 219 
 
 urged that this whole tendency towards 
 scrutiny is an invasion of private rights and 
 a hindrance to private enterprise. What 
 should be more carefully observed, however, 
 is the fact that these methods of scrutiny 
 are, under the new circumstances, the only 
 practical alternative for the still bolder ex- 
 periment of public ownership. To return 
 to the earlier world of individual liberty 
 and privacy is now quite impossible. Either 
 the corporations and federations whose in- 
 terests affect the whole population must 
 submit themselves to the scrutiny of the 
 representatives of the people, or else the 
 people will be over-tempted by the illusory 
 doctrines of collective control. Either the 
 organizations of labor on the other hand 
 must welcome a legal status and a legal 
 responsibility, or else they will find them- 
 selves involved in the much more dubious 
 venture of a Socialist Commonwealth. The 
 strength of the socialist programme in all 
 countries to-day lies in this conviction that 
 quasi-public interests are insufficiently con- 
 
220 The People 
 
 trolled, and the true conservative in political 
 economy to-day is not he who still sighs 
 for an impossible world of economic free- 
 dom, but he who applies himself to secure 
 publicity, integrity, and legal responsibility 
 in the vast economic organizations of the 
 modern State. 
 
 It must be admitted, however, that neither 
 in the education of the people, nor in legis- 
 lation for their sakes, lies the secret of the 
 people's power. In all that has been thus 
 far said, indeed, much too rigid a line has 
 been drawn between the people and the in- 
 dustrial forces of employers and employed. 
 The people have been described as though 
 they were lookers-on at a struggle in which 
 they have no personal share. The fact is, 
 on the contrary, that no such detachment of 
 the people from industrial life is possible. 
 In one way or another, as employers of 
 labor or as laborers, as stockholders or as 
 consumers, every citizen is inextricably in- 
 volved in the industrial struggle, and it is 
 quite in vain for any one to assume an atti- 
 
The People 221 
 
 tude of irresponsibility, or neutrality, or in- 
 diiFerence. What we call the labor ques- 
 tion is in fact one aspect of the general 
 movement of modern society, and one ex- 
 pression of the prevailing traits of national 
 character. A distinguished European ob- 
 server of modern life once said that revolu- 
 tionary socialism was the penalty which 
 Europe was paying for not being Christian. 
 The same thing may be said of the labor 
 agitation. It is the penalty we are pay- 
 ing for not being Christian. The sins of 
 the industrial order are at bottom the sins 
 of the people ; the evils of commercialism 
 illustrate the character of the people. Each 
 economic abuse which is tolerated or winked 
 at is a witness that the heart of the people 
 is not right. The stream of industrialism 
 cannot rise higher than its source, and that 
 source is to be found in the ruling passion 
 of the people's heart, and the dominant di- 
 rection of the people's will. 
 
 Here is the most solemn aspect of the 
 present industrial situation. It is not a 
 
222 The People 
 
 case where certain commercial persons are 
 contending for supremacy while the inno- 
 cent people look on or suffer. The successes 
 of the financiers on the one hand, and the 
 excesses of the labor-leaders on the other, 
 are made possible through the presupposi- 
 tion that the people are at heart of the 
 same mind as they. The people are so 
 eager to get rich that they become the easy 
 prey of speculative finance ; the people are 
 so indifferent to the enforcement of the law 
 that they easily tolerate illegal violence. 
 The agitators of Chicago rely on the tacit 
 sympathy of the people ; the lynchings at 
 the South occur not in defiance of popular 
 opinion but through the connivance of pop- 
 ular opinion. In short, a nation, like a 
 person, reaps what it sows. It sows the 
 spirit of commercialism and it reaps the 
 spirit of industrial agitation ; it sows os- 
 tentation and self-indulgence in the homes 
 of the rich, and it reaps the break-up of 
 those homes through degeneration and di- 
 vorce ; it sows the seeds of a World-Power 
 
The People 223 
 
 and it reaps the perils of a World- Power ; 
 it sows the lust for gain and monopoly, and 
 it reaps inflation, indigestible securities, 
 commercial crises, lawlessness, and social 
 war. 
 
 What then is to be the refuge of the 
 people from the perils of commercialism? 
 There is but one final security — it is the 
 spiritualization of American life, the re- 
 demption of the people from the overmaster- 
 ing passion for getting gain, the discovery of 
 greater danger for a nation than what Car- 
 lyle called " the Hell of not making money." 
 It is not alone the outside of American 
 life — its machinery, its laws, its industrial 
 combinations — which most need cleansing ; 
 it is, far more, its interior condition, its 
 character, its prevailing ideals. The social 
 problem may be in its form economic, legis- 
 lative, and educational, but in its essence it 
 is ethical, spiritual, religious, a call to moral 
 redemption, a summons to a better life. 
 
 What is all this but a challenge of the 
 modern world to the Christian Church — a 
 
224 The People 
 
 challenge which should give to any loyal 
 Christian new courage and hope. Through 
 many a weary generation the Church has 
 lived apart from the world, concerned with 
 the things of the spirit, rent by metaphysical 
 controversies concerning the nature of the 
 Godhead or the conditions of another life. 
 Now, with a certain surprise it finds itself 
 summoned to the redemption of this present 
 world and the interpretation of the modern 
 age. What is the great overshadowing peril 
 which now, threatens American life? It is 
 not the peril of corporations, or unions, or 
 economic controversies, however sharp and 
 costly these may be. It is the peril of a com- 
 miercialized, and materialized civilization, in 
 which the ideals that support Democracy 
 may fail of vitality and strength. What 
 we have to fear is that the gain of commer- 
 cialism may be the loss of idealism. Over 
 the gateway that leads to political expansion 
 and economic wealth is written the ancient 
 warning, " What shall it profit a nation to 
 gain the whole world and lose its own 
 
The People 11^ 
 
 soul ? " Here is the summons to the Chris- 
 tian Church — ^to abandon its ancient contro- 
 versies and divisive counsels, and gird itself 
 for a new crusade against the practical ma- 
 terialism of modern life. The two forces 
 which finally contend for the mastery are 
 not capital and labor, with the people look- 
 ing on, but throughout all classes and in all 
 conditions of life the spirit of commercialism 
 and the ideals of a Christian people, the lusts 
 of the flesh, and the pride of life on the one 
 side, and simplicity, brotherhood, and holi- 
 ness on the other. Here is the long desired 
 unity of the Christian Church — not identity 
 of opinion or tradition or form, but the 
 unity of a common ideal and the conscious- 
 ness of a common foe. Here is the hope of 
 national welfare — that the people, in their 
 controlling instincts and national aims shall 
 seek first, not gain or glory, but God's king- 
 dom and His righteousness. Here finally is 
 the hope with which one may regard the 
 perplexing issues of the present time — that 
 if the force of spiritual idealism, which is 
 
226 The People 
 
 ours through Jesus Christ, may but give 
 itself with unhindered power to the new 
 problem of redemption which the new world 
 provides, then it may happen again, as when 
 the Christian religion took possession of the 
 ancient Roman world, that the spirit of com- 
 mercialism shall be overborne by the spirit 
 of love, and the saying of the ancient prophet 
 fulfilled, that the wolf shall dwell with the 
 lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with 
 the kid, and a little child shall lead them. 
 

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 Cornell University Library 
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 Organized labor and capital; the Willjam 
 
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