THE MARTIN P. CATHERWOOD LIBRARY OF THE NEW YORK STATE SCHOOL OF INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR RELATIONS AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY 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/cu31924002356305 s o s Is 3 3 a o ft ■■s J4 o CI. Men, the Workers By HENRY DEMAREST LLOYD " Men, my brothers, men, the workers, ever reaping something new. That which they have done the earnest of the things that they shall do." —Wrrnn ^^LocMey Hail," bij Alfred Tennyion Frontispiece PROPERTY OF LIBRARY HEW YORK STATE SCHOOL IMDII'^T'^^'' #''n Mica BEUTIflWS C !.)NIVERSITV New York Doubleday, Page & Company 1909 ALL SIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGITAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN COPYRIGHT, IpOp, BY WILLIAM BROSS LLOYD PUBLISHED, SEPTEMBER, ZQOg. FOREWORD In this collection of articles and addresses the editors have endeavoured to show as com- prehensively as possible Mr. Lloyd's attitude toward the Labour Movement in the various concrete forms in which it presented itself to him. Some of the incidents which called forth his word have become historic, while others have been forgotten in the lapse of years; but each and every one of the questions treated is a vital issue in the world of labour to-day. The recognition of the union, the legal restriction of the hours of labour, the issuance of injunctions in labour disputes, and the relation of the labour movement to private monopoly, are as essen- tially a part of that movement to-day as they were in 1889 or in 1894. ■ The addresses were given to widely varying audiences — to members of trades unions, to ethical culture societies, to church congregations, to clubs of business and professional men — and they cover a period of fourteen years. One of vi MEN THE WORKERS the newspaper articles appended dates back to 1887. Inevitably it has been found impossible to give an appearance of continuity, and still less has it been possible wholly to avoid repe- titions. It is believed, however, that the collection will be found a fresh and stimulating contribu- tion to the literature of the labour movement, and further it is believed that the chronology of the various articles and addresses will serve to emphasize anew the promptness with which Mr. Lloyd recognised new issues and the new occa- sions which drew them forth. Anne Withington Caboline Stallbohm Boston, October, 1908 CONTENTS RntrTER Foreword MGS V I. The Labour Movement. July 4, 1889 3 II. The Union Forever. . . . 45 III. The Safety of the Future Lies in Organized Labour. Decem- ber, 1893 .... 77 IV. Arbitration .... 100 V. Illinois Factory Law Speech. 1894 111 VI. The New Independence 131 \^I. Strikes and Injunctions. 1894 . 156 VIII. Boomerang Law. 1895 172 IX. Speech at the Reception to Eugene V. Debs. 1895 179 X. Lessons of the Debs Case. 1895 194 XI. Argument Before the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission. 1903 201 viii MEN THE WORKERS CHAPTER PAGE XII. Speech at the Mitchell, Darrow, Lloyd Reception. 1903 . 253 Addenda A. The Political Economy of Child Labour. 1887 . . .261 B. Civilization as Heralded by Labour Day. 1898 . . . .265 MEN, THE WORKERS MEN THE WORKERS THE LABOUR MOVEMENT* TT MAY easily be that the future historian of ■^ our era — the Macaulay of the twentieth century — will describe the manner in which the organized workingmen of America celebrate this Fourth of July, 1889, as the special sign of the times. For a full century and more the returning sun of this day has been greeted with all the honours a glad and grateful people could pay to the anniversary of their deliverance from kingly despotism and the achievement of a new freedom. The day after the Declaration, John Adams wrote from Philadelphia to his wife, Abigail, in Boston: "Yesterday the greatest question was discussed which ever was debated in America, and a greater, perhaps, never has been, never will be, decided among men. The * Speech delivered af Cheltenham Beach, Chicago, on July 4, 1889. 8 4 MEN THE WORKERS fourth day of July, 1776, will be the most mem- orable in the history of America. It will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be com- memorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, balls, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward for evermore." Abigail was happily able immediately to announce to her husband the beginning of the fulfilment of his prophecy. She writes him that when the Declaration of Independence reached Boston, the inhabitants gathered about the balcony of the State House to hear it read. Great attention was given to every word. As soon as Colonel Crafts, who read it, had finished, the cry came from the balcony, " God save our American States!" And then three cheers rent the air. The bells rang, the privateers fired from the forts and batteries, cannons were dis- charged, the platoons followed, and every face was joyful. The king's arms were taken down from the State House, and from every place THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 5 in which they appeared, and burned in King Street. "Thus," she says, "ends royal authority in this country." Thus was the Declaration of Independence received when it was first read in Boston, and like Boston, the whole country for 113 years has fulfilled the prophecy of Adams with bells, guns, and hurrahs. But to-day the organized workingmen of America, loyal to the flag and to every one of the forty-two stars in it, faith- ful to the Constitution and every line in it, meet in all the great cities of the country to celebrate the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by a demonstration in favour of a great reform, which will add a new inde- pendence to those already enjoyed by the citizens of America. Seventeen hundred and seventy- six broke away from colonial dependence. Eighteen hundred and eighty-nine declares against industrial dependence. Seventeen hun- dred and seventy-six claimed that taxation, the price of government, should not be fixed without its consent. Eighteen hundred and eighty- nine says that (no other prices, whether hours of labour, wages, food, freights, rents, shall be 6 MEN THE WORKERS fixed without consent; that the consent must be full and free; and that this full and free con- sent is impossible under the present condition of competition and monopoly .j^ Seventeen hun- dred and seventy-six said that governments were instituted to secure men their inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit- of happi- ness, and that these governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Eighteen hundred and eighty-nine declares that [property, capital, business, are also instituted to secure "all men" in life, liberty, and pur- suit of happiness, and that property, like government, has no just powers but those which it derives from the consent of the peoplea This is a new sound in the strains of the day — a strange chord in the songs of jubilee. The crowd is chanting choruses of the deliverance that has been ; labour breaks in with deeper tones and strikes the notes of a deliverance that is to be. Labour spun the flag that frolics in the air to-day; it broke the sod and peopled the prairies of the new states which have multiplied the stars in the crown of liberty; it gave the blood by which the weakening union of the old states THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 7 was cemented into firmer bonds; it dug the earthworks of Bunker Hill, and endured the cold and hunger of Valley Forge. It has built the platforms, made the powder, and found the bread and meat, fruit and wine, for the orators, the fireworks, and the feasts of to-day's cele- brations. Thus, doing its duty and declaring its loyalty and love, organized labour asks its fellow citizens to spend part of this national holiday of independence in listening to its plea and arguments for broadening political freedom into industrial freedom, and for giving a little taste of independence to the wage earners by shortening their hours of labour. All this will seem to many an insignificant thing. The reports in to-morrow's papers of the proceedings of these meetings of workingmen will not be assigned the same prominent place nor gar- nished with the same enthusiastic headlines as those of the customary celebrations, but to me they seem to import vastly more. These celebrations would be anything but insignificant if they represented organized labour alone with its millions, but they stand for some- thing far more momentous. The agitation by 8 MEN THE WORKERS organized labour is but a part of the labour movement, and in the labour movement are to be seen the germs of a new, better civilization, growing slowly and painfully to maturity, in the breast of the old. Lord Beaconsfield said there are two nations in Great Britain. The remark is as old as Plato — thousands of years old. It is always true, and true of all nations. In nations as in orange trees, fruit, blossom, and bud follow each other in ceaseless succession. There are two nations to-day in America: one garlanded with the fruits of the past; the other with bleeding feet and heart, and too often with starving bodies, is planting the seeds of the yet grander vintage that is to be. They are vastly mistaken who see in this movement of the labour- ing people only a complaint, a protest, a discord- ant note in the universal thanksgiving, a mere attempt to get an advantage in the market, more pay for less work. The shorter-hours cam- paign, which is at this moment (1889) the special purpose of the workingmen, is but one step in the programme, and^ne great purpose of the programme is not to make better bargains, but to put a stop forever to the whole modern prac- THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 9 tice of bargaining in flesh and blood2 The eight-hours agitation is but the first of the prac- tical measures by which the people hope to realize the ideal of a new faith and new perform- ance. Whoever does not understand this, that the demonstrations of to-day are but the effort to realize in a single detail one aspiration of a new politics, a new industry, which, in their full development, will be of world-wide sweep — whoever does not understand this has not the faintest conception of what the labour movement is. To the Roman of the times of the Caesars the new sect of Christians appeared to be only a body of disagreeable fanatics who, under pre- tence of religious scruple, refused to do their share of military duty, and destroyed the palaces, baths, libraries, and statues of that glorious civilization because they were too lazy to do the work which its magnificence required of them, and too envious to see others enjoy it. The American colonists were regarded by King George and his people as a lot of uncouth, troublesome customers who wanted to get rid by any means, fair or foul, of paying their debts 10 MEN THE WORKERS and their taxes and rendering due and loyal service to their divinely appointed rulers. The fashionable opinion to-day looks upon the labour naovement with similar contumely^ and equal misconception. The labour movement is not a fanaticism. It is an effort to cure a fanaticism — the fanati- cism of money-making, the mania of the markets. The most philosophical and most learned of modern historians — Henry Sumner Maine — has penetrated the secret of the past far enough to give us a glimpse of how trade first arose among men. It makes its first appearance on the borders of the earliest social groups visible in history — the primitive village communities. These were great families where the lands were held in common, the fruits of the hunt and the field were in common, and there was no poverty. Henry Sumner Maine was a conservative of conservatives, but he tells us that poverty in its modern sense is not seen in history until the break-up of the old system of the common owner- ship of land. Within these great families there was no war either of bargains or of battles, but on the outside, war with the neighbouring fam- THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 11 ilies was constant. Gradually, on the border- land, neutral grounds were established, and there, during the pauses of peace, trade arose between the members of the different commu- nities. From that simple beginning to the trade industry of to-day, how vast the change ! When Nature, Emerson says, wishes to accomplish a purpose, she overloads the tendency. The conviction that the tendency which leads men to trade has been overloaded is one of the cardinal principles of the labour movement, lit believes that the business world has gone mad with competition, delirious with supply and demand; that however beneficent, legiti- mate, natural, may be the instinct which invites men to exchange, the practice of it has been pushed into cruelties, subtleties, falsehoods, and idiocies which are defeating the very purposes of the tendency."^ The workingmen don't care to listen to harangues on their violence, outrage of the rights of others, from those of the class who are doing the same thing, if with more refine- ment, still with a more deadly malignity. In other words, hypocrisy has no right to preach 12 MEN THE WORKERS to them. It must take the beam out of its own eye. But society, its speaker, the statesman, has a right to preach to both. "Chinese" Gordon says: "I think we are on the decline. It is money, money, money, with us. We put lime in our cotton, and are full of tricks in every trade. Now, falsehood in trade shows want of morality in the nation; and when morality — that is, honesty ■ — is lack- ing, the end is not far off." Throughout the civilized world one of the most observable present results of the mad practice of exchange is the formation of overshadowing and sombre combinations to stop exchange; and another of the most noticeable results is that increasing masses of the population, like the crofters of Scotland, the evicted peasantry of Ireland, and the starving miners of Illinois, ^are being driven in the name of the laws of trade into a position where they cannot trade at alji [In the name of the principles of production, exchange, and consumption, they are entirely shut off, both from the ability to exchange and the ability to produce, and as for consumption, they are driven in heart-breaking despair. THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 13 gathering their children about them, to consume themselvesji Trade began, as Maine shows, at the border; it has spread through the whole interior. At first, only strangers could bargain and cheapen each other; then countrymen, then townsmen, now at last brothers, can cheat one another; and the papers can find no news more delightful to their readers than how some "commodore" beat his own son in the stock market by giving him false information. In the last London Times the British Registrar in Bankruptcy declares that the commercial classes of Great Britain jare fast ceasing to be traders, and becom- ing gamblers and speculators^ Trade began with the exchange of things; it developed into the exchange of the representatives of things, and on the boards and exchanges has now sunk into the exchange of gambling betsji The labour movement thinks that all these are symptoms, not of civilization, but the decline of civilization, and it looks with horror and aversion at the ruin, distress, poverty, gambling, and monopoly which are to-day results of mod- ern business and the social system it supports. 14 MEN THE WORKERS It believes that the cause of these disasters is to be found in the principle on which business is done, the principle that you can commit any crime if only you call it competition — a principle only to he matched by the new doctrine that if you will only call it a "removal" you can com- mit murder with impunity. The captain of industry, called upon to account for the starvation of his men and their wives and children, gets himself behind com- petition. The labour movement says to him: "It 's no excuse that this was done by competi- tion. (Competition is not the excuse; it 's the crime itself.'l The labour movement is part of the great upward movement of humanity. Seen from the right side it is growth; it is revolution only when viewed from the side of the evil, whose unjust privileges and vested wrongs are to be disturbed. But it is not a vague, indistinct assertion of the general law of progress. The labour movement is a distinct stage in the march of progress, with a definite, clearly marked mission. JThat mission on its constructive side is to extend into industry the brotherhood THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 15 already recognized in politics and religion, and to teach men as workers the love and equality which they profess as citizens and worshippers^ On its other side, the mission of the labour movement is to ^ree mankind from the super- stitions and sins of the market, and to abolish the poverty which is the fruit of those sins2 To-day's popular doctrine of the rich, that poverty is the fault of the poor, is the old theological doctrine of total depravity applied to industry, and the labour movement spews it forth out of its mouth, as also the doctrine of modern competition, that death is the proper penalty of industrial mis- takes. That a man is physically or mentally weak seems just the reason to the labour move- ment why he should not be shoved into bad air and fed bad food, and that he is morally weak is the best of reasons why he should not be put where he will be made worse. The labour movement represents a distinctly higher ideal than that obeyed by modern society. About it, as often before about new standards, we see grouped the extremes of the social scale, artists, poets, and philosophers, because they love beauty and justice, and the poor and lowly. 16 MEN THE WORKERS because their moral natures are uncorrupted by privilege, and because they suffer most from social ills. If its aim was merely better bar- gains for a class, great-minded souls would not find in it a fuel for their fires. It is because they see in it a saving ferment — not a remnant — which will recreate all social life, that these men care for it above every other subject of thought. The labour movement is at the forefront of civilization. It advances morality a step farther than it has yet gone, for it declares that most of the acts which the present morality of trade encourages as virtues are sins of lying, stealing, and murder. It is in advance of the churches. It preaches that men must be brothers across the Wages line, as well as on each side of it, and brothers in the mills, mines, and fields as well as in Fourth of July orations and church creeds. It is the most religious movement of the day, for it carries the Golden Rule into the market, and insists that the Gospel which men profess in their families they shall also profess and practise in their factories. It holds the man or woman who buys cheap THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 17 responsible for all that may have caused that cheapness. If it was not right in slave times to buy men because they were for sale, it is no more right now to buy criminally cheap things because they are for sale. It is the most religious movement of the day, for it alone sees that for mankind to have recognized that they stand as brothers in the face of the Power beyond and the mysteries about us is but the preliminary to recognizing that we are brothers in everything. Once a brother, always a brother; a brother anywhere, a brother every- where, says the labour movement. It declares the infidels and heretics of to-day to be those who, as owners of land (which no one but God ever did own), as lords of the factory and the mine, as monopolists of money and privilege, are denying the brotherhood of their fellow men. Why don't the workingmen go to church? Because they are ahead of the church. Because the principles of the labour movement are more religious than the principles of the pulpits. Because the church steadfastly refuses to leave ofiF repeating its glittering generalities, and lacks 18 MEN THE WORKERS either the courage or intelligence to apply the test and language of the Ten Commandments to the practices of the men who sit in the high places in the congregations. Because it contents itself with admiring Nathan for telling King David to his face: "Thou art the man," but dares not do the same to our nineteenth century robbers and murderers. " During thirty years of my life," says Ruskin, " I heard one sermon at least every Sunday, so that it is after experi- ence of no fewer than 1,500 sermons, most of them by scholars and many of them by earnest men, that I now solemnly state that I never heard one preacher deal faithfully with the quarrel between God and Mammon." The churches, the political economists, the colleges, the existing political parties, all stand impotent in the face of the great question of the day — the social question. Even the mighty Liberal, John Morley, flounders with the rest of them in discussing the eight-hours movement. These parsons, politicians, and professors are all tied up by the lockstitch of self-interest with organized abuses, and they halt and hesitate and refuse to carry forward the principle of THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 19 brotherhood into the hew affairs of the new- world. They all profess this principle in part, but they will not widen its application. The churches profess it in theory, but will not put it into practice in their pews, and do not see that if it is to be true in religion it must be true in industry. Business men boast of the brother- hood of American citizenship, but will not see that if it is not lived up to in all other business it cannot hold its place in the business of govern- ment. The early Puritans built up their community on religious liberty, but it was religious liberty for themselves. They were horrified when Roger Williams demanded religious liberty for himself. Our business society is founded on brotherhood — for itself. Labour lifts its hands to society and says: "I want brotherhood, too," and society looks down upon it and says: "What, do you want brotherhood? How revolutionary !" The chief scientific truth about human nature is that the more men know each other the more they love each other, and knit themselves together, so that families become communities, com- 20 MEN THE WORKERS munities states, and states federate. The labour movement accepts this principle through all its ' ' scheme of life, from the trades-union, with its doctrines of mutual sacrifice and protection, to the international congress, which calls for the abolition of war, and would turn the world into a universal United States. We are on the eve of great things, and the labour movement with its clue of love will lead them, while th^ anti- quated institutions and philosophies, the empires, wars, and political economies and property founded on the hatred of man for man, and on social cannibalism, will shrink away, abhorred and repudiated, into the gloom of the past, to be forgotten with the other horrors of human ignorance and weakness. The labour movement is intensely practical. Instead of coming out with newfangled notions, it takes the old tangled ones, and says, "Let us act on them as if we really believed them!" It plans that all the unemployed, the idle rich and idle poor, shall be put to work, and that instead of devouring the substance of others they shall support themselves and add a sur- plus to the common stock. It offers practical THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 21 means of abolishing war and poverty. It is too practical to let babies and their mothers work while able-bodied men are idle. It says that the practical task of mothers is to take care of their children, and that the best thing children can do for the world is not to work but to grow. jjt means to turn machinery to a more practical use than throwing workmen into starvation, and then using their starvation as the measure of all other workmen's wages .3 It does not believe in making multitudes paupers by the laws of trade, and then patching their poverty with free soup tickets. It will put an end to the partnership between competition and charity, competition making paupers and charity drop- ing one tear on each. Give no privilege, take no charity. It means to make all men workmen, and to make all workmen free. It will free the law, which sees its principles and practices going more and more under the control of those who can pay heavy fees and control judicial nomi- nations and legislative lobbies. It will free business men from the perpetual panic in which they live, and out of which only one in one 22 MEN THE WORKERS hundred, according to the statistics of bank- ruptcy, escapes. It will free capital from its timidity. It will free the Church. The Rev. Dr. Pierson, of Philadelphia, says before the Evangelical Alliance : " Our churches are becom- ing the quarters of a monopoly, and the working- man sees it and feels it. There is no real democracy in the church in this day, with a few startling and glorious exceptions." The labour movement will make competition free by making it just, humane, righteous, and so will make free our whole modern society, which now keeps step in all departments with the bagpipes of the money-makers. It wants to be more free that it may do more work, not less; i.e., more good work. It would not wait a day longer, if it could help it, to keep the idle rich in palaces or the unemployed poor in miners' hovels, nor to make guns and dynamite shells for Christian nations to kill each other with. Labour wants more, but wants to get more, like a freeman — by giving more. It is not a movement of one class against another. No remark will be made so univer- sally to-day on the Fourth of July platform THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 23 as that there are no classes in America. Cen- turies before the Christian era a Hebrew waif could rise to be the prime minister of Egypt, and to-day many a child goes from the wage- earning class to the business class; but these very transitions, instead of proving that there were no classes in Egypt and are no classes in America, prove the existence of classes. Labour says your boast that there are no classes is valuable for this, at least: It shows that you think there ought to be none. Let us try to live up to these Fourth of July speeches. Let us make that boast a reality. The labour movement is not one of self- seekers demanding to get their rights, but of brothers seeking to put things to rights. "It is not in the spirit of selfishness," says New York's Labour Commissioner, "that the eight- hours day is demanded, but to give a chance to brethren out of employment." It is not founded on hate either of man or of property, but on the love that gladly sacrifices itself for the common good, even to the point of starvation, and it proposes to render property sacred, mak- ing it just and giving it to all, thus doing for M MEN THE WORKERS property just what freedom has done for govern- ment. It does not break with the past, but builds upon it. All the rights, liberties, virtues, that have been gained in the glorious past by its heroes and martyrs are the foundation stones on which the labour movement builds. Because Cromwell, Hampden, and Pym withstood the tyranny of kings, we can make a stand against monopolists. Because Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and Franklin staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honours to protect the people of America against taxa- tion by foreigners without their consent, we resist taxation by capitalistic trusts without our consent. Because an army of noblemartyrs in all ages have gone to the dungeon and the fagot to show their acceptance of 'the Master who taught that publicans and sinners were our brothers, we have martyrs to die for the faith that the work- men are our brothers. Because Garrison, and Phillips, and Lincoln, and a million Union soldiers said the buying and selling of the black labourers of the South must cease, the world is getting ready to put an end altogether to the buying and selling of labour, the cheapening THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 25 of life by the tricks of supply and demand. It is because these divine men have lived and died to give their fellow men the right of free speech, free association, free citizenship, that onward- moving humanity is now ready for the higher freedom — free labour — and the first step up this path is the eight-hours day. The labour movement is not lawless, licen- tious, insubordinate. Qts philosophy teaches that the only freedom worth having is the freedom to do right; that the freedom to do Wrong is the freedom to become a slaved It teaches, therefore, that free competition is free only when it competes in such ways as to do good and not evil. That competition is not free which ends on the one side in the fatal snares of luxury, excessive wealth, and corrupt control of people and government for the preservation of privileges, and on the other side creates the prisoners of poverty. J That competition alone is free which leads to more freedom and not to bondage. The labour movement is for liberty, but its liberty is not of the kind which, to show that it can do what it likes, walks off the edge of a precipice only 26 MEN THE WORKERS to find that it has made itself the slave of the attraction of gravitation. Its liberty is of the kind which makes itself the master of the attraction of gravitiation by walking in the straight way. Hence it says the true liberty of the market is liberty to so produce, exchange, and consume, that all have therefrom life, liberty, and happiness; and that the policy of those who claim "vested rights" to do as they will in matters of money, markets, supply and demand, competition, labour and capital, private enterprise, are blind leaders of the blind, walking over the edge of the precipice in pursuit of false liberty, fatal to themselves and all who follow. The labour movement is the rallying of the believers in these principles around a common standard. It is not the outbreak of a turbulent , or ignorant discontent; it is not the disloyal revolt of "foreigners." Its leaders are Ruskin, Mazzini (who declared the working people to be the worthiest part of the nation), Shaftes- bury, Carlyle, Emerson, Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, Abraham Lincoln, Wendell Phillips. Every one of these, with many other great men. THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 27 has definitely and clearly put himself on record as professing the principles of the brotherhood and repudiating the new heresies which have come into popularity with the modern wealth and industry to disturb the old social har- monies. "Foreigners!" Who are the real foreigners in America? Who are, the true Americans? The true Americans are all who join in the march from slavery to freedom, led by the Pilgrim Fathers, the Quakers, the Catholics of Maryland, the Huguenots, .the refugees of 1848 from Germany, leaving their land of birth, all the clustering associations of childhood, often fame, wealth, to find liberty of conscience and of citizenship in America. These Englishmen, Irishmen, Hollanders, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Hungarians, became Americans, true Americans, the moment their hearts accepted the new truth and they turned their faces toward the land of promise. Long before they set foot on the shore of this continent these heroic men and women, wherever they were born, have been baptized into the brotherhood of Americans. ^ To-day the down- trodden peasant. 28 MEN THE WORKERS dispossessed of his ancient home in Donegal, on the sunny slopes of the Apennines, the plains of Hungary, who catches from the westerly winds that cross the Atlantic the invitation of our prairies and our liberties, and comes hither with simple trust in the promise of America that all who take refuge with her shall have land, liberty, and the fruits of their labour, is a good enough American for me. The poorer he is, the more do I honour the bravery of his adven- ture in facing a new world; the humbler he is, the more do I feel humbled by his faith and confidence in my country. He believes in Amer- ica, he gives himself for life and death to America, he offers up his work and Worship to America. He is an American. But there are men who for generations back have been fed with the choicest juices of America; they and their fathers and grandfathers have been nourished with the best fruits of liberty; all that freedom could give she has showered upon them. They have waxed great and strong, for they have always had bread and justice. They are brave of heart, for their fatherland has never let them know the hand of the tyrant. THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 29 I see these men, cunning, bold, prosperous, spreading nets to catch the weak and unwary in the courts of law, the senate chambers, and the markets. I see them denying to others the bread and justice which liberty has given them without stint. I see them digging pitfalls for the feet of Freedom, bribing and corrupting her sentries to let them steal in to assassinate her in her innermost sanctuaries. They have gotten great riches by the labour of their fellows, and they are using these riches to impoverish their fellows by the legerdemain of the markets. [We see them using the wealth which only the freedom of their native land enabled them to win to destroy that freedonji and before high heaven we solemnly declare that these men are the real foreigners, the real strangers, the real aliens of America! None of these men are in the labour movement. The labour movement sets its sternest face against certain materialist and atheistical aspects of the modern thought. The worthlessness of the body and the advantages of poverty are the favourite doctrines of those who fare sumptuously every day. But the workingmen reject this 30 MEN THE WORKERS false philosophy. They see that through the, body only can they approach the higher realms of truth; that only through the body can the noblest hopes, and purposes, and faith, whether of Thomas Jefferson, John the Baptist, or Emerson, be either seen or put into action. They therefore believe the body to be as sacred as the soul, and that if one is to be holy the other must be whole. The priests of the old religion used to make thank-offerings to their de'ities of their yearling lambs and goats, doves and fruits in their season. The priests of the new religion believe that the only religious use to which the lambs, goats, doves, and the fruits can be put is to nourish the bodies of those by whose toil they have been produced. The fine stature, beautiful faces, trusting looks of the children of the well-to-do — not the rich, for they are spoiled — give us a glimpse of the capabilities of the body, and these capabilities the workingmen intend, as the first of their religious duties, lying at the basis of all duty, to develop in all children and in all men and women. The laws of the body are cleanliness, pure air and enough of it, pure water and enough of it, pure food and THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 31 enough of it, pure earth to walk on and work in and enough of it; and these the labour movement intends to give to all children, > as much to the children of the rich, who are over- done, as to the children of the poor, who are underdone. The people who thus obey the laws of the body — not for pleasure, but for use, not for the worst, but for the best — will be just that much better able to discover and obey the laws of the spirit and add holiness of soul to holiness of body. Those who preach and practise the mortification of the body, who teach the people to be patient with bad air, bad food, bad roofs, as matters of no consequence if the soul be saved, are the real materialists and atheists, no matter how excellent their intentions, for they deny the Supreme Power in denying the laws upon which it has decreed man shall found his life. Obedience to the laws of the body is the true worship of the body. It has nothing to do with that devil's worship which teaches that every bodily impulse or invitation of passion is, in the name of freedom, to be accepted. To be free to do what you want to do means that 32 MEN THE WORKERS you are to be free not only in what you do but in the results of what you do. When Noah drank too much he was doing what he wanted to do, for the moment, but he was not free, because soon he was drunk, and then he did and suffered, as the story tells us, a great many things he did not like, and was a beastly slave. The labour movement is a peace party. The organization of workingmen is to-day the great harbinger of universal peace. So far is it from being a movement of brute force and violence, thirsting for blood, that it is the only important movement among the peoples against the con- tinuance of the savage and monopolistic wars that disgrace mankind. It speaks in thunder tones against the greatest of national sins while the Church is silent. Tl;ie Evangelical Alliance of America, representing all the great Protestant churches, had a great convention in Washington in 1887 to consider the perils of the time and the duties of the Church in regard to them. Fif- teen hundred delegates attended — many of them among the wealthiest, most learned, dis- tinguished and pious citizens of the Republic, but evidently they did not consider war one of THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 33 the evils of the time, for the subject was not so much as mentioned. In 1888 there was held in London an inter- national convention of the dignitaries of one of the greatest churches in the world — the Episco- palian. There were present grand arch- bishops and bishops from Asia, Africa, and America. They met in the vaulted and gilded chambers of Lambeth Palace to consider the relation of the Church and Church people to the questions of the day, and to promulgate their conclusions for the guidance of the faithful. They discussed temperance, chastity, polyg- amy, socialism, the use of unfermented wine in the Communion, and many other mighty matters, but not a word do their resolutions and reports say about the wars for which Chris- tendom to-day keeps herself armed to the teeth. In the same year there met in the same city of London two conventions of workingmen. One was the Twenty-first Annual Trades-Union Congress of Great Britain, the other was the International Congress of the Workmen of the World. The crime of crimes — for war involves every sin — which the Episcopalian archbishops 34 MEN THE WORKERS and bishops of the great Church of all nations and the Evangelical Alliance of America had passed by in silence the workingmen denounced in tones of thunder. Amid loud and enthu- siastic applause the formal address with which the Trades-Union Congress was opened by the president repeatedly declared that the working- men of Great Britain looked upon war as a monstrous wrong and an incalculable injury to all men. "Labour," the president said, "will not remain silent when millions are spent on useless wars." And again: "When ignorance held its empire over European workers we were the tools of kings, and thought it patriotism to shoot each other down. But now that the radiance of education is spreading itself over the civilized earth, we are stretching our hands to each other over geographical barriers and recognizing the brotherhood of man." In the International Labour Congress a French delegate called attention to the fact that the German workingman and labour editor Bebel had protested against the Franco-German war as a shameful violation of the rights of national freedom — a generous and brotherly tribute, in THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 35 striking contrast to the snapping at each other which capitalistic France and Germany keep up all along the frontier. Twenty-four Italian- workingmen societies sent their delegates spe- cially pledged to protest against the war system. By a formal vote these workingmen from all countries put themselves on the lofty moral elevation which had been left unoccupied by the bishops and deacons of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. They unanimously passed this resolution: "That, seeing the huge armaments maintained by the governments of Europe constitute a standing menace to the peace of the world, and impose terrible financial burdens upon the indus- trial classes, this Congress recommends the Democracy to give a mandate to their represen- tatives to substitute the principle of arbitration in place of war in the settlement of disputes between governments." From the blouse, not the surplice, from those who earn their living by the sweat of their brows, not from those who live by the sweat of other men's brows, has come the only considerable word in the modern world for peace. The same 36 MEN THE WORKERS search for harmony between man and man, the same philosophy of peace, plenty, and jus- tice, which brings the workingmen together in their unions and congresses to find a means for putting an end to the war and murder of the markets, makes them demand that the war and murder of nations be stopped. The Interna- tional Congress of Workingmen which is to meet this summer (1889) in Paris has for its principal purpose to agitate for an international co-opera- tion of the workingmen of the world to regulate the hours of labour and to prevent wars. The labour party is not only a party of peace — it is the only party of peace. The contrast between the attitude of the Church and the attitude of the workingmen is a capital illustration of Ruskin's pungent words: "The homes of baron and priest, side by side, established on the hills. Underneath in the plain the peasant driving his oxen. The baron lives by robbing the peasant, and the priest by blessing the baron." Organized labour is not a furious fanaticism, a nineteenth century revival of mad crusades, a climbing of ladders of dreams into Utopia. Nothing has been from the first so character- THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 37 istic of the utterances and actions of organized labour as its moderation and conservatism. It carries this to an extreme. For years the Trades-Union Congresses of England would not allow the land question to be considered in their proceedings. Read the debates and the platform, follow the proceedings in speech and resolutions of the workingmen in this country and abroad, and you will find them deliberate, careful, guarded, and practical. They have never uttered a threat, never made an unrea- sonable request. In all this they are far more self-contained than those great leaders of the world's thought who have passionately thrown themselves in behalf of the working people across the path of the devouring dragon of the markets. Sir Walter Scott threatens with "God's justice those who have blown up the business world into a state of unsubstantial opulence at the expense of the health and morals of the working people." Carlyle says : " Great heavens ! will not one French Revolution and Reign of Terror suflSce us ; but must there be two ? There will be two if needed; there will be twenty 38 MEN THE WORKERS if needed; there will be precisely as many as are needed." The proper arbiter is society; but if society is not highly enough developed it must expect to see the contestants fight it out as did the Middle Age barons, before the power of the state grew selfconscious and strong enough to control them. According to Carlyle, the doctrine of supply and demand applies to revolutions as well as to wages. Ruskin says: "What is the remedy? None but the ruin which necessarily cuts a nation of blockheads down to the ground." On every side are springing up Dr. Curealls who propose every kind of scheme for the abolition of poverty and injustice — from Henry George to Bellamy. A noble woman, Helen Campbell, put piteous pictures of the sufferings of the poor of New York into a book, "The Prisoners of Poverty." The day after it was published she was called upon by a dozen indignant reformers. There was a land nationalist, and a greenbacker, and a socialist, and a corset abolitionist, and a liquor abolitionist, and all the rest, and each of them indignantly and sorrowfully wanted to know why she had not recommended his par- THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 39 tictilar pill. All these reformers — and there is not one of their schemes that has not some good in it — are urging their panaceas on the labour- ing men. How have the labouring men stood this . pressure ? Have they lost their heads ? Have they ^hown themselves rash ? Have they taken advantage of the overtopping eminence of such spokesmen as Carlyle and Ruskin, and said: If these idols of the literary world can shake thunder and lightning against our oppres- sors, and talk revolution and destruction, we, too, are licensed by their example to breathe threatening and slaughter? Have they said: If great philosophers like John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer can declare against private property in land, we may declare against it, too, and proceed to abolish it ? No ; the people — and the working men and women are the people — have proved themselves again, as always in history, humble, patient, wise, forbearing, prudent, far beyond their spokesmen, and, most vital of all, entirely con- scious of the limitations put upon them, by the various disadvantages of their position. With gentle, unrevengeful intelligence the masses 40 MEN THE WORKERS have lifted themselves out from under the throne, forgiving their oppressors seventy times seven, never striking the first blow, and letting the first blow, and many following it, go unanswered. In the same spirit they now seek freedom as brothers of industry. They seek to-day to add to political democracy industrial democracy, its legitimate and inevitable consequence. And how? One step at a time, and the first step the most moderate possible — the min- imum — not the beginning, really only an opportunity to get ready to begin — the eight- hours day. Organized labour, the world over, in these Fourth of July meetings to-day, in the trades- union congresses, in the international con- gresses, putting aside all sweeping projects of social reconstruction, giving no ear to the passionate indignation with which the great seers, prophets, and poets are crying out against the oppression of the poor, says simply to its employer. Business: "Give us a little time every day to think. Let us work but eight hours a day." It is to this conservative, reasonable, peaceful, practical, and profitable proposition THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 41 that labour limits itself. "Give us a little of our time every day to think." The working day in England 400 years ago, the great Eng- lish historian. Professor Thorold Rogers, tells us, was but eight hours a day in farm or shop. All that has been added since to the power of the world in machinery has not, we are told by the greatest of modern political economists, John Stuart Mill, lightened the day's toil of a single human being. John Morley, the great statesman of the richest country in the world, declares that with all its resources, power, and wealth, one-half the people of Great Britain who reach the age of sixty are paupers, and Emerson, America's highest philosopher, tells us the timidity of property results from the existence of great wrongs, which must be righted. Labour only says: "Give us a little of our time every day to think. It is upon us that most of the burden of all this falls. Taxation falls heaviest on us. War falls heaviest on us. Pauperism falls heaviest on us. Luxury falls heaviest on us. The losses of trade fall heaviest on us. Hard times fall heaviest on us. Give us a little of our time every day to think." Carlyle tells 42 MEN THE WORKERS us that "the work hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution on the eve of fiery wreck and madness; they will not march farther on the sixpence-a-day and supply-and-demand principle; they will not, nor ought they, nor can they." The great Channing prophesies that the present selfish, dissocial system must give way; he predicts a mighty revolution which will not stop until new ties have taken the place of those which have hitherto bound men together. The Episcopal archbishops and bishops of the world, from Lambeth Palace in London, confess the "anxious considerations" with which they view " the excessive inequality in the distribution of this world's goods, vast accumulations and desperate poverty side by side." The call for the Evangelical Alliance of America at the close of 1887 says: "The existence of great cities, severe competition, an unemployed class, increas- ing pauperism and crime, are the occasion and evidence of great discontent for which the ballot affords no remedy." In the midst of this babel of warnings. Labour only says quietly: "Give us a little of our time every day to think. You have made us citizens and partners in the THE LABOUR MOVEMENT 43 Government — the greatest co-operative institu- tion society has yet produced. It is our votes must decide war or peace, the tenure of land, the issue of money, the control of trade, the maintenance of justice, the general welfare, the course of society through the threatening future. Give us a little of our time every day to think. Let us have the eight-hours day." That is all labour asks, and it could not ask for anything wiser, nor for anything to which it has a better right — part of its own life — not for its own selfish pleasure, but for the good of the world. There is no reason, no good reason, why this decent and proper and minimum pro- posal should not be at once accepted, either universally or by one place after another. The inauguration of this reform might at first require some readjustment in business arrange- ments. The disturbance, if there was any, would be brief, and would be but the prelude to a prosperity of which the like has never yet been seen. The pith of the whole matter is that there is plenty of unused land, plenty of unused wood, coal, timber, and salt and iron, of unused water-power, steam, and electricity, and plenty 44 MEN THE WORKERS of men to work all these. As long as mankind has this vast, unexhausted margin of resources to draw upon all social readjustments are possible. The only real obstacles are in the hearts of men. II "the union fokever"* TTC THEN Trajan's matchless column rose » ▼ in Trajan's Forum at Rome, and that great empire was at the peak of its glory, there were two competitors for the prize of uni- versal empire. One was the magnificent Roman State. Its great heart was the proud city in which b^at seven millions of human hearts. Its extremities were the limits of the known world. Its wonderful flow of civic life came and went like the tides of blood or sea, with a secure regularity that seemed to put it beyond decay or defeat. Its perfect machinery carried it on so smoothly that the public welfare knew no difference when an emperor, besotted with power, made his horse ruler over the people. In its days of most profligate "prosperity" there was enough of conscience in that pagan empire to so rouse the people when Didius Julianus *An address delivered in 1891 before ibe Chicago Ethical Culfure Society' 4S 46 MEN THE WORKERS bought the throne that they put him to death. ApoUodorus built Trajan's column to stand forever, like the power of which it was the marble apex. The Roman would have laughed to scorn any one who should have suggested to him that his mighty fabric of universal dominion had any competitor for supremacy and survival. A competitor there was, but so unorganized, unselfconscious, that it hardly knew of its own existence; so humble, that no dream of earthly power wandered in the mind of any of its mem- bers, who did not dream at all, but lived by faith in an empire beyond the grave. It was not the Roman but the Christian who realized the dream of universal empire and immortal power. When the Romans were marking their chronology with the conquest of provinces, and the glories of new forums and immortal arches of triumph, the Christians kept tally of time by the records of their perse- cutions; the first, the secoiid, the third, the fourth, the fifth, and the sixth, and so on to the tenth. While the Romans revelled and hid their shame in palaces, the Christians burrowed in their catacombs. The Pax Romana, the "THE UNION FOREVER" 47 Roman Peace, was to bind mankind together in a lasting league; but the brotherhood born of the peace was not the brotherhood of the Roman. To-day, there are two competitors for the honour of founding a new universal empire, a new brotherhood of humanity. The hearts of men by the eternal law of human nature must melt into one another, wherever contact becomes possible. The secrets of history can be read in this law. "There is no such country as India, and there are no such people as the Hindus," said Sir Grant Duff, an eminent English states- man, lately, referring to the fact that what is called India is really a heterogeneous mixture of races, as diverse as the most widely separated nations of Europe. And yet, simply because the dominion of England compels those unlike and once bitterly hostile people to live with each other, under the British Peace, the Pax Britannica, those ancient enemies, those different tribes, are flowing together. One of the most inter- esting and important movements of modern history is this gradual amalgamation of these alien races and nations. The Pax Britannica only gives the opportunity. The law of the 48 MEN THE WORKERS human heart is the force at work, and as flowers rise out of the soil in spring, peace makes brother- hood blossom all over the Indian peninsula. Those who have eyes to see can always see history in the making, and one of the most thrilling spectacles of the modern world is the emergence of a new nation, a new people, to give a new name to the new land of India, like a new continent of peace and brotherhood rising out of the ocean of storms and shipwreck. As the universal human heart fused into a new brotherhood, when the Pax Romana gave the opportunity, as the hearts of the peninsula of Hindustan are uniting into a greater heart, now that the Pax Britannica gives it room, so we may know that, as history repeats itself, the wide empire of modern international civil- ization will surely give birth to a new brother- hood. The brotherhood which blossomed on the ruins of Imperial Rome did not come from its emperors, its conquerors, its palaces, its luxury, but from the love and piety of its poor and lowly. The brotherhood which is spring- ing up to-day in India does not wear the mantle of Lord This, and Viceroy That, and Arch- "THE UNION FOREVER" 49 bishop T 'other, of the ruling power of England, but on the contrary is the brotherhood of those who are oppressed by their luxury and tyranny, a brotherhood which asserts its right to live its own life free from subserviency to any other life, no matter how mighty. The new brother- hood our civilization is destined to beget will, similarly, not be the perpetuation of the rule of the power which, magnificent, irresistible, clad in purple and fine linen, proud recipient of tribute from every gift of man and bounty of nature, now commands the high places of the earth, and flatters itself with the old dream of universal empire and immortal destiny. The two competitors for the prize of universal dominion in the modern world — the competitors who stand to-day in the place Roman and Christian held two thousand years ago, which Englishman and Hindu hold to-day in India, are the Money Power on one side, and the Labour Movement on the other. The Money Power is the ruler of the world to-day. Like the Roman Empire, it shapes the destiny of mankind to the extremities of the known world. It takes a tribute in comparison with which the revenues PROPERTY OF LI3RARY ''i^ 50 MEN THE WORKERS poured into the coffers of Rome were but respect- able poverty. Five hundred millions a year are the tribute which Asia, Africa, and America pour into London alone. This Colossus plants one foot on each hemisphere, and all the trade and intercourse of the world have to pass between. The New Feudalism, as it has been called, holds all industries, all peoples, in sub- jection to its will. It is the international ruler of the modern world — the supreme authority. It wants to get double pay from those who are in debt, and by a silent concert of action all the leading nations declare silver to be no longer good money, thus upsetting at one blow the standards of value by which the people have done their business for thousands of years. All debts must be paid in gold, and the poor peasant of India* and Europe, the farmer and miner of Illinois, must work twice as hard as before, or get half as much, in order that the Money Power holding the stocks and bonds of the world may get twice as much as it should have. So overmastering is the influence of this modern Empire of the Money Power that it over- *Thi& paragraph was inserted in the address after the demonetization of silver in India, "THE UNION FOREVER" 51 rules religion itself, which men declare to be the supreme guide of their conduct. Our civilization professing the principles of love, returning good for evil, and self-sacrifice, pre- sents in reality a policy, within and without, which reverses these doctrines in practice. To the ignorant barbarians it comes not as the white-robed evangel of love and peace, and good will, but as the peddler of gin and calicoes, and it forces its way through dark continents, not by the irresistible power of the Gospel, but by the free use of gunpowder. That the Money Power, not the Christian Church, is the ruler of the world was shown, for instance, when the Christian nation of Great Britain, in order to make a market for its opium, compelled the heathen Chinese at the cannon's mouth to become opium eaters against their own most strenuous entreaties. It was shown again when Christian France and England joined forces with the pagan government of China to put down the Taiping rebellion, which was a Christian movement, and, but that it was so snuffed out, would have put China in the ranks of Christian nations. In its internal administration the 52 MEN THE WORKERS » Money Power divides each nation into two tribes, rich and poor. These halves pretend to be brothers, but in violation of every rule of brotherhood, one lives in luxury and super- fluity at the cost of compelling the other to live in the slums and in destitution. War was the trade of the Roman; trade is the war of the Money Power. The Roman sought to achieve his universal dominion by slaughtering his enemies in battles, the Money Power for the same end kills its "brothers" by its bargains in wage-contracts and combination of prices for bread. Tacitus tells us that there were only 300,000 freemen in the whole Roman Empire. A writer has recently shown us that in a few years the whole United States, at the rate at which large fortunes are now piling up, will be owned by 30,000 men. From this it is easy to calculate that the number of "free men," men who own themselves and own the rest of us, will be for the whole civilized world only one-tenth as many as the freemen of the Roman Empire. This small tody of men, shrewd, intelligent, lustful of power, continually crying. Give, Give, may quarrel among them- "THE UNION FOREVER" 53 selves for the division of the spoils, but they will unite like a Macedonian phalanx against the people seeking their rights. The commerce uniting all ports, the finances uniting all mon- etary interests, science ransacking nature for means of speeding travel, intercommunication of ideas, and the harnessing of all forces of heat, light, chemistry, to the car of Progress, have brought the people within reach of each other, as they have not been before since the days of Trajan. The new propinquity, as propinquity always does, has created new affections. Two brotherhoods again compete for universal dominion. One is an alliance of the owners of the earth, and their principles are that the chief end of man is to buy and sell; that it is right to buy anything for sale, even virtue, to sell anything for which there is a buyer, even men's lives ; that prices are governed by supply and demand, and that they are the governors of supply and demand. These men with these principles dominate the world to-day with a power portentous, magnificent, terrible — and increasing. They control its currencies, its banks, its markets, its machinery, its legis- 54 MEN THE WORKERS latures, its governments, its society, its art and literature, its colleges. They are the rich, powerful, learned, fashionable. The daughters of American millionaires are marrying the dukes and counts of Europe, and the classes are every- where uniting in markets and senates, by trusts in the one, and by conspiracy laws and extra- dition treaties and copyright laws in the other, to swell their power over the masses. Surely here is a combination, a brotherhood, if we may degrade that noble word to such a use, which nothing can overcome. Surfely here is a power which will continue to hold its seat forever. One of its chief spokesmen, Andrew Carnegie, insists that the present ways of doing things are right; that it is right that through them a few men should become enormously rich, and the mass of men remain as now — enormously poor; and that the chief duty of the millionaires is to give back in their own way, and at their own sweet will, part of the millions in charity to mankind. But another brotherhood has been born out of the nearness of man to man made possible by modern civilization — this brotherhood is the "THE UNION FOREVER" 55 Labour Movement. It is humble, poor, till yesterday almost inarticulate, with few friends in high places. To all the haughty pretensions of the Money Power it says. No, and it backs up its No as the first Christians backed up their No to Roman power, by the sacrifice and martyrdom of the lives of its men, women, and children. A cause for which the poor are dying is the cause of the future. The Labour Brotherhood says No, a radical, thoroughgoing No to every principle of the Money Brother- hood. The chief end of man is to buy and sell ? No, says Labor; the chief end of man is to live the life of a free man, whole — that is holy — in body, mind, and soul. It is right to buy anything cheap and sell anything dear? No, says Labour, you shall not buy or sell men at all, cheap or dear. You shall not manipulate the markets, and monopolize lands, mines, roads, machinery, and the forces of nature, so that the net result of all is that those who do the work of the world live in slums and hovels, amid filth and malaria, and the minority, the Money Power, live in palaces, and then justify all this by calling it supply and demand. No 56 MEN THE WOEKEES ijaatter what you call it, says the Labour Brother- hood, it is wrong. "You can never expect them to agree," said Sydney Smith, of two men who were quarrelling across the fence that divided their backyards; "they are arguing from different premises." The Labour Movement and the Money Power argue from different premises, and they can never agree. Workingmen and their employers can agree, must agree, in this world of compromise, but it will always be by some surrender by one side or the other; either the employer will give up some of the claim of the Money Power, that a man has a right to all he can get by a bargain, or the workingman will give up some of his claim that brotherhood should rule in the bargains of the world as much as anywhere else. The Labour Movement has, I believe, passed through its infantile period. It has not achieved the full measure of the ten persecutions through which Christianity had to pass; but it has gone through the most of them, and the worst of them. It is no longer an almost unconscious, instinc- tive groping of men blinded by oppression to find a way of escape from the House of Bondage "THE UNION FOREVER " 57 into the Promised Land. It has grown far beyond that. The people are using the rights of freedom of worship, speech, press, assemblage, travel, so toilsomely won, and are building up the new brotherhood on their foundations. The Labour Movement has its newspapers, its trades-unions, its Federations of Labour, its international congresses. "The still, sad music of humanity," to which the Labour Movement marches, is beginning to melt the hearts of men. Its principles are finding able exponents, and its programme is becoming clear and definite. The leading doctrines of the Labour Movement are spread out before the world, which must choose between it and the Money Power, for the two lead in directly opposite directions. The world cannot serve two such masters. The Money Power wants to make money; the Labour Movement seeks to make men. The great aim of the members of the brotherhood of money makers is to rise in the world by keeping others down; that of the Labour Movement is that all rise. The Money Power accepts and uses war and poverty for its profit; the Labour Movement demands 68 MEN THE WORKERS the abolition of both, as the greatest blots on the honour of mankind, now that slavery has gone. Most of the causes of death are social, says Engels. The money-makers fatten upon a system which gives them the profits of slum rents and sweated labour, and gives the labourer a death rate half as high again as that of the employer. The Money Power teaches that because a man is stronger than another, or cleverer, he has the right thereby to keep the other forever subject to him, working for him while he rests. The Labour Movement holds that men who are to live together in society must make mutual sacrifices. It holds it no better that the superior workman should set the pace at which all other workmen must work, than that the fastest walker in an army should set the pace at which all must march. " I do not think," said Kingsley, "the cry to get on to be anything but a devil's cry. The workingman who tries to get on to desert his class, enters into a lie and leaves God's path for his own." The Labour Movement demands sacrifices of its members, as all organizations do. "THE UNION FOREVER" 59 as every church, every government, every party does. But it will cease to demand those sacri- fices by compulsion as soon as men become good enough to make the sacrifices voluntarily. The cost of labour — production — to society is very different from its cost to the employer. The cost to society is the total cost of breeding and rearing, maintaining and burying, the labourer. His sickness, injury, premature death, etc., are all charges upon society, not to the employer. The employer does not pay back to society nor the employee what the labour cost, but by all the familiar strategy of the com- petitive system buys the good part of the labourer cheap, and leaves the bad parts of him to be healed, upheld, buried, by the mass of society; that is, by those not "smart" or "strong" enough to outwit their brothers and secure this sinister advantage. Equity — if not equality — demands that even the division of labour shall not be permitted if it is to be made an instrument of oppression, of undue advantage for a few. Division of labour is good, in theory, but in fact it produces great ills, such as dwarfing the labourer, child labour. 60 MEN THE WORKERS great wealth, etc., all of which are fatal to society. Now we protestants, abolitionists, are willing to accept division of labour if it can be had with justice, equity, not otherwise. If all these things — competition, high finance, division of labour — are to live, it must be because they have been reformed so as not to offend the sense of justice in mankind. Society can live without division of labour, but not without justice. There are two things the labour brotherhood of the world specially desires to obtain at this time: The eight-hour law and the recognition, full and complete, of the trades-unions. On these two points it is concentrating its chief efforts. My main purpose here is to show that these aspirations, especially the latter, are noble and necessary; that all workingmen ought to form themselves into unions, and that all good citizens ought to support the movement enthu- siastically and fully. The success of the eight- hour movement is included in the other: shorter working hours can only be got by suc- cessful organization among the men. To the question of unions, therefore, we will confine ourselves. The union forever! "THE UNION FOREVER" 61 Workingmen's unions should be encouraged because men have a right to organize if they want to; it is a natural right, if there is any such. Business men organize, and do practically all of their transactions through unions, which they call corporations. Their boards of directors are "committees." Their superintendents are walking or sitting delegates. Nobody calls it dictation because the two or three thousand men who own the Rock Island road decide by committee what to charge, and then name to the public through one man what will be the price of railroad tickets and freights, and what wages 'they are willing to pay, etc. Why should it be dictation for the five thousand men employed by the Rock Island to decide by their meetings what wages they think they should have, and to send their delegates or committees to represent them in making the bargain ? If the seller of labour thinks he can get a better price that way, what right has anyone to say. You shall not do it.'' Our civilization so worships its bargains that it puts them above its bibles; if it has to choose between goods and gospel, it takes the goods 62 MEN THE WORKERS every time. Yet it denies the workmen the union which will enable them to make better bargains. What reason can there be for such discrimination, except that he is the weaker? Except the good old rule, the simple plan, that they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can ? Unions should be encour- aged because the mere fact of acting together, deciding questions by debate and majority vote, making sacrifices of opinion and individual superiority for the common good of all, is an education. It develops the reason, the con- science, the civic sense. A union man will be a better employee, a better comrade, a better citizen, a better man than the non-union man. Men organized are more conservative than unorganized. The business men of Great Britain twenty-five years ago went through this fever of destroying the unions which has now seized upon the American business man. They have given it up. Their experience is all summed up in the pithy phrase of one of the greatest business leaders in England: "I had rather deal with a committee than with a mob." They found that an unorganized body of men "THE UNION FOREVER" 63 was liable, and sometimes very unexpectedly, to become a mob. The unions should be encouraged because only so can the workingman hold his own in the cruelly competitive world we live in. The unorganized workingman, says Thorold Rogers, cannot make a free con- tract. "You all know," said John Morley, once, to the miners of Durham, "what union has done for you. It has made men of you." "Trades-unions," says the eminent John Stuart Mill, "far from being a hindrance to a free market for labour, are the necessary instrumentality of that free market — are the indispensable means of enabling the sellers of labour to take due care of their own interests under the system of competition. Strikes, there- fore, and the trade societies which render strikes possible, are, for these various reasons, not a mischievous, but on the contrary, a valu- able part of the existing machinery of society." Quotations like these could be multiplied indef- initely. Trades-unions have done enormous good in the past, and have established their right to be counted among the greatest instilimentalities 64 MEN THE WORKERS of civilization and social progress. The trabes- unions of the Middle Ages, then called guilds, were among the most remarkable institutions of those days. The researches of historians are disclosing the facts that what we call the dark ages were centuries of social security and tranquillity and justice, superior in many respects, incredible as that seems to our modern conceit, to the times we live in. The trade-union of the Middle Ages had accomplished these things : It had established an eight-hour day for farm workers, as well as artisans and shop workers. Masters and men both belonged to the same union. No brother had a right to underbid another, and the employee had the same right to his place that the employer had. These old guilds prohibited night work. If any member of the guild bought commodities fit for use by the trade, every other member could claim a share in the bargain. The modern practices of lowering quality and cheapening price were absolutely forbidden. The industries of the times were practically under the control of these guilds. One result of the prohibition of the mad competition which runs riot in our day "THE UNION FOREVER" 65 was that there was on all sides a rude plenty for all, unknown now, and much more equality than in our day. Our conflicts of interests between labour and capital, so deplorable, were unknown. Let the unorganized workman of to-day think of the abyss into which he has fallen under our system, which makes it impos- sible for any but the exceptional few to become masters. Seligman, the most conservative of students, says that the goal of complete inde- pendence was attainable by all without exception. This was what the union did in the Middle Ages. And only by the restoration of the union upon an enlarged and improved scale can the work- ingman recover the possibility of becoming independent. The union forever ! Not the workingman alone, but the rest of us, business men, lawyers, preachers, doctors, whose prosperity is bound up with that of the working- man, should weigh well the inestimable impor- tance of these facts. Like the other institutions of the Middle Ages, the unions prevented an undue competition, and rendered individual opu- lence impossible. The workingman felt his honour involved in keeping up the reputation of 66 MEN THE WORKERS his predecessors for good work. The union preserved him from a continual struggle for existence, and ensured a comparatively contented life. The result was not that he became lazy or shiftless, or dissipated, as the upholders of the present system of industrial war and throat- cutting are continually telling us will happen if We do not chase the workingmen through the world with the whip of want and the fear of death; no, the result of his freedom from terror and uncertainty was that he endeavoured to become a better workman, and let his energies find vent in growing pride in the creations of his skill. Our diabolical system of competition, which, as the member of one of the great trusts put it, cuts to the bone, has taken away this security of life. It has plunged the workman again into the fierce struggle for existence. It has made pride in his product impossible to him. Capitalists, employers, use every artifice to give the men as little money for their work as possible, but complain with righteous indignation when the workingmen give as little work as possible for the money. And our system has produced just the vices which the old system did not. It "THE UNION FOREVER" 67 is making the workingmen poor and desperate, and it is in such soil that vice grows, not in the other. The workingman who is to-day com- pelled to make himself troublesome to call attention to his wrongs, was then so contented that there were no social troubles like those which are racking our modern world. The chief reason for this tranquillity was that the system was such that every workman was, or could become, his own master. This rapid sketch of what the union has proved itself to be by actual experience, shows that the union is a good thing for the workingman and the employer and the business man, and everyone else who wants to live in a peaceful, prosperous, orderly, contented, happy, and progressive society. It is because the union would do a great deal to bring back those happy days that I say: The union forever ! Workmen who do not join unions are untrue to their own best interests, and business men who do not encourage the workmen to join them, and do not support them in all their struggles to maintain their organizations, so as to use them to make better bargains, are also 68 MEN THE WORKERS untrue to their own interests, and to those of society at large. In the Auditorium, built by scab labour, Chicago gives the lie to every line in the American Declaration of Independence. It is now known, as in the dockers' and bakers' contests in London, that the most des- perately poor among the workmen can form unions, can maintain an obstinate strike, can elevate their condition, and can lift their wives and children to a better life — on one condition, vital, all-important — if they have public support. These unions and strikes, by the sympathy they created between the different layers of the people, worked for harmony through the whole of society, and knit all men closer together in sympathy. They gave the workmen better wages, shorter hours, higher living, and a chance for higher thinking. They must better trade and improve the business of merchants, manufacturers, bankers, professional men, by lifting their customers up to the higher stage of existence, where they will have more to spend, and will consume more because they produce more. The success of these two London unions had widespreading results. Wages have been "THE UNION FOREVER" 69 advanced, in consequence, in two hundred trades, and iji one hundred and sixty industries the workingmen have formed new unions, or re-formed old ones, to get on in the world; not at the expense of their fellows, but with them and for them. The movement thus assumes the form of a social amelioration of the most beneficent character. "Dictation this is," says the capitalist. " Dic- tating to me how I shall run my business." That is what George III. said to Washington, Jefferson, and Patrick Henry. Their answer to him will do for the workman to his employer: "All men are created equal, with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The secret of success for labour unions lies in the sympathy and support of the public! The workingmen are too easily discouraged about the a,ttitude of the public. The public only need to know the truth of oppression to rally to the defence of the oppressed. Recent events have shown the same tendencies have begun, though faintly and timidly, to work here as in the emancipation of the workingmen abroad. 70 MEN THE WORKERS The cigar-makers of Chicago assess themselves for the miners of Spring Valley, and influential newspapers in St. Louis, New York, Boston, and Chicago give columns on columns to the con- flict. Sums of money begin to come from the well-to-do, usually from women, the first to feel sympathy and the moral appeal of the New Conscience. All these are the first drops of the blessed shower, breaking a drought of the human heart, in which the fair face of human nature has been blistered by the heat of a pitiless greed. I can hear the coming notes of a glorious music. The song that was sung for the slave is being taken up for the workingman. We are coming. Father Abraham, nine hundred thousand strong! It was Abraham Lincoln who said, oflicially, to the whole people in an annual message: "I affirm it as my conviction that class laws placing capital above labour are more dangerous to the Republic at this hour than chattel slavery in the days of its haughtiest supremacy. Labour is prior to and above capital, and deserves much higher consideration." "THE UNION FOREVER" 71 Father Abraham, of the white as well as the black slaves! This is more our question than the workingman's. Somehow the workingman will live. He can live without us. We would die, all of us, at once, without him. London is not more dependent on bakers than the whole world is on workmen. If worst comes to worst, they will survive, not we. They can bear toil, hunger, cold, and disappointment; we cannot. The recent overture by the Farmers' Congress at St. Louis, for alliance with the workingmen, shows that farmers at last see the truth. Busi- ness men have yet to learn that the only hope for their survival as independent American citizens, instead of vassals of the Money Power, lies in union with workmen. The spread of trusts and monopolies, and the power of the plutocracy in politics, are evidence of the rapidity with which business is passing out of the control of business men into that of business animals, whose proper place is among the carnivora who go on all fours. They need, as Emerson said of similar men in his day, to be educated out of the quadruped state. They are devouring the independent business man as well as the 72 MEN THE WORKERS workingman, and, not content with their control of the markets, are relieving the people of the trouble of selecting their own judges, legislators, and executives. They have ceased to care for public approval, since they can buy its official badges. The discontent of the workingmen is the loudest, because they are the weakest, and suffer the most from monopoly. The prescience of the business men ought to start in them that ferment of reform which actual want has aroused among the labourers. Only by making common cause with labour against the Money Power can business save itself and all of us from catastrophe. The trades-union is the precursor of the union of all men. This social upheaval among the most miserable of the labourers, and the rally to their help of their more fortunate brethren of labour, and by the well-to-do, foretells the greater union that is to be when all humanity become one in what St. Augustine called the City of God. We see every possible aspect of complaisance in the idea that we are to do for the poor. What seems utterly lacking is any recognition that they are to do for themselves. "THE UNION FOREVER" 73 The workingmen should organize: I. — Because organization, union, association, is the law of human life ; man the animal, becomes man the citizen only to the extent that he unites with his fellows. The greater the number of his associations, as in family. State, church, club, labour union, political party, the more of a man he is. Individuality becomes possible only by association. Man isolated, would be man brute; and he would hav^ none of the individualities which, in society, make him a man on as many sides as he has relations with other men and women — as father, husband, brother, citizen, friend, political partisan, fellow- worker, or what not. Every new tie gives a new individuality. Every attempt on the part of those who are the buyers of labour to prevent the sellers of labour from uniting to promote and protect their interests, is an attempt to de-humanize the workman, and de-civilize the world. II. — Because manufacturers, merchants, railroad men, financiers, all interests, are uniting the world over to gain the advantage which union gives them in the markets, both as buyers 74 MEN THE WORKERS and sellers . Trades-unions of workingmen have no means but their own efforts for preventing the incursion of non-members into their field. But the lawyers, doctors, dentists, and other guilds have the whole machinery of the law at their service to keep out intruders who attempt to exercise "their sacred right to labour." For the workingmen to remain disunited would be an admission to the world that they were incom- petent to act the part of men of the nineteenth century, but would gladly accept the place and pay of a divided and subject class. A bargain made between a union of employers at one end, and a mob of workmen at the other, means an increase of the disproportions, already alarming, between the share labour receives and the share it ought to receive of that which it produces. III. — Because only by organization can workingmen prepare themselves to be citizens of industry, the new citizenship which is their manifest destiny. Government, which is co-operation for certain ends, exists only by the consent of those who co-operate. Business is co-operation for certain ends, and can continue to exist only on the same principle of consent. "THE UNION FOREVER" 75 Property is not more sacred than government. Governments derive their just power only from the consent of those concerned, and property, business, capital, wealth, have no other right or lasting foundation. The revenue of corpo- rations, capitalists, middlemen of all kinds, is as truly a tax on the people as the revenue of the government. If no taxation without represen- tation is a good rule for one, it is good for the other. If it be said there is representation, because all these revenues of the middlemen are got by contract, the answer is that the contracts are for the most part not good contracts, because of fraud, or because made under duress by the people, when weak or ignorant, or because the results, reflected in slums, high mortality, the vast number of unemployed, are contrary to public policy. The workman refuses to con- sider that he must gauge his present deserts against the past miseries — or be silent because statisticians prove that he has gained something. What he wants is his share of to-day. IV. — Because only by organization, local, national, international, and by federation of all these can the workingmen fit themselves to 76 MEN THE WORKERS march by brigades in the ranks of the New People, who, in Europe as in America, on the farm as well as in the factory, are rising to the ideal of a new brotherhood of humanity, in which all shall work to live, all shall live to work, and the work shall be not wealth for the few, but welfare for all the people. Ill THE SAFETY OF THE FUTURE LIES IN ORGAN- IZED LABOUR* WORKINGMEN have the undoubted right of organization. The question of the day is: "What are they going to do with it?" This right, like all other rights, can be kept healthy only by exercise. The liberty of union can be preserved only by using the union to get more liberty. The workingmen have the vote, but there are signs in plenty that if they do not use it to free themselves in other ways, they will lose that right and all the other free- doms that are clustered with it. "Too many people vote in Ohio," the counsel of a great trust said lately in the United States courts. A constitutional convention is about to be held in New York, and one of the reforms to be pressed is some qualification of the suffrage, to put an end to this evil of "too many people voting." * A paper nad before the tluTteenth annual convention of the American Federation of Labour, Chicago, December, 1893. 77 78 MEN THE WORKERS Never have the people — the working people — had the right, the light, the might they have now. There are many periods in the past which shine like golden ages in contrast with our own, but only at points and for single moments. There were no paupers and no unemployed in our fatherlands — Germany or Ireland or England — in the good old times when society was organ- ized in village communities and the land held in common. But, as well, there was no right to change your trade, your place, your religion. You were not what you are to-day — a person, a man, a citizen — but only one of a tribe, a guild, a parish. Thorold Rogers tells us of the golden age of labour in England in the fifteenth century, when eight hours was the working day in town and country, and when men were dear and living was cheap. But in that golden age a coal miner, a salt worker, was not a man. He was a creature of the pit. Once a miner, always a miner, even unto the third and fourth gene- ration of his descendants, and a fixture of the property, sold with its sale to any new owner. If we can look backward to those days with longing, through the windows of our common THE SAFETY OF THE FUTURE 79 schools and our voting booths, it is because we have lost the virtue to look forward, and it will come true again that those who avert their faces from the hopes and the duties that call them on will turn to stone — pillars of salt — and of salt that has lost its savour. From him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath. To the man who is free and would remain free, fate is a policeman uttering the perpetual word " Move on." The coal miners of England, in their recent contest with the mine-owners, did more than resist a demand for a reduction of wages. They carried the standard of their rights to a new height. They demanded that hereafter the cost of a decent life for the man who mined should be a fixed charge on the product of the mines; that in the fluctuations of supply and demand there should be a line — a life-line, not a dead-line — below which the share of labour should not go. The demand for a living wage was a rebellion of the people against the maladministration of their lives and labour, their property and their liberty, by others. It was an insurrection against the decree of busi- 80 MEN THE WORKERS ness that wages shall follow prices, and prices know no law but the competition between traders. We and our wives and children, the miners said, are not chips for gamblers. Take your choice, a living wage or no coal ! In taking this position the miners stood for no more than what Mill, Ricardo, and all the great economists have declared to be the true law of wages. The public came to their support. Members of Parliament, some of the nobility, more than one mine-owner, gave money and encouragement. A daily newspaper in London raised $90,000 to feed the starving. Large numbers of the clergy of all denominations took part in the relief work, and, more important, declared in public that the demand for a living wage was one no people could remain Christian and deny. The clergy of Bristol united in a formal public statement to this effect. Men, women, and even children who could not spare money, sacrificed watches, rings, any- thing that could be sold. Ben Tillett, the labour leader, gave up his bicycle. Miss Frances E. Willard, of Chicago, then in England, gave her watch. The women where collieries were at THE SAFETY OF THE FUTURE 81 work sent to the mothers in idle districts to bring their starving children to their homes to share with their own children, though these had not enough. Mothers wept for joy at the chance thus to surrender to strangers little ones whom they could not feed, and whom they might never see again. It is in such blood-red letters as these that jour theory that labour is a com- modity! imprints itself in the lives of the people. The defeat of the demand for a reduction of wages is much; but it is more that the miners have burned these new words of the living wage into the bill of rights. It was the union of the miners which made this resistance and this counter-advance possible. Had the business men broken down the principle of the living wage they would have moved on to strike down the union. The men on their side must not stop. They must take the next step. The next step to the principle of the living wage is the living wage itself. (The living wage is that share in the products of the common toil which belongs to men; and men, the best authority tells us, are born equal, with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Alienate 82 MEN THE WORKERS one right, the smallest right, to life, liberty, or happiness, and the wage is less than the living wagej "I have a right to be a man," said Francis Lieber, "because I am a man." That is the living wage, and to realize it is the sure destiny of organized labour. It was the work of our forefathers to establish the truth that no one shall govern a country without the consent of its people. (It is our work to establish the equally self-evident truth that no one shall gov- ern an industry without the consent of its people^i "The right to work" was a phrase of fire which flew out of the mouth of a senator of the United States during the heat of the excitement at Homestead. But "the right to work" is a half- truth. A great student of men says that it is half-truths which lead them. But even so, there is another half-truth beyond this which has also its power of leading. Lpeside the right to work stands as of equal majesty the right to share as a man in the produce of the workTj The organized working-men of London have compelled its government to adopt trades-union principles as an employer. The London Council now makes it a part of every contract for city THE SAFETY OF THE FUTURE 83 work that contractors shall pay the trade-union rate of wages and observe the trade-union con- ditions as to hours, etc. More than this, the government of London, under the lead of John Burns and other Labour members of the Council,' has taken the bold step of beginning the abolition of the contractor and his profit-hunting exploi- tation of the tax-payer and the workingman, and substituting for it direct dealing by the city with its men. The first experiment in this new policy has been a success. The estimate of the Council's engineer for a new sewer in York Road, Lambeth, was $35,000, When bids were called for the lowest was $58,000. The Council rejected the bids and did the work itself. It cost only $26,000. The saving was $32,000 on $58,000 — nearly 60 per cent. The work was better done than contract work. John Burns told the Council that he had been on the job from start to finish because he was deter- mined that it should be a good job. "With regard to the excellence and durability of work- manship there was no comparison between the work done by the Council and work done by the contractors, particularly in unseen work." A 84 MEN THE WORKERS member of the Council who was a builder and contractor, confirmed this, and said that a better piece of work had never been done in London, and this was ratified by others. This success has stimulated the Council to order the adoption of the same plan in other improvements. In New Zealand, too, the government has abolished the contractor in building railroads and other public works. The work is given out by the public oflScials in sections to the workingmen, who organize themselves in cooperative groups, selecting their own foreman, and share and share alike in the earnings. It is to the union, to the preaching of the principles of the trades, union and the perfection of the discipline with which the workingmen have fought for and upheld their union, that this remarkable new departure is due. The elimination of the contractor means many things. It is the repu- diation of indirect sweating — that meanest para- sitism upon the poor, disclaiming responsibility because done through agents. It is the repudia- tion of sweating altogether. "When the people are the employer and the people are the employee, there will be no sweating. It is the repudiation THE SAFETY OF THE FUTURE 85 of profit-hunting, and instead of the selfishness of the individual makes the welfare of all the star to steer by. It means a saving in the com- mon toil and an increase of wealth, for we find the higher motive produces the better and cheaper work; and it means a step, and a long one, toward closing the gulf between the too rich and the too poor, for it stops the abstraction of profit. The London County Council is now discussing a plan for constructing a system of electric railroads, underground in the city, above ground beyond, in order to scatter its congested working people into homes in the green fields and pure air of the country. A man will be carried twenty miles for four cents, because the roads will be built by the city and operated by the city. The city can get money at 3 per cent, instead of 6 per cent. It has to pay no boodle for the franchise, no dividends on watered stock. Since coming into power the Gladstone admin- istration has done several notable things. Both the War OflSce and the Admiralty have increased the rate of pay to meet the aspirations of labour for a living wage, and the War Department, like 86 MEN THE WORKERS the City of London, has begun the abolition of the contract system. To remedy the grievance that the judges are all of one class, the govern- ment has appointed a number of representative workingmen as magistrates in the larger cities. The eight-hour day has been introduced into the gun works at Woolwich Arsenal. Hours have been shortened elsewhere to prevent whole- sale dismissals during slack times. The govern- ment has interfered to protect trade-unionists in non-union shops, and has promised to pay trade-union wages in the government dock- yards. Lastly, to protect workmen from acci- dents, and to secure them damages in cases of injury, the government is pressing through Parliament an employers' liability bill, so thorough that John Burns declares it to be another Magna Charta of Labour. The man- ner of all this is even more important than the matter. When the government, the largest employer of labour, sets such an example of respect for the new aspirations of the people, it gives the programme of the labour movement the prestige of patriotism. All these are concessions; they have been THE SAFETY OF THE FUTURE 87 forced out of the government — the largest enaployer of labour — by the unceasing agitation of organized labour. "England," says Glad- stone, "never concedes anything to Ireland, except when moved to do so by fear." The working masses of Great Britain scared the classes into giving them the vote and surrender- ing the monopoly of government. With a vote they have gone to work to scare them out of all their other monopolies one after the other. In all the reforms, of suffrage, hours of labour, abolition of the contract system, organized labour has been the apex and the bulk and the force of the wedge splitting its way through class government in politics and in industry. What the workingmen have got is but the beginning. They, too, want "more." At their trade-union congresses they have demanded that lands and mines be nationalized, and at Belfast the last congress pledged itself "to the principle of the collective ownership and control of all the means of production and distribution." Our English brothers could not have done this without their trade-unions, but they could not have done it with their trade-unions alone. They used their 88 MEN THE WORKERS power of organized labour as a stepping-stone to the greater power of organized citizenship. They have put Labour members into the city councils, into Parliament, on the magistrates' bench. "The political labour movement in England is booming." Keir Hardie writes me from the House of Commons : " At the municipal elections this fall the Labour vote ranged from 30 to 50 per cent, of the total vote cast. In some cases the Liberals coalesced with the Tories, and vice versa, and in every case the Labour men stood on strictly independent lines. When the parliamentary election comes the Labour vote will decide it in nearly every indus- trial constituency." The battle of Bunker Hill was fought by a general who died without desiring American independence. Washington, John Adams, JeflFerson, Franklin, are all on record as striving not for independence, but for colonial rights. This was Washington's hope and purpose until events forced the issue, and he had to choose whether he would take the place of father of a new country. Adam Smith, the English econ- omist, and Benjamin Franklin, the American THE SAFETY OF THE FUTURE 89 philosopher, thought they had discovered a solution for the problem of American discontent in the representation of the colonies in the Par- liament at London. Hardly anyone but that chief incendiary, Sam Adams, more than any other man the author of our nationality, com- prehended the drift of things. He saw and meant that America should be free. His clear eye saw running through all the tangle of the mutual rights of mother country and colonists that the real colonial right was to cease to be a colony and become a country. The real right of Americans was to cease to be subjects and become citizens. In our day we are being buffeted about in another baffling complexity of disputes and adjustments. Between those who employ and those who need employment, between those who pay wages and those who receive them, between those who fix the hours of labour and those who work the hours, between those who own the foot-stool and those who must have footing, between the advocates of this compromise or that panacea, is our irrepressible conflict. By the miners of Michigan, starving at the mouth 90 MEN THE WORKERS of the mine while a thousand industries starve for want of the iron; by the millions of unem- ployed from Vienna to London, San Francisco to Melbourne, while machinery and forests and fields that would employ them are all kept idle; by the dead chimneys of the shoe factories and the cloth mills, closed for "over-production" while multitudes go with unshod feet and bodies half clad; by the tenement house standing up against square miles of land held for specula- tion; by the hundreds of millions piling up in banks, while the people can neither produce nor exchange because of the lack of money; by the difference between the price of wheat and the price of flour; by all its panics, riots, over- production, and underconsumption, our present aristocratic and monarchical government of industry stands self-confessed a failure. Such results are below the conscience and the common sense of the people. The pioneers who saw a generation ago the thread that would lead us through this laby- rinth and into the free air have now become a multitude. That thread is the thread of democ- racy, whose principles must and will rule THE SAFETY OF THE FUTURE 91 wherever men co-exist, in industry not less surely than in politics. Pit is by the people who do the work that the hours of labour, the conditions of employment, the division of the produce is to be determined. It is by them the captains of industry are to be chosen, and chosen to be servants, not masters. It is for the welfare of all that the coordinated labour of all must be directed. Industry, like govern- ment, exists only by the cooperation of all, and like government, it must guarantee equal protec- tion to all. \ This is democracy, and democracy is not true only where men carry letters or build forts, but wherever they meet in common efforts. The declaration of independence yesterday meant self-government, to-day it means self- employment, which is but another kind of self- government. Every dollar, every edifice, every product of human toil is the creation of the co- operation of all the people. But in this coopera- tion it is the share of the majority to have no voice, to do the hardest work and feed on the crumbs of life. Not as an exception, but uni- versally, labour is doing what it does not want to 92 MEN THE WORKERS do, and not getting what it wants or what it needs. Labourers want to work eight hours a day; they must work ten, fourteen, eighteen. Crying to their employers, to Congress, to legis- latures to be rescued, they go down under the murderous couplers and wheels of the railroads faster than if they were in active service in war, marching out of one battle into another. They want to send their children to school ; they must send them to the factory. They want their wives to keep house for them; but they, too, must throw some shuttle or guide some wheel. They must work when they are sick; they must stop Work at another's will; they must work life out to keep life in. The people have to ask for work and then do not get it. They have to take less than a fair share of the product; they have to risk life, limb, or health — their own, their wives', their children's — for others' selfishness or whim. They continue, for fear, to lead lives that force them to do to others the cheapening and wrongs of which they complain when done to them. All this is inconsistent with manhood and with citizenship. This is an impossible situation. No human THE SAFETY OF THE FUTURE 93 society ever held together on such terms. This is contrary to the most sacred principles of American society. This is government without consent, and it is the cornerstone and roof-tree of American life that we will have none of it. The men who think it can continue are our idlest dreamers and most impracticable theorists. Open the churches for dormitories for the roof- less; feed the hungry in soup-kitchens; rake every kind-hearted garret for old shoes and old clothes ; find work in kindling-wood yards for the unemployed. It is the work of mercy and neces- sity, a Red Cross service for the succour of the sick and wounded on the battlefields of business. But the war goes on. Its cannon-balls can fly faster than your ambulances . One new machine can turn out of employment more men than all the churches are feeding. One syndicate shutting down or dismantling to limit the output and keep up prices or to intimidate Congress on the tariff or currency, can drown out your charities. Against this flood charity is a mere broom; it cannot sweep away this stream of the unem- ployed, for that is the rising tide of the Atlantic Ocean' of dispossessed humanity. But muni- 94 MEN THE WORKERS cipalize the street-car lines, nationalize the coal mines, the forests, the iron mines, stop the com- petition of children and the starving in the labour market, set free every gift of nature and every hand of man to soak up labour instead of corking it up, and the tide begins to run the other way. Wheels of labour now chained by private selfishness will turn never to stop while a human need remains unsatisfied. |The over- employed and the unemployed both vanish, and their places will be taken by those who are well employed because self-employedj The American colonies did not fight for fine phrases. It was not the theoretical wrong of taxation without representation and govern- ment without consent that made them act, but the actual wrong that followed. The colonies were not allowed to sell their lumber, their grain, their wool, anywhere but in England; they must buy in England the commodities they needed. Who can say our situation to-day is not exactly similar.!* The farmer of Minnesota and the Northwest can sell his wheat only to members of the elevator combination; he can buy his har- vesters only of the Harvester Trust; his binding THE SAFETY OF THE FUTURE 95 twine only of the Cordage Trust. The brass- worker can sell his labour only to members of the association of metal manufacturers. The iron- puddler and steel-worker in Chicago, the coal miner in Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, can work only for the members of the steel ring or the coal pools. They can buy their tools, powder, their meat, their fuel, their kerosene, their gas, only of this or that monopoly. In a thousand trades the labourer is forced by a com- pulsion stronger than that of British stamp acts to sell his labour to a ruler, and in a thousand neces- saries of life to buy only of a ruler. What did the stamp tax or the tea tax amount to in com- parison with the taxes we must pay on meat, coal, iron, oil, salt, almost all the necessaries of life, to private tax-farmers whose greed legis- lates a new stamp act, stamping out all freedoms — of trade, of politics, of society ? Democracy must be progressive or die. It was by a divine instinct of right, whether they knew it or not, that the hundreds of men who found themselves these winter nights in Chicago without a roof went to the city hall. That is the house of democracy. It stands on the foun- 96 MEN THE WORKERS dation principle that the people live and work for the people, /^he city hall means nothing if it does not mean that the general welfare, not the advantages or privileges of a few, is the object of society. It means more — the gen- eral welfare can be properly planned only if all have a voice, and the plans can be properly carried out only when all join their efforts. The city hall represents an institution ready made for any purpose of the common good for which the common people choose to use it — an institution in which they are equal partners, and no thanks to anyone but themselvesj The old democracy is the father of this new democracy. The old trade-union is to herald this greater union. The people who vote are bound on their own recog- nizance to get the independence and knowledge to vote right and free. The public schools are a pledge of the public honour that every citizen shall be able to buy books and shall have time to read and digest. The progressive genius of democracy is at one with its progressive necessities. "A house divided against itself cannot stand," said Lin- coln. "This union cannot permanently endure THE SAFETY OF THE FUTURE 97 half slave and half free." [jt is equally true that all cannot remain politically free if all are not economically free. Political freedom is but the first installment of economic freedonij The trade-union, even the federation, is but the initial step in the organization of labour. Shall we go on ? In seven years, January 1, 1901, the twentieth century will open. The eighteenth century put an end by the American and French revolutions to the ancient regime of political and social tyranny. The nineteenth century has seen the last chains of chattel slavery break. In seven years the century will open which before its close will see the social crime of enforced poverty and the dependence of any human being upon another for the necessaries of life or the means of industry forever abolished throughout Christen- dom. Let us begin to make ready now for that next emancipation — that new liberty — that enlarged democracy. Let America, the leader of the liberties of mankind, make the first move, and let the federation of the trade-unions of its working people lead America. I venture, though not worthy the honour of sitting as a member of 98 MEN THE WORKERS an association of workingmen, to suggest that the American Federation of Labour could do the cause of civilization no greater service. Let it initiate here and now a plan for a series of national and international conferences or con- gresses of labour. Let these culminate on the first May day of the new century with an inter- national demonstration of the labour organiza- tions of all countries. Let this be a grand international constitu- tional convention, in which a new Magna Charta, a new declaration of independence, a new bill of rights shall be proclaimed to guide and inspire those who wish to live the life of the common- wealth. The labour organizations are waiting for some such definite word and plan. This is true not only of those of this country, but of Europe. There are hundreds of other organ- izations, not of labour, which, if you choose to invite them, would fall into line at once. The proposal is practical enough to command the support of those who want to do something now. It is so broad and far-reaching as to kindle even dull imaginations. At the first note of your call new hope and strength will swell the veins of THE SAFETY OF THE FUTURE 99 all the nations. The thinkers and philosophers will help you with the best harvestings of history and wisdom; the poets will sing for you; the musicians will find an international air; the weary and heavy laden will come to you. The liberty of the world waits for your leadership. IV ARBITRATION* TT IS not by the will of the workingmen that ■*• differences with employers have to be settled by strikes, with all the attendant loss. The workingmen almost invariably ask for arbitration, and it is as invariably refused. The statement contained in the recent dispatches from Marinette, Wisconsin, that the lumber- mill owners there refuse to arbitrate with their men, is but one of a monotonous series of such refusals by employers. The head of the Read- ing Railroad and its coal consolidation declined to arbitrate with the switchmen on strike, adding that they were "outlaws." The men at Homestead offered to leave the dispute there to the decision of the Governors of New York and Ohio, and the head of the Knights of Labour, but the Carnegie Company said: "This is not a case for arbitration." * Published in the Hand 3ook of the National Association of Steam and Hot Water Fitters and Helpers, iSga. 100 ARBITRATION 101 Vice-President Webb, of the New York Central, is reported to have torn up the letter from the head of the switchmen's organization propos- ing arbitration as a substitute for bayonets and to have sent back the verbal message: "There is nothing to arbitrate." Even where, through the efforts of the workingmen, official means of arbitration have been supplied by the state governments, these remain inert and useless through the active or passive opposition of business men. The savage character of the struggle at Home- stead, at Buffalo, and between granite cutters and the quarry owners of Massachusetts, tell plainly enough how much the Wallace Arbitra- tion Law of Pennsylvania, the New York Board of Mediation and Conciliation, and the Massachusetts Board of Conciliation count for. We have heard much of the Conseils de Prud- hommes of France, whose function it is to keep the peace in industrial relations. But the French troops shoot down French miners in behalf of French mine owners, jiist as the American militia shoot the miners of Tennessee and Idaho. 102 MEN THE WORKERS When the history of the great struggle now going on all over the world between the rich and the poor — which is the true division of classes concealed under the terms, labour and capital, master and men, employer and employed — is written by the Macaulay or Bancroft of the next century, this will be one of his chief facts : " The poor cried Peace, Peace," and the rich said, " There is no Peace." That the situation is alarming it is idle to deny. The attitude of the employer amounts simply to this: Reason shall not arbitrate between us, because there is a Judge sitting on your case who always decides in my favour, if he has time enough — Judge Hunger. Expe- rience proves only too clearly what every one who knows anything of human nature would foresee. The mere fact of being denied a change of venue from Judge Hunger to Judge Reason puts workingmen into a bad mood. This turns out disorder and bloodshed, and disorder and bloodshed, growing by what they feed on, may end no man can tell where. Frightened by the red shadows they see cast by coming events, an increasing number ARBITRATION 103 of people are calling for arbitration. Magazines, newspapers, sermons are full of it. The prin- cipal article in the Review of Reviews for Septem- ber, 1892, is given to an account of the recom- mendations made concerning conciliation and arbitration by the Australian Royal Commission on Strikes, published by the government of New South Wales, in a huge volume of a thou- sand pages. One of the leading pulpit orators of the country, the Rev. Dr. Thomas, says: "The time has come, in my opinion, for forced arbitration in the conflicts between capital and labour, and if arbitration will not bring about the desired result, let there be state ownership." With all this no fault can be found, except that in most cases those who preach so eloquently for arbitration, and express such burning indig- nation that the convenience of the public, of society, should be wantonly disturbed by strikes for the lack of arbitration, address their exhorta- tions and rebukes to the wrong side — to the Workingmen instead of to the capitalists. As the result of the study and observation for many years of the labour troubles, it is here confidently asserted that there has been no 104 MEN THE WORKERS important strike, whether it be those of the coal miners in Germany, the dockers in London, the engineers of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad, the iron and steel workers at Homestead, or the switchmen at Buffalo, or any others, which could not have been averted, if those on the capitalist side had been willing to make their bargains with their work- men as with other capitalists. The workingmen need no pulpit eloquence or political economy to make them eager to arbitrate. It is the other side which has what it believes to be invincible advantages and is not willing to enter into any arbitrament whereby it may have to take less than it believes it can get. It wishes to take no chances of having to "split the difference." It wants all. The overwhelming advantage on the side of the employer is the existence of the unemployed. This grows daily by the extension of machinery, and by the "institutes," in the language of the poet Wordsworth, which "legalize exclusion," forcing the people into slums and sweaters' dens because shut out from their rightful use of the land, the forces of nature, and the accumulated resources of society, ARBITRATION 105 which, as no man made, no man should be allowed to monopolize — institutes which, the poet continues, should be forever blotted out. From this point of view the real struggle in our modern society is a civil war between employed and unemployed. The captain of industry sets these two multitudes of brothers against each other for his profit, just as the hereditary capitalists of monarchy and aristocracy have for centuries kept their thrones and titles by setting one people against another in dynastic struggles in which, had they been but able to see it, the people had no true interest but to unite and destroy their captains of dynasty. It is the existence of the army of unemployed which makes the employer so strong and the workingmen so weak that arbitration is proposed in vain. The public opinion that is now making itself heard for arbitration is nine-tenths selfish- ness, but it is a healthy selfishness. It does not appear from their utterances that these advocates care much that the injustices done to workingmen should be redressed; that the switchmen should not, in violation of the law, be compelled to work thirty-six hours 106 MEN THE WORKERS continuously. Their anxiety is not quickened that a national production of wealth which adds a thousand millions a year to the assets of America should be divided into something more equal, for instance, than the sweater's wages of Chicago and the incomes the merchant princes on the avenues get from the boots and shoes and collars and shirts and clothing "their" men and women and children make, working in the daily shadow of the pestilence. They speak lest their mails shall be delayed, their corn and grain be sidetracked, their chimneys quieted, the stock markets perplexed, and the "highly organized machinery of modern (sweating) industry" be deranged to their loss of profit. They are right so far as that it is necessary that the processes of industry, which are processes of life, shall go on without breakdown. But this can be secured lastingly only by having them go on with justice. It is not in human nature for employers to deny themselves the advantage of getting the employed and unemployed to bid against each other, so long as we keep sending unemployed into the labour market constrained to undersell their brothers or die. To tell the ARBITRATION 107 capitalist that he must arbitrate is to tell him that he shall not buy cheap that which we have made cheap, and which we have instructed him from his youth up it was his sacred right to buy, like all other things, cheap, cheap, cheap. First, we make men cheap, and open a market for buying and selling them, and then we say with our arbitration laws that the buyers must let us revise and perhaps cancel their bargains ; for it cannot be repeated too often, arbitration has no reason for being except to humanize the bargain the employers are making in the purchase of their labour. Once get the unemployed at work of their own — on the land, rebuilding the slums, making roads, creating for society the thousand things it needs done to lift it out of the poverty we miscall wealth — and arbitration will establish itself. Cobden used to say: "Wages are bad when two men are after one job; but when there are two employers for one man, wages are good." When there are two employers in want of the same man, no one ever hears of any difficulty about arbitra- tion. There can never be any real arbitration as long as we maintain, as now, a labour market 108 MEN THE WORKERS flooded with men who must sell themselves at half price or less. We cannot invite the employers with our right hand to buy cheap, and with our left hand take away their bargains. This is the real cause of the failure of arbitration wherever it has been tried, whether under the Wallace Act of Pennsylvania, the Boards of Conciliation of Massachusetts, or elsewhere. Workable arbitration can be had only where both sides want it, and where there is an approach to equality of conditions. Arbitration is an actuality on the Board of Trade of Chicago because the members prefer and agree in becom- ing members to settle their differences in that way. Even the arbitration of the courts often breaks down when the parties are not both desirous of using that method of ending dis- agreements, and when there is too great inequal- ity between them. There is no court in America in which a Western settler can get justice against one of the great railroad corporations. The Interstate Commerce Commission, especially created by Congress to arbitrate between com- binations of the railroads and the large shippers on one side, and the people on the other, has ARBITRATION 109 broken down. The railroads and large shippers do not want to arbitrate. They are making too much money out of the wrongs. The employer does not want to arbitrate. The situation is too much in his favour. Shrewd enough, too, are the capitalists to see that all the surging dis- content which takes form in the demand for arbitration, for shorter hours, for the right to combine in trade-unions, for the regulation of monopolies, is a new Rise of the People, which will assuredly put an end to the capitalistic con- trol of the people in industry without representa- tion, as it has put an end to the control of the people in government without representation. We have taught the capitalist class to believe in its right to administer industry as it thinks best, just as devoutly as other vested classes in history have believed it was theirs to say, the people's to obey. It is their clear vision that the reforms demanded by labour can only end in adding the democracy of industry to the democ- racy of government, that makes the employers as a class set themselves dead against beginning the concessions. The doctrine that industrial power, like political power, comes from the people, and 110 MEN THE WORKERS exists rightfully only by the consent of the governed, puts the people in the seat and makes of the employer a representative of the popular will in the administration of the general welfare, who says "ours" instead of "mine" — a reversal of present relations. This is the Manifest Destiny; this the Irrepressible Conflict come again. Shall we spell the evolution with an initial R ? The workingman, pacific, industri- ous, taught by his participation in the common hardships of the people to be a brother, says: "No, let us reason together. Arbitrate." What do the words of those who reject his peaceful overtures really mean? How will the future translate them? T V FACTORY LAW SPEECH* HE principal opponent of the factory law is the Association of Clothing Manu- facturers, said to have one thousand members and to include all the important concerns in the state. The representatives of the state charged with the duty of enforcing the law have been met at every step, in the courts and outside the courts, with the strenuous opposition of the manufacturers, individually and associated. These officers of the state have been treated 'I' Address at a meeting called in Chicago, April 22nd, 1S94, for a debate between the supporters and opponents of the "Sweat-shop Law." The " Sweat-shop Law " was an act adopted in 1890 creating the oflSce of^ State In- spector of Factories and Workshops, prohibiting the employment of women and girls more than eight hours in twenty-four, regulating child labour, restricting manufacture in tenement houses, providing a staff of inspectors for enforcement and equipping this staff with salaries and funds for travelling, etc. The provision which limited to eight hours in twenty-four the working day of adult women was pronounced unconstUuiional by the Supreme Court of Illinois, i. e. contrary to the Constitution of the United States, in May, 1895, in the case of Ritchie vs. the People. In January, igoS, the Supreme Court of the United States, in tiie decision written by Mr. Justice Brewer in the case of Curt Muller vs. the People of Oregon, cited with disapproval the reasoning in the case of Ritchie vs. the People and unani- mously upheld as constitutional the Oregon ten-hours law. The Supreme Court of Illinois, having been thus overruled as to the principle involved, the way is open for the legislature of Illinois to re-enact the eigbt-hour law for women and girls. The other parts of the statute have remained intact and have been from time to time extended far beyond their original scope. , 111 112 MEN THE WORKERS with personal contumely. The law has been ridiculed and misrepresented by able and cun- ning writers. Prominent lawyers have resisted its enforcement by all the resources of legal delay and technicalities. Not least potential has been the influence of private opposition, disseminated through every avenue of social intercourse, and spreading from powerful busi- ness men through widening circles a feeling of intense hostility to this attempt to use the powers of the state to protect the women and children who march in weary brigades ii;i our industrial army. By all these means it has been sought to create the belief that this law is an extraor- dinary enactment, an interference with the liberty of the individual, and an attack on the business prosperity of Chicago. The Supreme Court in all questions of the public Welfare and individual rights is the people, who judge the judgments of all other courts. That the public might hear and decide, the members of the Clothing Manufacturers' Association have been challenged to submit here to-day to joint debate. They have been called to state and defend the grounds on which they deny the FACTORY LAW SPEECH 113 right of the people of Illinois to take cognizance of the helpless Wretchedness of the women and children connected with the "sweat-shop" industries, and to throw about them the pro- tecting arm of the Commonwealth, as other civilized communities have done. The law simply puts Illinois, already one of the greatest manufacturing communities in the world, and destined to be the greatest, in line with other civilized commonwealths. The law is not an innovation. It is no experiment. It embodies a principle which is established in the law of the leading states of this country and Europe. The crucial point involved in the Sweat-shop Law is the right of the state to control contracts made by women for the sale of their labour'. The state controls its men and women for their good and the general welfare at innumerable points. They are not free to contract what size of rooms they will build in their houses; nor at what hours or on what days they will buy the wares of the saloon; nor how they shall burn coal; nor at what speed they shall run their railroad trains across the streets of the city. They are not free to 114 MEN THE WORKERS contract to marry how they choose; nor to dissolve the contract of marriage by mutual consent. Railroad men are not free to contract at what price transportation shall be had; nor how many cars shall be put into a train; nor how many brakemen a train shall have. If men altogether competent make a contract altogether proper the state will upon occasion break it and make a new one for no other reason than to relieve individuals from the inconvenience of pecuniary pressure, as in the case of bankruptcy. We have seen the modern state step between the adult male landlord and the adult male tenant of Ireland, tear up the contract they had made, and replace it by an entirely different one, satisfactory to neither. We have seen the government of this country, after contracts in government bonds, real estate loans, bank deposits, promissory notes, and current accounts had been made to pay tens of thousands of millions of dollars in gold or silver, at the option of the debtor, interfere without notice and revolutionize the contract by taking away the right the debtor had under the contract to pay in silver. Business men FACTORY LAW SPEECH 115 are not free to contract at what rate of interest they shall lend and borrow. From this side modern civilization can be defined with accu- racy as the progressive denial by the state of the right of individuals to make contracts incon- sistent with the welfare of the community, and, as included in this, civilization more and more denies the right of the strong to make contracts with the weak to the disadvantage of the weak. This civilization of the contract has passed upward from its primitive interference with the contracts by which men used to buy the bodies of men and women into the more refined and complicated regulations made necessary by our more refined and complicated life. Nothing is more characteristic of the nineteenth century than the extent to which this inter- ference has gone in the contracts of trade, finance, and manufacture. Our captains of industry began the century with the claim that they were free from this veto by the general good. They had but to utter the magic words, laissez faire, and all doors flew open before them as before the open sesame of the Arabian Nights. Under this theory they 116 MEN THE WORKERS went on making contracts with little children and with women which turned the cotton factories of England into hells where the bodies and souls of thousands were consumed. The first occasion on which modern legis- lation interfered with the labour of adults, was the law of 1842 of Great Britain prohibiting women of all ages from working underground. Terrible as it seems to Herbert Spencer and his eyeless worshippers, the sacred right of woman to make contracts to spend her days in the coal mines crawling on all fours, like a dog or a mule, hauling a coal car by a rope tied to her waist and passing back between her legs, clad in a piece or two of bagging, which was not so much a protection as a revelation of her nakedness, herding in the subterranean pas- sages as if to breed some new and nameless horror of animal life, offspring of dehumaniza- tion, fire-damp, and darkness — this sacred right has been taken away from women in England. Then, as now, there were philosophers to protest in the name of individualism — preachers of Christ to defend those for whose profit this crucifixion of maternity was carried on — FACTORY LAW SPEECH 117 model merchants to assert their divine rights to buy such goods — even women from the pit, to beg that their livelihood and their children's be not cut off. "Where can we parallel such misery as that of the women in the mines of England? We read as follows in the report of the committee of Congress which investigated in 1892 the condition of the working people who work in the sweat-shops and in the tenement houses of Chicago and the other leading cities: In the sweat-shops "wages average from 25 to 33J per cent, less than in the larger shops, and as to hours there is practically no limit, except the endurance of the employee, the work not merely being paid for by the task, but the task so adjusted as practically to drive from the shop each employee who is not willing to work to the limit of physical endurance, the hours of labour under this system rarely being less than twelve, generally thirteen or fourteen, and frequently from fifteen to eighteen hours in the twenty-four." In the tenement houses: "The work is carried on in the one, two, or three rooms occupied by the family, which probably has, as sub-tenants or boarders, an equal number of outsiders. 118 MEN THE WORKERS No pretence is made of separating the work from the household affairs, if such a term can be used to describe the existence of these people. The hours observed are simply those which endurance or necessity prescribes. Children are worked to death by the side of their parents, who are dying from overwork or disease. Con- tagious diseases, which are specially prevalent among these people, thrive along with their work, and even death may distract from their occupation only the one or the few necessary to dispose of the body. As to wages, there prac- tically is no compensation which could be properly so called. The work has been secured by ruinous underbidding of even the tenement house sweat-shops, or by sub-con- tract from them. . . . Indeed, as to this class of labour, it consists in so large part of those who are compelled to accept rather than to choose their work, that it is taken without reference to the possibility of a livelihood being made thereby, the miserable workers getting simply all that they can from it, begging as much as possible to supplement their below- starvation wages, and dying or being taken FACTORY LAW SPEECH 119 charge of by the charitable authorities when they are driven to that extreme." The committee give this description of a place visited by them in person in Chicago: "The committee drove to the sweating establishment of . This shop is located in the rear of a two-story frame building, over a stable in which there are three stalls, one horse, a dog, a spring waggon, and a large manure pile, and is reached by a narrow, dirty passage-way which leads to a rickety pair of steps, by which the shop is entered. There is a space perhaps twenty-five feet square between the front build- ing and the stable, which the sweater chooses to call a "yard," but which in reality is nothing more than a garbage receptacle. The dirty rags, ashes, and decayed garbage, together with the foul odours that issue from two unkept closets, evidence great neglect on the part of the tenant as to the healthful and sanitary conditions of his surroundings." This, they say, is not a specimen of the more extreme cases given in this testimony. ' ' Eighteen people worked in this stable annex, and they made cloaks for one of our millionaire merchants 120 MEN THE WORKERS to sell to the fashionable ladies of Chicago and the West." How gaily these ladies of good society are apparelled! The beauties of the South fasten fireflies and rainbow beetles to their dresses, and have pet lizards in chains of gold dangling from their belts. Our beauties deck themselves with animal life of more subtle and sombre and costly forms, the fireflies of fever and filth; their garb is, literally, garbage. Bad as it would have been for the English to have left these wretches in the mines, there is one thing more terrible. Considering our greater pretensions and opportunities, consider- ing the sacred duty which lies upon us to better every eflFort of the generation that has preceded us, and to add at least one step to the steps they have taken, considering the incalculable wealth, power, liberty, and delight with which we of America have been dowered, that more dreadful sin would be for us to leave our women and children to their "individual" and "sacred" right to be devoured by the sharp teeth of free contract in the sweat-shops of Chicago. In 1847 the people of England, by the agita- tion of noble men like Oastler, the leader of FACTORY LAW SPEECH 121 the workingmen, and the Earl of Shaftesbury, the leader of the well-to-do, were waked up to the factory horrors which were woven into their calicoes. The Earl of Shaftesbury declared that such a system, aflFecting the internal tranquillity of the land and all relations between employer and employed, was a per- petual danger and grievance, and must ever come uppermost in times of diflSculty and discontent. It was destructive of the health of women, the care of their families, their conjugal and parental duties, the homes of the people, the decency of their lives, the peace of society. The public saw that he was right, and put an end forthwith to the so-called and miscalled "freedom of contract" between manufacturers and their female employees by the passage of the famous ten-hour law of 1847. It was sustained by the courts, and its cardinal principle is now established as a corner-stone in the foundations of modern civilization, not only in England, but in Europe and America. The ten-hour law was confined to women and children. But the enthusiastic support it received from the working classes was due to their knowledge 122 MEN THE WORKERS that when the women and children stopped work at their looms, all the rest must stop, and it was acknowledged in and out of Parlia- ment that the law was therefore as much a ten- hour law for the men as for the women. Lady Dilke, a leader in the English movement for the Christianization of industry, writes me that "there has never been any attempt to repeal any of these limitations when once they have passed into law; but there is constant progress in the direction of restriction, and further proposals are entertained by Parliament every session." As early as 1874, the province of Victoria, Aus- tralia, limited the hours of women in factories to eight a day. This was enlarged in the Factories and Shops Act, 1885,by the enactment of an eight- hour day for women in all employments. The Eight-Hour Law of Illinois has put Massachusetts on its mettle, and legislation is now under consideration there for still further curtailment of the hours of women's labour. "It would be difficult," says the report of the Labour Bureau of Massachusetts of 1890, "to point out as the result of such legislation any of the evils which before its enactment were FACTORY LAW SPEECH 123 predicted by its opponents. In point of fact, such legislation is identical in character with statutes which aim to establish and maintain favourable moral and sanitary conditions in society. . . . If it is proper to guard against the maintenance of nuisances which may en- danger the health of a community, it would seem equally proper to guard against such industrial conditions as tend either to illiteracy, physical degeneracy, crime, or pauperism; and labour legislation, as a rule, has had no other object." This Illinois law, therefore, is evolutionary, not revolutionary. It follows logically and his- torically in the straight sequences of social development. The Spencerian philosophers dote on evolution; on evolution, that is, in the text- books. Evolution upward in the breathing pages of brothers and sisters' lives they have no eyes for. This law asks for the minimum. In the name of brotherhood, mercy, gain, the state, less could not be asked for. The true political economy, says Emerson, is the care and culture of men. In the name of political economy less could not be asked for. In truth, the question is whether to ask for so little is not criminally 124 MEN THE WORKERS conservative. But the most marked characteristic of the working people, by whom and for whom this demand of regulation is made, is conserva- tism. They propose only the next step. They say: "Keep your wealth, your power, your machinery, your overwhelming leverage of social superiority; remain you employers, remain we employed. Let the fittest survive. Let industry continue as now a struggle for existence." ' But they also say : "When man fights man, it is heavy-weight against heavy-weight, feather- weight against feather-weight, and you have the Marquis of Queensbury rules and the umpire to protect equal from equal. Here you enter your weakest women and children against your strongest men. In the name of common decency, establish some rules of the ring for this prize-fight. Let the state be the umpire, and let the rounds be only eight hours long. Could we ask for less ?" In the London Daily Chronicle, of April 7, 1894, I find this item: "THE EIGHT HOURS QUESTION. "Following the example of several other large employers of labour, Messrs. J. and F. Howards FACTORY LAW SPEECH 125 implement 'makers, of Bedford, yesterday posted up thie following notice in their workshops: "'After carefully considering the advantages and disadvantages of a working week of forty- eight hours. We have come to the conclusion that a reduction to forty-eight hours might probably prove to be a beneficial arrangement to all employed in these works, especially as it would give more time for rest and refreshment before beginning each day's work. We hdpe, too, that it might add to the general comfort of home life. Any loss which such an arrange- ment might entail upon us, we can only hope, will to some extent be compensated for by everyone being better fitted for work and by everyone, therefore, being uniformly diligent in work, especially as the rate of wages, though based on a week of fifty-four hours, will remain as heretofore ; and with a confident expectation that everyone will do his utmost to make the arrangement a general success, we should, from the first of next month, be inclined to give the change a trial. Before, however, we come to any final decision we wish to know what is the general feeling of all employed here. 126 MEN THE WORKERS We think, therefore, that it will be well for each department to appoint two representatives to see us in the waiting-room on Friday next, at twelve o'clock.' " But our great Chicago clothing manufacturers say to their employees: "You shall not have the shortening of hours in any way. You cannot have it by individual request; you cannot have it by union; you cannot have it by law." They do not take this attitude in ignorance of the conditions in which their people work. So keen is their appreciation, on the contrary, of these conditions, that business men go mad at the mere fear that they or their loved ones may descend into that inferno. Even among those who are perfectly sane, and are so well oflf as to be absolutely secure, it is common to find middle life and old age haunted by the fears of poverty as by a thousand furies. It is but a few months since one of the millionaires of Chicago, who had got his money out of the sweat-shops of Chicago, hanged himself in mortal terror at the delusion that he and his were in danger of being pauperized to the sweat- FACTORY LAW SPEECH 127 shop level. If we would read the riddle how the hearts to which the apprehension is such a terror can push back their brothers and sisters trying to climb out of the reality, we need not go far. Every page in history has the answer. Pharaoh, the Roman, the American slave-holder, the English in India and Africa, John Bright, the factory lord, opposing with raging vituperation the Earl of Shaftesbury's law to take away his right to keep babies at work from half-past five in the morning to seven at night, the Chicago contractors forming a union to lock their workingmen out of their unions — everywhere the riddle has the same answer. No man has the right to rule any one but himself. For one to rule another is to ruin both. The factory legislation of Europe and America has its origin in the researches of economists following the protests of poets like Wordsworth, but it never could have been achieved without the unions of labour. Had there been no trades- unions in Lancashire, and no trades-union leaders like Oastler to agitate, hold mass- meetings, besiege Parliament, the Earl of Shaftes- 128 MEN THE WORKERS bury would never have been able to carry his Ten-Hour Law. Had there been no trades- unions in Chicago, and no trades-union leaders to raise the people in mass-meetings, labour with members and committees in Sprmgfield, and guide state and national investigations through the baby farms of Chicago industry, Illinois would not have to-day the best anti- sweat-shop law on the statute books of any civilized community. The unions of Chicago are here to stay, notwithstanding the War that is now being made upon them, and the anti- sweat-shop law is here to stay. There is no city in the world where civic patriotism runs higher than in Chicago. Wendell Phillips said he loved the pavements of Boston so well that he would make it impossible for them to ibe trod by a slave. The people of Chicago mean to make its streets too good for the sweat-shop. To the Chicago enemies of the trades-unions who think that, like Canute and Mrs. Partington, they can lock out the rising tide of human advancement I give a different word: Look out! If the Supreme Court of this state finds the law unconstitutional or void, we will change FACTORY LAW SPEECH 129 the form of the law. If that is not enough we will change the constitution. The employers of labour throughout the country are engaged in an attempt to take away the right of union from the working people, while keeping it for themselves, and to reduce the wages of labour in order to enhance the wages of capital. This is but one move in a concert of moves; but the advance of one column out of many in a campaign of conquest. The centralization of industry by the trusts; the concentration of eight-tenths of the wealth into the hands of one-tenth of the people; the repudiation by the creditor class of their contract, "nom- inated in the bonds" to take silver as well as gold from their debtor; the scandal of tariff legislation, by which the right to tax the people on sugar, steel, coal, oil, is given at Washington to rings, as the privileges of tax- farming were sold to private speculators in France before the Revolution; the defiance by the railroads of state and national control, their stolid maintenance at the street crossings of our cities of the locomotive guillotine which kills every year nearly as many as the guillotine 130 MEN THE WORKERS of the Reign of Terror did — ^all these are of the same warp and woof as the attack all along the line on the wages and organization of labour, and on the laws like this of Illinois to civilize the conditions of the industrial struggle. We are witnessing the culmination on all sides of the forces set in motion by the false philosophy of selfishness we have made the rule of inter- course between man and man in industry. This is not cause for despair, but for exultation. It has always been the hope of the world, the promise of civilization, that privilege runs mad. As long as any means of undue advan- tage for a few remain in our social constitution, it will be discovered and exploited by the fittest — for such work. They who so develop to their intolerable extreme the opportunities for injustice are as truly functionaries of the world's advance- ment as the patriot and the reformer, who come after them. It is our happiness to live so near the end of this era that we can see over the crest of the mountain to the smiling valley beyond of a cooperative commerce, and a humanity where men will have learned that they become more "individual" as they become more brotherly. VI THE NEW INDEPENDENCE* ^TRIKES and lockouts are the skirmishes ^^ of a social struggle — the Lexingtons, Bunker Hills, Gettysburgs of a civil war which so far has for the most part been fought out by means more civilized than hitherto in con- flicts between classes. Anyone who seeks to gain a clue to the rights and wrongs of the labour struggle must study something deeper than the incidents and persons of battle. The Rev. Dr. Peabody, of Boston, in the Atlantic Monthly, declares the men who threw the tea into Boston Harbour, and who faced the British soldiers in King Street, to have been turbulent, low, vulgar people of no account whatever. John Brown, Henry Wilson said, was a "damned old fool," and a late biographer of Lincoln appears to be much of the same mind. In all great struggles both parties are at one time * In its original fonn this address was delivered first before the Chicago Ethical Cul- ture Sbciety, December 7, 1890. 131 132 MEN THE WORKERS or another caught in the wrong, but in all issues of principle only one side can be right. The workingmen are often wrong, but theirs is always the right side. The labour movement is our chapter of the great historic uplift, which brings tyrant after tyrant felicity against his own will, by giving him brothers instead of slaves. In one age the tyrant's name is King, in another Baron, in another Money-Power, but the name of the brother is always the same. It is the people. When Louis XIV. said: "I am the State," he summed up, in four words, all the literature and dogma of thousands of years of tyranny. It cost mankind a great deal to change that pronoun and inscribe on the state houses of the world, " We are the State." To-day, again, the fate of the world hangs on the same pronoun. The people in that steady growth to liberty and full realiza- tion of all the divine possibilities of human nature which nothing has ever stopped, nothing can ever stop, now find barricaded across their path the firm, the corporation, the employer, saying, "This is my business." The working people, which is to say, the people — for if all THE NEW INDEPENDENCE 133 are not yet working people they will be such before the labour movement lets go — the people having got rid of Louis XIV. who said, "I am the State," has now passed on to its next job, teaching the capitalist, employer, railroad owner, landlord, that he shall no longer say, "I am the State," "This is my business." No, says Labour, ^hat which is done by the efforts of all, on which depend the food, clothing, shelter, life of all, is not your business. It is our business and yours. That which is done either in government or industry by the cooper- ated labour of the people shall not become the exclusive and usurped business of a iew\ Tri- umphant democracy, which made divine right change its pronoun, will not fail in teaching vested rights its grammar lesson. It was proved before a recent factory com- mission in India that it was no uncommon thing in the cotton factories to make women, and even children, work day and night con- tinuously, and that in the busy season men, and women too, were worked both day and night sometimes for eight days running, and that the people, because so overworked, ire- 134 MEN THE WORKERS quently died. One of the witnesses described how he had seen a woman three-quarters asleep, tending a cotton gin nursing a baby the while, which would stop feeding to throw cotton into the machine like its mother, and then go back to the tired breast again. To break the force of these facts, one of the employers went on the stand. "These people," he said, "feel nothing. Being accustomed to the work from their very infancy, they feel nothing." We treat the working people as if they had no feeling. Bureaus of labour, state and con- gressional investigations, the inquiries of special- ists, tenement-house inspection, reveal the exis- tence of conditions of life which to us would be intolerable. The wife of the coal miner of Spring Valley holds her babe to her starved breast until it starves. For this, for everything, we are out of tune. It moves us not, because, in Wordsworth's phrase, "The world is too much with us." We do not need these official reports and investigations. We have eyes to see the clothing, the homes, the bent forms, the ceaseless procession^ of children's funerals, the premature old age of the crowds that stream THE NEW INDEPENDENCE 135 by us on the streets, how far they live below what our own lives show that we consider the proper level of subsistence. To us here to-night the life of those who keep the world spinning for us would be a fate of horror. But we think the workingman ought to be perfectly content. We think he feels nothing. Terrible blunder! In uttering it we, like the Hindu factory lord, show that it is we, not they, who have no feeling. All sentiment this, says Gradgrind. "Why, it is entirely a matter of sentiment, my dear sir," says Ruskin, "whether you eat your grandmother or bury her," Let anyone treat us with superiority, and we are aflame. But we do not think those who live with us, and wait on us, and dig for us, and mould and hammer, can feel the airs with which we order, criticize, or ignore. To get on in the world, to buy cheap and sell dear, not to buy or sell except at our own price, to make "more," to get rich, to make our own bargains for ourselves, all this is the genius of our civilization, unless the workingman does it. The Union forever! we cry, but if the work- ingmen attempt a union, we will receive no 136 MEN THE WORKERS committees. A man chosen to attend to a combined interest is called an attorney, director^ representative, unless he is acting for working- men combined. Then he is a labour agitator, a walking delegate, and we will not deal with "outsiders." We fire up with fury if the work- ingmen make demands which will lessen our profits, but with an iron hand we cut off their livelihood altogether, if so we can better our business. I met a Chicago manufacturer who had just returned from Europe where he had been spending a summer of luxury with all his family. "The workingmen are getting too much," he said. I thought how his men had been working all summer, and contrasted their ways of life with his. He is a good man, a kind man. He thinks he is a just man. Evidently he must believe the workmen have no feelings that need rest, travel, pleasure, inspiration. Our ideal of life inspires us to pile asset on asset and dividend on dividend. But we will cut the workingman in mid-winter off entirely from his income, and blacklist him, too. We practise the same market manoeuvre in buying men as THE NEW INDEPENDENCE 137 in buying dry-goods, because we think they have no feeling. The history and philosophy of this attitude is that it is historically but yesterday that the workmen ceased to be slaves. This fact is fossilized in our language in the phrase "master and men." The caps we put on domestics, the liveries on our coachmen, our scorn of manual labour are all "survivals" which prove that we have not yet outgrown the barbarous days when slaves did all the work of the world. So slowly does the vast glacier of human prejudice and selfishness move to its emancipation in the free waters of the ocean. We have made the bodies of the workmen free, now we have to free their wills, as the great Lamennais said. The workingmen claim that they should not be discharged without cause, and that they have a right to be told what it is. It is objected that to grant this would be to admit that they have a proprietary interest. Exactly, that is pre- cisely what the demand of the workingmen means. They claim a proprietary interest in every structure in which the mortar has been mixed with their sweat. To-day they assert the 138 MEN THE WORKERS right to know why they have been discharged, because to-morrow they intend to step up into the independence of hiring, discharging, owning themselves. It hath been said of them of old time, Servants obey your masters. But the new gospel of May Day, moving day, says: Let no man have any master but himself, for no man is good enough to be the master of another man. We are making history again.* The Anti- Trades-Union Law — called the Anti-Trust Law of Senator Sherman — who voted to keep the Fugitive Slave Law on the statute book; deci- sions like those the other day (1893-1894) by Judge Ricks and Judge Taft that railroad men cannot give up their employment when they choose; recent decisions of judges in Lynn, New York, Binghamton, and elsewhere, pre- venting strikers from communicating with other workmen; the common use of spies by business men to betray the secrets of labour organizations : the refusal to treat with committees of workmen ; using the unemployed to take away the liveli- * The Shermaii Anti-Trust Law was passed July 2, i8go. The amendment thaf it was not to apply to labour imions was rejected, its author (Senator Sherman) saying it was not necessary, the intention of the law not being directed against labour combinations. THE NEW INDEPENDENCE 139 hood of others, instead of finding other work for the unemployed, are all parts of a world- wide concert of action of a money-power crazed with greed, and fanatical to the hilt, to reenslave the working people of the world. It was the essence of slavery that the master made both sides of all contracts in which the slave was interested. [The present attempt of the employer to make both sides of the workingmen's con- tract is an attempt to send him back to his old status of servitude^ It is distinctly and unequivocally an attempt at revolution, not one of the divine revolutions, forward, but a revolution backward, one of the devil's kind. That it is to be done largely by law makes it worse. "Do not set your watch by that church clock," said Mark Twain in Hartford, to a friend. "It is two hundred years behind time." This attempt to reenslave the work- ingman is behind time. The opposition to woman's suffrage was lost ages ago when it was first admitted that women had souls. Man saw in the face of his brother first, that he was too good to be killed as a captive; then that he was too good to be kept as a slave; 140 MEN THE WORKERS and now, that he is too good to be kept poor and dependent. The old philanthropy went out into the highways and byways to bring in the halt, lame, and blind to the feast of life. (The new philanthropy, which is four-fourths science, finds that it can abolish these evils by abolishing the privileges, monopoly, tyranny, and ignorance which cause them, and where it cannot abolish accident, or a failure of crops, or cyclones, it will insure against them. It will thus release mankind from the ills of the flesh, and give them the freedom and the property and health by which to find their own feast for themselves^ The time to have prevented workingmen from rising to-morrow out of wage-earning depen- dence was when they were emerging from slavery into personal freedom. The only way to prevent that would have been to continue the early habit of killing the vanquished. Then none of these troublesome labour questions and social problems would have haunted our luxury. Business says : We will be ruined if we give these men the right to combine and strike. The South said: If we give the black his liberty we THE NEW INDEPENDENCE 141 cannot raise cotton. Conscience said: The manhood of the least of these is worth the cotton- hood of all of you. But if you give them their manhood, your cottonhood will not be lost, but doubled. The more business gives labour, the more business will gain. One of the master steam-fitters of Chicago said of the employees: "We ought to grind their faces." President Houghton, of the Typo- thetse, says : " Organized labour is an organized mob." The Lynn morocco manufacturers say: "We will pay our men what we think they are worth." Young Gould discharges his over- worked, underpaid telegraphers because they want to make their bargain with him in a body, and says: "I will run my own business." Vanderbilt says no man can exercise his American rights to assemble and associate with whom he chooses without losing his place on "my road." These methods are not American. The men who use them are the enemies of American liberty and pros- perity. They are renegades. The system they seek to establish is a renaissance of royalty and aristocracy. 142 MEN THE WORKERS You are "sorry for non-union men"? So much the less should you use them as a club to make all workingmen non-union men. Teach them to form unions. Use your cap- tainship of industry to lead them to doing some of the myriad of things still to be done on this planet. So, instead of using them to make their brothers poorer, you will set them to creating more wealth for them and you. Labour unions are human, but the tyranny we hear so much about is for the most part their anti-tyrannical refusal to let the employer make both sides of the bargain. A charge of tyranny from those who live on the boulevards, with an average life of fifty-five years, against those who live in the back streets, with an average life of twenty-eight years, is excru- ciatingly funny. As for the tyranny of their denying the "sacred right of others to work," this charge has no right to the floor when it comes from those who create the class of unemployed, and who then use it to dis- employ others, who close factories, and issue blacklists. The rules of the market permit surplus goods to be slaughtered. The labour- THE NEW INDEPENDENCE 143 commodity doctrine in operation shows us surplus labour slaughtered literally. TTrade-unions exist to maintain the only sacred right to work. The only right to work which is sacred is the right to work for the good of all, and not to make others idle and unhappy. The unorganized workman cannot make a free contractj The workingman who is too ignorant or too cranky to join the union by which alone labour, in our present system, can live, has no sacred right to take away the work of other men. He has a sacred right to his own work, but not to theirs. If he refuses to become a citizen in the Common- wealth of Labour, he makes himself an alien. There is no such thing known to law, morals, or political economy as a "sacred right to work." No one has a sacred right to practise law, or give pills, or sell wheat on the Board of Trade. You are all owners of the public parks, but you have no sacred right to work there. uThis cant about the sacred right to work usually means a sacred right to work the workingmen against each otherT] The railroads are the most powerful body 144 MEN THE WORKERS in the country, and they and their business alHes are leaders in this conspiracy to reenslave American citizens. The railroad men have got possession of our roads, and now are reach- ing out for everything else in sight. Such railroads are highways, and their owners high- waymen. All the railroad fortunes of this country have been created by the misuse of the sovereign power of the government to take away the property of the many to give it to the few. The use of highways and the right to take private property by force, that is, by eminent domain, belong to the people, and the law has no right to give them to individuals for their private profit. When Commodore Vanderbilt wanted the land where the Grand Central Depot in New York stands, the owners refused to sell. "Then I shall take it," said the Commodore, and he took it by law, with the force of all the courts, bailiffs, policemen, sheriffs, militia and regular army of New York and the United States to back him up. The millions of dollars which his property has gained in value since have been taken by the Government out of the THE NEW INDEPENDENCE 145 pockets of those who owned it, and given to the Vanderbilts to swell their pile. The vast sums which have been made by street-railways, gas-works, electric light and power companies, telephone companies, etc., represent a similiar perversion of the prop- erty of the people into the property of the privileged. VOn this unconstitutional, immoral, confiscatory, and revolutionary misuse of government is built up directly or collaterally nearly every great group of millionaires in this country ._/ Given this monstrous and wicked power to take the property of others to enrich themselves, and given the control of the high- ways, our Goulds, Vanderbilts, Tom Scotts, have created the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Armours, and their kind. This is the power that strikes the key for the millionaire's chorus against organized labour and its strikes. The Reading Railroad breaks up its employees' union, and then dictates to the men how they shall shave their faces. These plutocrats are so drunk with the intoxication of absorbing the property of others that they have become entirely oblivious of 146 MEN THE WORKERS the existence of an old-fashioned American preference that each man should be the owner of his own property. They think we have no feeling for our own property. VWhen the. highwaymen controlling our railroads have consummated the crystallization of all the roads of the United States into a transportation triangle, according to th£_ediii-Jmai_our_Wall Street dynaiStties ; when, with their help, the coal, iron, lumber, oil, salt, coffins, hardware, stoves, and, ultimately, the meat and wheat of the United States are all the property of trusts, with no bodies to be kicked and souls to be damned; when this irresistible power, with its cant about "free men," "free shops," "my business," "no dictator," "the sacred right to work," has taken away the rights of labour — what then will become of us? At the outbreak of the war the number of slave-owners in the South was less than 200,000, and this little minority led the Southern millions to ruin. According to Thomas G. Shearman, the bulk of the United States is already owned by 250,000 persons, and this is being rapidly concentrated into a much THE NEW INDEPENDENCE 147 smaller number. When these few thousands have achieved the power they are now reaching for, of making both sides of all the bargains made in this country, for workingmen, farmers, and the clerks and middle-men, what will become of us? During the war, when an army that had Negro soldiers in it went into battle, the Negroes were put into the front. The workingmen are in the front to-day of this great struggle. Of all our people,[it is to the farmers, who can least easily unite, that the preservation of the right and power of the workingmen to strike is absolutely vital^ The workingmen are to-day in the front fighting their battle. The cities are eating up the country. It is only by alliance with the workingmen of the cities that the farmers can save themselves and their country?^ Having divided hundreds of millions of the property of the people into private estates for themselves, our railway men are now advocating that workingmen in their service shall be pre- vented by law from striking. Not quite daring to propose it to the legislature, they are 148 MEN THE WORKERS procuring it by such law-revolutionizing de- cisions as that of Judge Ricks (1893). They seek to establish a system of railroad peonage. They have converted the highways and property of the people to their own profit; it is a perfectly logical step to proceed to confiscate the "sacred right to work" into their cash-boxes. They seek to achieve this confiscation of the liberty of the workingmen, as that of the highway, by law; with, back of it all, the court, bailiffs, sheriffs, policemen, militia, and regular army and navy. They veil the proposal behind a plea of the public rights and conveniences. /The switchman or engineer is under no greater obligation to the public than the public is to him. If the public wants him to serve it, let it serve him7\ We do not want a people- king any more than a man-king. The most wretched slaves in history were those of Sparta, owned by the state. If the 250,000 owners of the United States succeed in breaking up these unions, dictating with whom the work- ingmen shall meet and associate, as Chauncey Depew, the peripatetic phonograph of the Vanderbilt family, their talking delegate, is THE NEW INDEPENDENCE 149 attempting to do for the New York Central; how they shall dress and shave, as the Reading road does; how long they shall work, what they shall eat, drink, and wear, as the morocco manufacturers of Lynn and the master steam- fitters of Chicago mean to do, there will be a fall in which you and I and all of us will go down. How much will such freemen have to say about the other affairs of freemen, about who shall collect the taxes, how much of the taxes the 250,000 shall pay, and how much shall fall on us ? Who shall judge between them and us how money shall be issued; how banks, and railroads, and land shall be regulated; about who shall command the army, and what he shall command it to do? The horrors of strikes, their idleness, assaults, famines, riots, Pinkertons, blacklists, and storms of hatred are no necessary part of the real strike, which is simply a difference of views between the buyers and sellers of labour. These horrors are only the bad manners which remind us we have not entirely outgrown the quadruped state. It is not these bad man- ners that make strikes successful. The 150 MEN THE WORKERS gentlest strike of history has been that of women, but their emancipation has proceeded so rapidly that in states Uke New York it has become a commonplace among lawyers that husbands have no rights their wives are bound to respect. That fine old liberal Tory, Dr. Samuel Johnson, always used to drink as a standing toast: "Here's success to the first insurrection of the slaves of Jamaica." But the slaves got their freedom without the insur- rection. Wilberforce struck for them. Imagine some visitor from a better world reaching the earth at Gettysburg, at the time of the battle. What means this blood, cannon- ade, murder, shrieks of the dying? These people, we should have to reply, are debating ampng themselves how best to live together and preserve their union. He lights upon the scene of the New York Central strike, or the strike in the Lehigh Valley, and sees rail- way tracks and tunnels blockaded, coal mines shut up, men idle, women starving, ruffians legalized, firing rifles at random on the people, all the terrors of riot, hunger, and cold, rich and poor cursing each other. These brothers, THE NEW INDEPENDENCE 151 we should have to explain, are settling in their own way how to establish a harmony of interests ; they are debating the cooperative use of the bounty of nature and the brotherhood of man. This ruffianism stains both sides, but the blackest half of the guilt is theirs — the great, the rich, the wise, who use it to make the poor poorer and to still further wrong the wronged. Those clergymen, professors, and writers who pride themselves on maintaining a "judicial attitude," almost invariably show that they have come to believe that a judge is one who never renders a decision against the upper dog. Ruskin complained of the ministers who dined with the rich and preached to the poor. Our popular parsons do better. They preach to the rich and at -the poor. We hear much from them of the turbulence of the workingmen. "I would kill any sheep that bit me," said the sheepstealer to the judge. "The lion is a very wicked animal, who defends himself when he is attacked," wrote an African trav- eller. The methods of the workingmen, with all their lapses, are holiness itself by the side 152 MEN THE WORKERS of the Pinkertons, Camp Sheridans, and the Gatling guns, which Christian chaplains bless as instruments for the conversion of heathen and strikers. Every gun in the new armoury on Michigan Avenue, in Chicago, tears open afresh the wounds in the body of Christ, who said, Love one another, and whom the work- ingmen in London and New York cheer at their meetings. Upon its portals should be inscribed, for the daily consideration of the millionaires who built it, this saying of a wise man: "You can do everything with a bayonet except sit on it." "Why did you not take the other end of the pitchfork.?" said the angry owner of a bulldog to a workingman who had saved his own legs by running the animal through. "So I would," was the reply, " if he had come at me with his other end." C^The workingmen have made many mistakes, but the greatest is that they have never asked for enough. They have never demanded the cost of production, and to that they are entitled in full, by every law of love and the markets^ Even the political economists admit that. Read Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, and all THE NEW INDEPENDENCE 153 their disciples, and you will find that the wages of workingmen, like all other prices, are deter- mined by the cost of production, and this "cost of subsistence" rises or falls according to the standard of life the workingmen demand. What does it cost to produce an American, a man fit to be your and my fellow citizen; our brother and partner? One who can help us administer the estate of liberty, left by the fathers ? A childhood free from factory life ? A motherhood that needs to do no work but that of the home? A fatherhood that has time to take its children on its knee? A manhood that can make its own bargain, choose its own associates, vote its own ticket, shave its beard as it likes, and have as good a chance of old age as any other man? What such subsistence costs is the cost of production of the American workingman that Washington fought for and John Brown died for. That the workingmen are entitled to, but that they have never demanded. "Labour is its own bondslave," says Wordsworth. The only cure for the strikes and lockouts which are making two hostile armies of the 154 MEN THE WORKERS working hosts and business men, is the same that made peace between the EngHsh and Americans in 1783 — a recognition of indepen- dence. The dockers of England and Australia, who propose to handle the commerce of London and Melbourne by cooperating to make con- tracts directly with the vessel owners ; the coop- erative stores of England, Belgium, and France; the cooperative workshops being started in England ; the Trades - Union Congress of Great Britain, which demands the nationaliza- tion of the land; the Knights of Labour, who call for the resumption by the Government of the powers over public highways and private property improperly given to rail- roads and telegraph companies and banks; the Federation of Labour, which advocates the international organization of all working- men; the Miners' International Congress, who propose that there shall be a general strike of all the miners of the world for human work and human pay; are all parts of a great declara- tion of independence, which is now being written in black, and sometimes in red, upon the pages of history before our eyes. THE NEW INDEPENDENCE 155 What we call the labour movement is but the appearance in a wider field of the expand- ing manhood of the world. [History has repeated itself, until we know that no pater- nalism can solve any social probleni]^ The good king, the chivalrous baron, the Christian slaveholder, the merciful master, the philan- thropic monopolist — the few we have had — have been charming; but they cost too much. They march in a vanishing procession. Only the brother stays. From the inland hill we admire the ship that sails smoothly along the distant horizon. Only those on board see the tossing of the waves. To our near view, the passions of this industrial conflict forebode the wreck of a world. We are on the surface of a sun. Therefrom volcanoes and cyclones of fire rage forth red, tumultuous, and awful storms of flame. But these pass into space, a white light to kiss the stars into gardens of love and beauty. VII STRIKES AND INJUNCTIONS* TO prove that injunctions to prevent strikes are legal does not prove that they are right. Nor does it touch the quick of the question. We who are lawyers, and even more, those of us who are judges, would be the first to admit that, philosophically and practically, law and right are not the same. It has been prettily said that the common law is the perfection of common sense. It was common sense in the days of Sir Matthew Hale that certain kinds of old women, wrinkled of face, furrowed of brow, especially those who went about with dogs by their sides, were possessed of the devil; had power to raise the dead and bewitch the living. In the common law, as the perfection of this common sense, that great and good man and judge found his warrant for putting harmless * Address before (he Sunset Club, Chicago, 111., October >s, 1894. 156 STRIKES AND INJUNCTIONS 157 and wretched old women to death. The law is full of fictions, but whatever the super- stitions of more orthodox days may have been, the idea would no longer be held by any one, least of all by the learned tenants of the bench, that our judges are aqueducts connected with some celestial watershed of infinite and infallible justice, which they pipe to every citizen, accord- ing to his needs. There is no question which the courts, give them time enough, will not decide in two ways, opposite and irrecon- cilable; for that which was yesterday thought to be common sense, to-day finds to be non- sense, and the courts speak for their day. "The highest virtue," says Emerson, "is always against the law." "No pretence can be so ridiculous," says Burke, "as that the laws were designed as a protection for the poor and weak against the oppression of the rich and powerful." The real science of the matter, the hope of the world, the justification of democracy, is that the laws of the legislature, the law of the courts, and the common sense of the people are slowly, age by age, creating that justice which mankind has vainly imagined 158 MEN THE WORKERS some upper power would create for it. There is a higher fountain of right than courts and Con- gress ; it has its inexhaustible springs in that res- ervoir from which has flowed all the truths of the people — that fountain is the people themselves. The law of injunctions to prevent strikes rests for the moment, as far as Federal law is concerned, as stated by Justice Harlan, in his recent decision. There is no Federal law for an injunction to forbid a man or a body of men from quitting the service of an employer. Such an injunction "would be an invasion of natural liberty." This decision was a vic- tory for workingmen, so far as it shortened the tether of the judge below who had issued such an injunction — an "invasion of the natural liberty." Nothing could be so sig- nificant of our times as that such a decision should be necessary — nothing so clearly delineates the desperate straits into which the common people of thisr country have been brought as that this decision should have been hailed with joy as an act of judicial deliv- erance. Ten short years ago such a question could not have arisen. STRIKES AND INJUNCTIONS 159 In 1882 the freight handlers of New York struck against a reduction of their pay from twenty cents to seventeen cents an hour. The railroad ofBcials locked out and shut down the business of the metropolis rather than pay the men this wage, scanty enough. Trade was paralyzed; trucks stood in the streets by thousands for days waiting to be unloaded. The railroad ofBcials sat serene in their office, waiting for the men to starve and for the public to become so infuriated as to tolerate this injustice to the men, or any other iniquity, provided the Goddess of Getting- On were allowed to get on again. But public opinion was not as "advanced" then as it has since become. It was so clear that the price asked by the men was fair, and that the railroads were manufacturing general distress to goad the people into forgetfulness of the rights of the men, that public opinion forced the author- ities of the state to act. The Attorney- General of New York, reinforced with able counsel supplied by one of the most influen- tial organizations of the city — the Chamber of Commerce — applied to the courts for a 160 MEN THE WORKERS mandamus to compel the corporations to operate their roads, even though they had to pay this living wage. The judge to whom this application was made refused it. He was the same who afterward fined members of the oil trust $250 for conspiracy to blow up a competitor's refinery full of workingmen.* But the highest court unanimously reversed this, and decided that the mandamus should have been granted. But by this time the men had been defeated, the strike was lost, and the railroads had won all they played for — won it by the timely and indispensable help of a judge's bad law, the injustice of justice. So the Northern Pacific defeated its men last winter with the help of the judge, "the perfection of whose common sense" flowed into "an invasion of natural liberty," as had been judicially declared by Judge Harlan. This injustice of the judges was the reinforce- ment that saved the battle for the corporations in New York and the Northwest. In a quesr tion of buying and selling of labour the Gov- ernment intervened in the person of its judges, *'* See "Wealth Againsl Commonwealth," p. 2ga. STRIKES AND INJUNCTIONS 161 and commanded the seller, under penalty of imprisonment or, if need be, of encounter with all the military forces of the nation, to sell his labour instantly; to sell it to one buyer alone, and to sell it at that buyer's price. " The jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that honour feels." The railroad owners saved millions of money that would have had to be paid to the work- ingmen. They could afford their men what- ever satisfaction could be got out of the decision, irreparably too late, that the means of life for their wives and children and their rights have been taken away from them by those whom they have made the guardians of their rights. The law tells' us it has a remedy for every wrong; what remedy has the law for the wrong the law has done these men? Ten years ago, as in New York, it was a man- damus against the road that was applied for; now it is an injunction against the men. Then, attorney-generals moved for the public; now, for the corporations. The public virtue that energized this action of the authorities of New York in defence of the public seems to be dead or gone on a journey into a far land. 162 MEN THE WORKERS A cyclone of passion against the men tears its way when a strike threatens, through news- papers, counting-rooms, parlours, the heads and hearts of those who control the influential utterances and acts of society, and greets with cheers, prayers of thanksgiving, and hymns of praise the batteries that come rumbling into the city to deal out "God's whistling messengers of peace." This is the sign of the times. Power is always progressive — for power. The men who own our highways are using them to transport into their own possession whatever else they see that they like. "In Arizona," said one of its business men, "when the Pacific road has a shipment of freight for one of us, it asks: 'How much is the man worth .P' and it charges him that amount for the freight." The men who have their hands on the highways of a people are in a position of as much vantage as he who has a grip on his neighbour's windpipe. The public will pay anything for its breath. Give us your prop- erty, give us your streets, give us your common council, your legislature, your attorney-generals. STRIKES AND INJUNCTIONS 163 your army and navy. Give us the power to say to which citizens in each industry the right to live and to be monopolists shall be given. Browbeat, enjoin, if necessary shoot our switchmen and trainmen into submission to lower and lower wages. This power to open and shut our highways is the screw its owners can turn until the frantic public will do any bidding. The railroads have till lately been content with resisting government; now, con- scious of powers matured, they take a higher ground, and make the City Hall and Spring- field, and Washington the main offices of their train dispatchers. The use of injunctions to break strikes is one of the most advanced manifestations of this railroad aggression. But that is not the quick of the question. The injunctions against strikes are not con- fined to interstate commerce; state judges have applied them to state matters. In the case of a clothing-makers' strike, a New York judge recently forbade "all persons" from assembling or loitering in the vicinity of the employer's store, or from patrolling or picket- ing the streets, or from using printed notices 164 MEN THE WORKERS or publications to interfere with his business; or even from "enticing" "anyone" fronl his employment. If correctly reported in the press, an injunction issued against the head of the Knights of Labour last winter by a Federal judge forbade him from "speaking any word" that would help the strike. We have had a dry year, but it has rained injunctions all over the United States. The course of the judiciary in this matter is an illustration of the dangers of a progressive use of power, peculiar to the United States, and of which we have had ample warning. The power of the American judiciary to reverse the action of a coordinate branch of the Gov- ernment is a power which Jefferson long ago told his countrymen would make the Supreme Court the master of America. The courts of Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, France, the other democracies, have no such sovereignty to overrule other departments of the . gov- ernment and the expressed will of the people. Pushed forward thus, by the resistless gravita- tion of resistless power, into inevitable suprem- acy, the United States courts have been STRIKES AND INJUNCTIONS 165 aggrandizing themselves in other ways, in none more noticeably than this very matter of injunctions. That eminent jurist, the Honour- able Lyman Trumbull, has recently startled the whole nation into attention by his words on this subject. De Tocqueville tells us that "he who pun- ishes infractions of the law is therefore the real master of society." One of the greatest institutions of democracy is the jury, designed to make the people the only masters of the people, and to prevent star-chamber judges and the Charles the Seconds, whose behests they obey, from becoming the masters of society. Federal judges are beginning to claim the right to create new crimes without debate, legislation, or even notice, by proclamations called injunc- tions, and to punish without trial by jury those who disobey. A deeper eclipse than all these is settling on the temples of justice! When we see railway counsel pass at one step from the legal department of their corpora- tions to the bench, and listen to the cynical avowals of captains of industry that they contribute to the campaign funds of both 166 MEN THE WORKERS parties for "protection," our heart dies within us. For we know ourselves to be face to face with the masters of our masters, the lords of our lords. But even this is not the quick of this ques- tion. Greater than the aggressions of the railroads, greater than the aggressions of the judiciary, stands forth as our central fact, that we have begun to drive our workingmen to their work. Our society on its industrial side lives by force. Our leaders have lost the power to lead, and have begun to drive. We have stopped whipping our wives; we have, most of us, stopped whipping our children; but we whip our workmen to their tasks with the scourge of starvation, and are now adding to this the brute force of our armaments. The discontent of the people, says Burke, is never unprovoked. Millions of the people are discontented, and pour into the streets. We offer no remedy. Shorter hours? Higher wages? Work for the workless? The liv- ing wage? Abolition of monopoly? The right to work? Recognition of the right to union? All of these requests for relief, most STRIKES AND INJUNCTIONS 167 moderate, conservative, mere palliations, we evade. We have against every one some reason that suits us. It is not convenient; by and by; we have another engagement; or, yes, if you can get an international agree- ment. We offer no remedy; but we draw up our lines of soldiers opposite the lines of the people, and wait for the rioters who will give us the right to shoot, and our judges force the poor back to work by orders which later we acknowledge are " invasions of natural liberty." We live with each other in government by the glorious principle of "consent." "The con- sent of the governed" is the Golden Rule applied to political life. But in industrial life we think to live by force. This is mere midsummer madness, midwinter madness, all the year around madness. Industry by force, government by consent, cannot coexist. No people, no society, is stronger than its weakest link. If they associate with each other at any point on terms of compulsion, the general level of the whole society will sink to that point. We are proving this in our experience. We have allowed the people, as consumers, to 168 MEN THE WORKERS become the victims in the market of the force of those who have the power to withhold the necessaries of life, owned as monopolized pri- vate property; we have allowed the people, as labourers, to be forced into hated tasks, at prices they are not willing to accept, by those who have the power to withhold employment. Now we wake as into a nightmare to find that this market force must be succeeded by the more brutal — though not so deadly — force of armed men, using their bayonets as punc- tuation points to help the people read the judicial bulletins of industry under compulsion. The use of the force of the army is the legiti- mate successor of the use of the force of star- vation. Put to one side all consideration of the unjust injunctions; admit that injunctions are legal to prevent workingmen from improperly quitting their work; recognize that law and order must be upheld; the main question still confronts us: Why is this legal force necessary to keep men at work.? I never yet met any one who in private conversation would not admit that the people are enduring great wrongs; no one who would STRIKES AND INJUNCTIONS 169 deny that some remedy must be found. Do not dream that the discontent can be dealt with by repressing its manifestations. You do not cure, but kill, the small-pox patient when you drive in the eruption. All the broken granites and marbles from Nineveh to Rome are the gravestones of the civilizations that tried to settle the discontent of the people in that way, and to live in peace by force. " By love serve one another " is as good political economy as politics or religion. It is the only good political economy. First Coxey, then Debs; next who, what.? This discontent of the people is more righteous than the spirit which would repress it without remedying the causes. Monopoly has made the army necessary. The more armies you have the more armies you will need and the more monopoly you will get. There is only one way in which the American public in the nineteenth century of Christian civili- zation, and the one hundred and eighteenth year of the declaration of the equal rights of man, can save its legal or moral right to be served by even one worker, no matter how humble. That sole way is to render equal 170 MEN THE WORKERS service for service, and to make it so pleasant and profitable, so safe in love and justice to serve, that all hands and hearts will fl;Ow freely into deeds of reciprocal brotherliness. A nation that has to send Gatling guns and bayonets, parks of artillery and major-generals, to drive men to serve each other, and has to use force through the medium of injunctions, how- ever legal they may be, is a nation whose social units have already been driven apart by unpunished injustice. To reunite them by force is impossible; that attempt has often been made, but never successfully. Pharaoh tried it; it did not hurt the Hebrews, and it spoiled the Egyptians. We are not moving back- ward, but forward. Hhmanity is about to take the greatest step up in its history. It is about to crown and consummate the free- doms it has won for man as worshipper and citizen by a still more glorious freedom for him as labourer. The unprecedented sympathy which stirs to-day for the poor; our unhappiness in the discovery that we are getting the services of our fellows by force ; the universal confession that the burdens and benefits of society are not STRIKES AND INJUNCTIONS 171 rightly divided — these are the whispers of a new conscience which is soon to be reaUzed in the daily lives of mankind. Even we may live to reach that new height in the ascent of man, and look back upon the days of industry by starvation, by injunctions, riot-drills, with as much amazement and joy of deliverance as the people of the South feel for the day, only yesterday, of industry by slave-pens and blood- hounds, and the fear of servile insurrection; with as much exultation in the ever-rising des- tiny of the people as the republicans of France look back to the government by coup d'etat and street massacre, which men still young have seen make way for government by consent. VIII BOOMERANG LAW* TT is now universally admitted by students •^ of history and politics that if England had been victorious in the War of Independence she would have lost her liberties in keeping her colonies. George III. did not know much, but he knew that the principles of no taxation without representation, and of local self-gov- ernment, would have to be yielded in England if yielded in America, and he fought with the desperation of a giant who felt that the very foundations of his throne were in danger. The Reform Bill of 1832, and all the reform bills that have followed, were the victories of the English people gathered from their defeat at Yorktown. In that particular, and to that extent, the English people escaped the greatest peril that can threaten the prosperities or the liberties of * Published in the RaUvfay Times, l^bor Day edition, September 2, 1895, Terre Haute, Indiana. 172 BOOMERANG LAW 173 a nation. History proves nothing if not that no people can safely hold another people in subjection. The longer the denial of the rights of the Negroes continued, the more arbitrary grew the repression of the rights of blacks and whites, North and South. Had slavery not been abolished, the reign of terror which it brought to the South would have become chronic in the North as well, and the slave- market quotations would have become a regular accompaniment of the stock and produce market reports. The Southern master was emancipated by the same proclamation that set free his slaves; and not the Southern master alone, but his Northern brother, too. But as if so simple a lesson could not be learned by the people except by ceaseless iteration and reiteration, as children learn, we of America are again entering upon this fatal policy of holding another people in sub- jection. Our forefathers had as their deepest hope and purpose to found a state which should always Continue free from social inequality. But that hop^ has already gone. Inequality 174 MEN THE WORKERS (as the almost immeasurable inequality between the syndicate millionaire and the unemployed and the strikers) has become an established institution and, as in the spirit of institutions, demands the help of all other institutions — the church, army and navy, the schools and colleges — to maintain it. The subjection of the poor to the rich, which is to say of the wage worker to the capitalist, of the farmer to all monopolies, can be maintained only as subjection has always been maintained; that is, by taking away the equal rights of the subject class. This process of subjugation is already far along. Already we have two clearly dis- tinct administrations of law in America: One for the rich, one for the poor. Debs and his associates are in jail on the unsupported, because untried, charge that they did certain acts. For merely being accused of these acts they have been deprived of property and liberty, and are each day shut out from the free sun, deprived of an irrecoverable part of life itself; and yet such acts are the daily routine of the capitalist class. The strike, the boycott, obstruction of interstate commerce, violation BOOMERANG LAW 175 of the law, even violence, all these before our eyes are indulged in as a matter of course by the big toads of our industrial puddle. This or that trust can "strike" against the public by raising the price of a necessity of life, or "strike" against its employees by reducing their wages or increasing their hours; the trusts can stop work en masse by "shutting down" to create scarcity; the railroads can boycott each other and boycott workingmen who have dared to join a union; they can obstruct interstate commerce by refusing to operate their lines in order to goad the public into coercing their employees, by military force, into doing compulsory labour; they can violate* the Interstate Commerce law; they can give passes and rebates, and defy the decisions of the Interstate Commerce Commission; they can burn down and blow up their competitor — and the law has no arm to lift against them. The law puts its sheltering arms around them and the property they have acquired by these means, holds them safe, and transmits it unimpaired to their successors. In the same spirit in which the jurisprudence of slavery 176 MEN THE WORKERS forbade the slaves to read and assemble, or travel, or defend themselves, the jurisprudence of capitalism is busy contriving doctrines to take away the rights of the poor — the work- ing people — to free speech, free assemblage, trial by jury, the presumption of innocence until proved guilty; freedom to work or not to work, and the other safeguards of civic and social liberty. The new tyranny is not so stupid or clumsy as to pass laws against free speech or trial by jury, or the right of meeting. But it sends its police to break up meetings of workingmen; and its judges kill free speech by deciding that a speaker is responsible for the bad use a fool or knave may make of his utterances, and that violence is a necessary consequence of a strike; so that he who advises a strike advises any violence that may come of it. Trial by jury can be taken away by judges' injunctions without any help from the lobby and the legislature. Our administration of law, in parallel col- umns, forbids the combination of workingmen and permits the combination of employers. This awkward contradiction does not need BOOMERANG LAW 177 to appear in our statute-books. It is created by the subtler and more irresistible legis- latiort of judges and attorney-generals. All this is boomerang law. The middle classes of America, who are helping a few thousand plutocrats to take away the working people's rights, are establishing the mischievous prece- dent by which, when the time comes, their own rights will be forfeited. It is the labour orator, to-day, who is jailed or hanged. It will be the magazine writer or middle-class author who will feel, to-morrow, the lariat of the law of constructive respon- sibility. The farmer and middle classes of the cities are cheering on the lawyer and prose- cuting attorney who are tying down the strug- gling Samsons of labour. They will find themselves, later, caught in the same snares. No people ever held another in sub- jection without losing its own rights. This is as true of the relations of classes as of nations. Our middle class have joined hands with the railway kings to make a subject class of the railway operatives. By so doing, the merchants, manufacturers, and farmers have 178 MEN THE WORKERS been building up these masters of transpor- tation into the power to take away, as they are doing, every common-law right of the people on the highways. The loss of their rights on the highways is only the beginning of the blows they will receive from the recoil of the boomerangs they are now throwing at the working people. IX THE RECEPTION OF EUGENE V. DEBS* A LL classes of the community, business ■^ ^ men and professional men, stockholders of corporations as well as workingmen, are represented in this meeting to welcome Eugene V. Debs back to liberty. Mr. Debs has received two thousand invitations to deliver public addresses before all kinds of bodies, from trade-unions to political gatherings and literary societies. He has a deluge of letters from all sorts and conditions of men — eminent jurists, labour leaders, farmers, capitalists, and statesmen. Tributes of sympathy and en- couragement come to him from all parts of the country, and from every element of the people. First, the people greet Debs because he was the leader of a sympathetic strike. Amer- icans cannot forget that America is free from * Address at a mass-meeting to welcome Debs, after his release from Woodstock, Indiana, Jail, at Battery D, Chicago, Illinois, November 22, 1895. 179 180 MEN THE WORKERS Great Britain because France ordered a sym- pathetic strike. The Negro is free because of the sympathetic strike of the North, What greater love hath any man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend? The sym- pathetic strike in a good cause is orthodox Christianity in action. Second, this outpouring in honour of Debs greets him also because he is the martyr of government by injunction, the most dan- gerous tyranny that ever threatened the freedom of the people or the safety of a republic. The American people have wit enough to know that these precedents of government by injunctions, instead of trial by jury, of law made by proclamation instead of legislation, of punishment at the mercy of a judge's sour temper or sour stomach, are precedents which will not stop where they begin — with the workingman. If government by injunction lasts, the rights of anyone — capitalist, labourer. Republican, Democrat, Populist, farmer — can be destroyed at the will of any faction or syndicate which happens to have judges in oflBce. SPEECH AT DEBS'S RECEPTION 181 Under the decision of the United States Supreme Court refusing Debs the right of trial, all that is necessary to justify govern- ment by injunction is an affidavit by any unknown person that he believes the country is going to the "demnition bow-wows." That 'is all the evidence the judges need for putting the country under worse than martial law. That was all there was in the Debs case — an affidavit full of hysterical lies by a man no one ever heard of before or since. Under government by injunction any judge can accuse any person of high crime by the device of enjoining him not to commit it. This accusation by the judge is the same thing as condemnation, for the judge, on any kind of evidence whatever, and without trial by jury, can find the accused guilty and sen- tence him to pay any fine, even to his last dollar, and imprison him for any term, even to the last year of his life. Government by injunction, like most bad things, grows fast. In Massachusetts and New York judges have got to issuing injunctions forbidding working- men from stopping work or walking up and 182 MEN THE WORKERS down the street in front of their employers' places of business. Government by injunction means that a judge may at will crowd the people into a position where they must all be either slaves or criminals. Slaves if they obey him, crim- inals if they obey Magna Charta, the Declara- tion of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States. Debs and his six heroic associates, innocent of any offence known to the laws, without legal notice that what they were doing was forbidden by the judges, with- out notice from any provision of the Constitution or statute of the legislature, without indictment, without trial by a jury of their peers, without habeas corpus, were deprived of liberty and property and for many months of life. They were denied the right to appeal. The right of a judge to punish as he will for contempt of court within his bailiwick is the choicest pre- rogative of his office, and any other judge who interfered with it would be looked upon by all his associates on the bench as a "scab." If Debs were the least and worst of us all, instead of being the generous enthusiast he is SPEECH AT DEBS'S RECEPTION 183 for humanity, this outrage upon his — and our — citizenship ought to be enough to call to his side every soul fit to be free. The most popular man among the real people to-day is Debs, the victim of judicial lynch law, the repudiator of contempt of court as a substitute for the Constitution of the United States, and of Gatling guns as the harmonizer of labour and capital; the first rebel against government by injunction. It is not a disgrace to these men to have been in prison. The bird of freedom has always been a jail-bird. In all great crises the place to look for the redeemers of the race is not in the palaces of religion or the palaces of justice, but in the prison cells or on the road thereto. Moses had to flee from the Egyptians. Socrates died in a cell. Christ was made a convict because he was a friend of the people and was crucified as the first preacher of democracy. Washington and JeflFerson had so much contempt of court that they would have been hanged if they could have been caught. In the history of progress tyranny has always been the turnkey, liberty always the convict. "Truth," said Lowell, 184 MEN THE WORKERS "forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne." Let us grant for the argument that per- haps Debs made mistakes. He would be the last man to claim infallibility. Perhaps the American Railway Union is not composed altogether of archangels. There are two sides to every question, people say, and then climb up on the fence. Which was the right side in the Pullman strike? Which is the right side in every labour dispute .?' Our forefathers in the Revolution did many illegal things and committed several acts of violence; but, as against George III., theirs was always the right side. The workingmen often do wrong, but theirs is always the right side. It is the side of the disinherited, the wronged, of the victims of power, of the many, of the hun- dreds of millions who go to bed hungry every night on this fruitful earth of ours. The workingmen's side is the side which carries the principle of civilization — the rule of the people — which is that all must live for all, one step further, making it the rule of industry as it now is of patriotism. It will enlarge the SPEECH AT DEBS'S RECEPTION 185 splendid flag of the republic into the more glorious banner of the cooperative common- wealth. The workingmen's side is always the right side, and the more mistakes they make the more will all those who love their fellow men, and who have faith in the future, give them aid, comfort, and aflPection. Some years ago the street-railway men of Glasgow struck for shorter hours and longer wages, and lost. When they found that the industrial strike failed, they tried the political strike. They began an agitation by which, to-day, Glasgow owns and runs its own street railways. If the million railroad men of Amer- ica want to organize a strike that will strike down at the root — the cause of all these injunctions and Gatling guns, these insur- rections against the people by the judged and the army and the President — let them strike to make themselves and their fellow citizens owners of the railways and telegraphs and telephones — and a good many other things. The common people of the last century demanded that since government exists only by the labours of all, it should exist only by 186 MEN THE WORKERS the voice of all. It is time for the common people of this century to make another declara- tion and constitution, and demand that since industry and wealth are possible . only by the labours of all, they shall be administered bnly by the voice and by the consent of all. When in any industry the workingnlen find that their employers have become possessed of such overgrown power that they are able to treat their committees as rebels; when they can starve them into submission by lockouts, because they know there is no other work for them; when they can play the tyrant by telling them that the price at which they must sell themselves is only the employers' "business," not theirs, and threaten to shoot them if they "dictate" about this "business" by asking for arbitration — when in any industry the people find that they must pay whatever price the seller demands for coal, sugar, oil, salt, meat, or what not, and must accept whatever quality they are given, then there is an industry ripe for a ballot strike, a sympathetic strike, by the people, consumers and workingmen alike, for industrial democracy. SPEECH AT DEBS'S RECEPTION 187 How did Washington deliver America? "He saved his money and bought a gun." But he planted bullets because he knew how to make them grow into ballots. He fought that we, his heirs, need not fight. Napoleon, on his way to his gr9,ve at St. Helena, said: "I was not conquered by the arms of the Allies. I was beaten by ' the ideas of liberty.' " Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, if they were here to-day, would not need the musket to free their people. They would say to us: "If you can vote public lands and public bonds and public streets and public rights to private citizens for private profit, can you not vote the same to the public for public railroads, telegraphs, telephones, street-cars, gas-companies, for public profit?" Are not the Americans as able to do these things as the English, Germans, French, Swiss, Russians, Italians ? Washington would say the corporations would have no right to com- plain of public competition. Do not they and their professors of political economy tell us continually that competition is the life of trade; and since self-interest is the law of life has not the public a self-interest of its own and a right 188 MEN THE WORKERS to use it? Your votes elect judges who rule that a strike must by its nature be violent, and that the workingmen who order a strike are therefore responsible for any violence that comes with it. Why not use your votes by way of change to elect judges who will go one step nearer the cause of the violence and rule that the capitalist who compels his men to strike by cutting them down below a living wage is responsible for the violence that comes with the strike, and is an accessory before the fact to whatever may happen ? How would it do to elect judges who would issue injunc- tions against monopolists who strike, locking up their tanneries, or match factories, or sugar refineries, or coal mines to create famine and make the people pay famine prices? You have been electing judges — it is your votes have done it every time — to kill the sweat-shop, truck-store, child-labour laws, because contrary, these judges say, to the sacred liberty of contract. There is another end to this poker. You could, if you would, elect judges who would hold that all contracts made between employers SPEECH AT DEBS'S RECEPTION 189 and employed under the compulsion of star- vation are void, and that the wealth so extorted must be refunded, because the contract was not free. There can come to the bench any day you choose to elect them, judges who can declare void all the sales of monopoly coal, oil, salt, lumber, iron, at monopoly prices, and can order the wealth returned to its real owners — the people — because taken from them by a hold-up. You have been electing judges who have defeated your attempt to control the corporations, because they held that their charters were contracts! When you elect the right man for attorney-general he will read to you out of his law-books that that poker, too, has two ends, and if you will elect people's men judges, he will go before them and have nine out of ten of these charters forfeited because the contract has been broken. Nine out of every ten gas -companies, street rail- ways, steam railroads in the United States stand to-day with the penalty of legal for- feiture hanging over them. They have done what they ought not to have done, and left undone the things they should have done. 190 MEN THE WORKERS Some wonderful justice will be done when the people come in. This reception of Debs is the most encour- aging thing that has happened yet in the labour movement in America, and the labour move- ment is a great, world-wide uprising of the people — the greatest in history. The labour movement is another rise of the people — rising to establish liberty, fraternity, and equality as the law of industry, as they already made the law of the republic. The labour movement is the third great historic crisis of democracy. The first abolished the altar monopolist, the second abolished the throne monopolist, the third will abolish the money- bag monopolist. The first made men equal as brothers by the fatherhood of all humanity; the second made them equal as fellow citizens; the third, the labour movement, will make them equal as co-workers in cooperative industry, of all, by all, for all. This labour movement is a grand whole, of which the social settle- ments like Hull House in Chicago and Toynbee Hall in London, the trades-union movement, the municipalization of monopolies in the cities, SPEECH AT DEBS'S RECEPTION 191 the nationalization of larger monopolies by the country at large, labour legislation, the cooperative movement, the farmers' granges, are but parts. It is a new Christianity, for it will Chris- tianize, industry; it is a new democracy, for it will democratize privilege and injustice out of the world of business; it is a new philanthropy for it will humanize the relation of employer and employed, buyer and seller. It is a new polit- ical economy, for the greatest destroyer of wealth in the modern world is wealth, and the labour movement, by putting all to work, and opening to all the riches of nature, now locked out, shut down, will create a true wealth of which our wildest avarice cannot dream. It is the logical sequence of all the great emanci- pations, reformations, religious revivals, and patriotisms of the past. It will emancipate two kinds of slaves — master and man — the slave who has to submit to starvation, Gatling guns, and injunctions, and the slave who uses them. This new emancipation, continuing and consummating all the others, will give a new strength to all the great words embodying 192 MEN THE WORKERS the hopes and achievements of the race. Sal- vation, home, heaven, individuality, fatherland, family, freedom, humanity, all these keynote words will be filled fuller when we have made each other brothers in industry, disciples of the golden rule in business, fellow citizens in the true commonwealth. It is not a movement of hate, but of love. It pities the man who can stand at the helm of any of the great concerns of modern indus- trial life, made possible only by the countless efforts, loyalty, and genius of thousands of his fellow men, living and dead, and say: "This is my business." It says to him: "This is not your business; not my business. It is our business." It says to him, in the words of the Persian proverb: "The power that is not founded on love is always the power that has failed." It pities him as robbing himself of the greatest joys and triumphs of leadership. It seeks to lift him from the low level of selfish and cruel millionairism to that of a general of great cooperative hosts of industrial brothers. The labour movement will put the strong man, the born captain of industry, in a place as SPEECH AT DEBS'S RECEPTION 193 high above the plutocrat as Lincoln, the elected and beloved leader, is above a czar. The rise of the people has always meant that all live for all — you and your children, you and your fellow worshippers of one Father of all men, you and your fellow citizens with one vote and one flag, you and your associates of the trades-unions, the society, where an injury to one is an injury to all, in all these — in family, church, guild, society, city, and state, you are, so far as you are true, doing as you would be done by, living for all. The new rise of the people we call the labour movement has for its mission to put this rule of all for all into action among the miserable multitudes of modern industry now living in anarchy and civil war. It means to civilize. Christianize, republicanize, humanize, econ- omize, these masses of industrial combatants, destroying themselves and destroying society. Looking back over the thousands of years they have travelled, the people can see that nothing was able to stop the republic; looking forward they know nothing can stop the cooperative commonwealth. LESSONS OF THE DEBS CASE* "TXEBS out of prison is as much of a mar- ■*-^ tyr as Debs in his cell. He comes out, not pardoned and indem- nified for a great injustice, as he should be, but with the yoke of an unremitted condem- nation heavy upon him and upon the people for whom he has suffered. He cannot walk among us as a free man until by retribution and reconstruction the burden of personal and social wrong has been lifted from him and us. In his person are impersonated the victims in another defeat, in a long series of defeats, of organized labour; and in him are im- personated the people suffering from an- other loss, in a long series of losses, of their liberties. The workmen on the railroads and else- * Published in " The Coming Nation," Ruskin Cooperative Association, Tenneiaee City, Tenn., November 30, 1895. 194 LESSONS OF DEBS CASE 195 where have been split into more and bitterer factions; the rights of the states in relation to the Federal Government have received another blow, the severest since the formation of the Government; the judiciary, under cover of the popular panic, has taken the longest for- ward step yet made in its unhalting self- aggrandizement; the judicial and administra- tive foundation has been laid for the denial of the right of the people to unite in speak- ing, assembling, printing, working or not working, as they deem best. As a result of the labour troubles of 1877, the workingmen of Illinois lost the right to bear arms, which was taken away by law. Nine years later the eight-hour movement of 1886 cost them the right of free meeting, which now exists only by sufferance of the police, and with the liability under the law as laid down in the well-called anarchist cases, that any participant, present or absent, may be hanged for any word or deed of any other person concerned. Eight years later the great Pullman strike of 1894 leaves them as the subjects of government by injunction. 196 MEN THE WORKERS • without the rights of free speech, free labour, or trial by jury. Evidently, in this journey of disfranchise- ment of property, liberty, life itself, there cannot be many more marches for us to make. In other words, fought on the present tactics, the cause of the workingmen, which is to-day the cause of the people, is a losing cause, and will, unless there is a change, soon be a lost cause. Perhaps the most significant difference between the advancing hosts of capitalism and the retreating masses of the people, is that the former unite spontaneously, while the latter disunite spontaneously. With the same unerring instinct for the advantage of their side that the slave power showed, the mem- bers of plutocracy of all business and pro- fessions and countries act with a common intelligence and a common energy for their common benefit. Without conventions, or pre- concert, they will all manufacture the same "public opinion," and take the same kind of action simultaneously all over this country and Europe. Democrats and Republicans LESSONS OF DEBS CASE 197 forget their partisanship and vote together. Does a distinguished leader become bank- rupt? His debts are paid, and he is set on his feet again by a subscription raised in a few days among the rich men of the country. Is an income tax to be overthrown in the Supreme Court ? A fighting fund of $2,000,000 is got without effort among the men who have learned that the world belongs to those who can combine. But, on the other side, all is disintegration, jealousy, suspicion, backbiting, and niggard- liness. Workingmen will not pay their union dues, the people will not support the reform papers; the first thing every labour move- ment, every political reform party, does is to split, at least, into two. This union on one side, disunion on the other, is due to the fact that one side is posi- tive, the other as yet mainly negative. One side has a religion — self-interest; the other side is so far a party of protest, opposition. So long as it continues in this position it will be the defeated party. When the people raise in their economic 198 MEN THE WORKERS life the standard of a religion holier than self-interest they will raise an enthusiasm and power of spontaneous devotion and coales- cence far beyond that possible to the wor- shippers of the false god. This holier religion has been proclaimed by every great prophet that has ever lived. It is the religion of self- sacrifice, instead of self-interest; but of self- sacrifice, organized, institutionalized in private and public cooperation, and in fulfilment of the promise that he that loseth his life shall save it, paying dividends immeasurably greater than those of anarchic self-interest. This is the religion of the Cooperative Commonwealth. Every attainment by the people, step by step, of the ability to use the common power for the common good, is the progressive establishment of the Cooperative Commonwealth. It is the building, stone by stone, of the cathedrals of the new religion of common life, whose heaven is here. All our governments and social cooperations are co- operative commonwealths on the instalment plan. Its principle, long since recognized in the guilds, churches, political organizations, is now LESSONS OF DEBS CASE 199 about to assert its sovereign jurisdiction in the most important province it has yet claimed — the industrial life. Not until the anti-monopolists, grangers, and workingmen adopt this creed of political Christianity, industrial religion, economic patriotism, organized love of man for man in the world of busy-ness will they be able to unite and conquer. The grangers will show themselves as solicitous for the welfare of their farmhands and of the workingmen of the cities as for their own. The organized trades will make themselves propagandist societies for teaching trades-unionism to all working- men. They will use their political and other powers to find employment for the unemployed, abolishing the "scab" by making him a brother, and they will escort our industrial women and children back to their homes. The anti- monopolists will graduate from the futile policy of trying to "regulate" the industrial vice of monopoly into the more inspiring policy of uniting the common powers of man and nature in producing wealth for all, and our nation will make itself a missionary nation 200 MEN THE WORKERS to teach the gospel of cooperation to all peoples. Its "jingoism" will be -to stand up as a guar- dian nation to protect the weak and simple, whether the Indians of our own West, or the natives of Africa, from the spoliation which has made Christianity and civilization words of terror to the heathen. Two most striking signs of the times are that the last great strike was a sympathetic strike, and that its chosen colour was white. The workingmen offered to lay down their lives — their work is their life — for their friends of Pullman. Their flag was the white flag — the flag of peace, purity, and of the colour which is the union of all colours. While we think the prophets are dreamers who are talking of the new religion, this religion is being established under our own hands, and its emblems and watchwords are spreading among the people, accepted first, as always, among the lowly. XI ARGUMENT BEFORE THE ANTHRACITE STRIKE COMMISSION FEBRUARY 9, 1903 MR. CHAIRMAN, and Gentlemen of the Commission: I speak for the fourth demand of the miners, the demand for a trade agreement; and the text of my argu- ment is one word in President Roosevelt's letter to this Commission, the word "permanent." We ask you to recommend a basis of agree- ment that shall be permanent. The moment your award is made, there will arise questions between the mine owners and the men as to its interpretations and its scope. Assume perfect good faith on the part of both sides — and perfect good faith cannot be assumed — difficulties will arise. In the bitu- minous fields, where contracts are made , after prolonged debate by operators and miners, by unanimous and voluntary agreement, and put into print, there are hundreds of disputes SOI 202 MEN THE WORKERS every year. You cannot make a permanent wage scale in any settlement of conditions that might not be rendered incongruous within a year or two. You cannot sit perpetually to be appealed to for perpetual re-settlement. No award can be made that will cover every point. Friction will arise as to matters not submitted to you, as to matters not now in existence. Men like the miners, who do not know a "reign of terror" when they see it, might not grasp all the niceties of a complicated award. New companies may open new collier- ies, and new local unions may be formed which would not be bound by an award to which they had not been a party. The Commission must either cover all questions, or provide a way to meet them whenever they arise, if they are to give us the "permanent" remedy that President Roosevelt asked for, to prevent what he feared, the "recurrence" of a paralysis like that of the recent strike, which, though it happened only once, has happened once too often. There are hundreds of sleeping dogs in the relations of the operators to the miners in the TRADE AGREEMENTS 203 anthracite fields, and we do not know how long they will lie. Some of the operators claim the right to refuse work to a man for being, as one of their officials expressed it to you, a "gross agitator"; and they claim also the right to define, to suit themselves, what makes a man a gross agitator. Another witness is charged with being a criminal by the head of a company for which he has worked during two generations, and can get neither explanation, trial, nor acquittal by this judge who holds over him the power of life and death in his ability to refuse him employment. Then there is the powder question; and there are several questions within the powder question, some of them explosive, like the question as to whether the miners shall use powder made by non-union labour. There is the contract ques- tion. Favoured men get contracts to employ from six to twenty labourers, and the contractor himself seldom comes near the work for weeks at a time, creating all the mischief of favouritism, to say nothing of the manifold dangers to the labourers in the absence of a skilled contractor. This system of work, the miners say, causes 204 MEN THE WORKERS more men to become traitors to their organ- ization than any other, and subjects the union man who resists it to being cut short of cars to supply these petty contractors. Then there are other grievances: grievances about pay-days, dockage, reinstatement of discharged men. There have always been complaints that the so-called contracts were altered to the disadvantage of the men by the introduction of new conditions. These complaints, whether just or not, may arise again. There may be new state laws and new complaints from the men, whether well founded or not, that these laws are not prop- erly observed. The miners have struck before to enforce laws, as happened thirty years ago in the strike to enforce the eight-hour law. Such a cause for strike may come to them in connection with some other law, some store-order law. It is often stated that some of the companies defeated the advance of 1900 by first dis- charging their men, and then hiring them again at reduced wages, upon which the agreed increase was then calculated so that the men TRADE AGREEMENTS 205 never got the increase, and some, in fact, assert that they got a decrease. If a minimum wage basis is not determined by you, and fixed in the award, upon which the increase made shall be estimated, or if there shall be some misunderstanding on either side as to the exact operation of that minimum basis and the conditions to be superinduced, the men may be led again to believe in the necessity for themselves of a strike, the recur- rence of which President Roosevelt tells you to forestall,* The most precious power of all for the pacifi- cator of industry, as shown by the whole his- tory of labour conciliation, the power to prevent disputes from beginning, will be absent '^ As the case for the miners approached its end a very imporfanf mling was drawn from the Commission by the offer of Mr. Darrow of evidence prepared by Mr. Lloyd showing the profits of the companies. The Commission declined to hear this. "We are going to assume," said Chairman Gray, "that they are able to pay fair wages. If they cannot pay fair wages they had better go out of the business." Mr. Darrow and Mr. Lloyd took this ruling of the Commission as far more favourable to them than the admission of the testimony offered. Mr. Lloyd said: "We are more than satisfied to forego this question of profit on the statement made by ihe Commission, of the principle which will rule them in deciding the matter before them. If the principle of the living wages is to be considered, that the workmen are to be paid fair compensation for their labour irrespective of whether the employer has large profits or not, that is entirely satisfactory to us, and we think, to the miners in thij controversy and to the country at large. We hope this will be a precedent to be applied in future arbitrations. We shall expect the principle to work both ways. When the capitalists are not making large profits we shall expect to see efforts on their part to reduce wages resisted on that same principle." 206 MEN THE WORKERS unless the Commission ~ exercises the power which we claim it has, to provide for the two parties before it a permanent means of nego- tiating future contracts and remedying imme- diate grievances. President Lincoln said in his speech at Hart- ford, in 1860, when there was a great boot and shoe strike: "Thank God we havfe a system of government where there can be a strike. Whatever the pressure, there is always a point at which the workingman may stop." That we want to prevent. With empires in the international world and combinations in the industrial world on so vast a scale as now, it is as imperative that we prevent strikes in the one realm as wars in the other, at the start. We cannot afford to let ourselves drift within the possibilities of such struggles. What those possibilities were was none too strongly intimated by the language of the President when he asked the parties now before you to arbitrate. He spoke of the "terrible catastrophes impend- ing"; "the situation which has become intol- erable" ; "the already existing coal famine" ; "the future terrors of which we can hardly yet TRADE AGREEMENTS 207 appreciate," with "evil possibilities so far- reaching and appalling." These appalling, intolerable terrors may recur at any moment if either side blunders or sins into a deadlock with the other on some new question unfore- seen, or some old question misunderstood. The dignity of the deadly peril and the dig- nity of the act which called you here would make it incongruous that this Commission should not do more than merely meet the single emergency that called it into existence. Such an event as the convocation of this Commission is too momentous to be often invoked. For human nature's daily food we must have less extraordinary methods of adjustment. There must be given organized, institutionalized, regulated means of adjustment. There are probably not half a dozen trade- unions in the world which could stand without ruin the expense of such an arbitration as this which the United Mine Workers of America are glad and proud to have accorded to them. Perhaps there is not another one. This Commission will be the first to insist that there is something better than arbitration. 208 MEN THE WORKERS and that is negotiation and conciliation between the parties themselves, based upon the recogni- tion of each by the other as a party of equal contractual rights, with due provision for the prevention of deadlocks by a suitable refer- ence to some umpire. Arrangements of this kind are every year becoming more common in Europe and America. This voluntary system, and the compulsory arbitration of New Zealand are, in the language of the coal regions, "butties" working side by side at the same task — industrial peace. The trade agreement which we ask for is the most modern and the most important development in the methods of industrial peace, here or in Europe. An only partial list of the industries in which peace has been reached in this way in the United States comprises the longshoremen, the ironmoulders, in the stove industry, in the foundry industry; machin- ists, bituminous coal miners, mineral mine workers, boot and shoe makers, iron and steel workers; the metal trades, book and job printers, newspapers, elastic goring weavers, box manufacturers, bricklayers, stone-masons, TRADE AGREEMENTS 209 carpenters, plasterers, electrical workers, rail- road engineers, conductors, trainmen, switch- men, and so forth; street-railway men, clothing makers, coopers, window-glass blowers, glass- bottle makers, granite cutters, horseshoers, iron and steel and tin workers, comprising three-quarters or more of the subsidiary plants in the United States Steel Corporation; iron workers, marble workers, masons, oil and glasswork workers, painters, papermakers, pottery workers, garment makers, teamsters, and hat manufacturers.* The Commissioner of Labour of Massa- chusetts points out in his latest report that this method of making contracts between employer and employees is becoming more common. In the treaties which these belligerents have made in their trade agreements, the purpose is stated with monotonous uniformity to be to prevent strikes and lockouts, and to establish * Mosf of the agreemenfs mentioned still exist (1908), and many new ones are made each year. Some of these no longer exist — the "Mineral Mine Workers* Union," for instance. The Iron Foimdrymen's Association, by the election of a new secretary, entered into an open fight with the Union, and refused to make agreements; this struggle is still going on, to a certain extent; this is true in book and job printing, in the hat industry and the clothing trades. On the other hand, many industries are making agreements for the first time, and public sentiment in favour of wage agreements is stronger than ?ver before. 210 MEN THE WORKERS a means of conciliation and arbitration. "For the purpose of establishing a method of peace- ably settling all questions of mutual concern," says the form used by the National Associa- tion of Builders in the agreement with the workingmen in the building trades. The results are declared, with almost com- plete unanimity, to be beneficial, and by none more emphatically than by the employers. As is the case of the New Zealand compulsory arbitration law, one of the almost invariable features of agreement is that work shall go on during the consideration of whatever disputes may arise. A timely review of the results in Great Britain of this method of making trade contracts between capital and labour was given by the United States Commissioner of Labour in his address to the Arbitration Conference, held in Chicago in 1900. It is shown there that, owing to an arrangement of this kind, there has not been a general strike in the pottery trade of Great Britain since 1836; and yet it is, the commissioner says, one of the most diflS- cult in which to harmonize the conflicting views of capital and labour, because there is so large TRADE AGREEMENTS 211 a number of trades into which the labour is divided, and some pecuUar customs which have been regarded as vested rights. In the hosiery and glove trade of Great Britain, a period of one hundred and fifty years of almost unbroken murder, riot, anarchy, machine-breaking, and strikes was brought to an end by agreement; and it has hardly been necessary to amend the rules devised for mutual contract since the board was established. Immense sums of money, the commissioner says, have been saved in the same way in the ship- building yards. Hundreds of employees in the boot and shoe industry have found the same path of peace. In the Nottingham-lace trade the same method prevails, and the commissioner says: "If this trade could manage its disputes in this way, any trade can; for there are infinite varieties of lace and infinite chances of disagreement." The same is true of the cotton trade and the cotton-warp dyeing industry. In the case of the greatest federation in old England, that of the colliery operators and the Miners' Fed- eration, the joint board works harmoniously and 212 MEN THE WORKERS prevents any trade conflicts of note. "In Eng- land at large," says the commissioner, "disputes are prevented by this means in the aggregate hourly." The Commissioner of the Bureau of Labour of Connecticut has described how, in 1886, a struggle which had lasted for thirty-five years between the hat manufacturers and the trades- unions in Danbury, Connecticut, had come to an end by agreement.* Our experience in America is neither so long nor so full as that abroad; but that which we have is as unanimously in favour of this method of settling disputes as that which I have quoted to you from the English experience. For instance, the Stove Founders' National Defence Association has had an agreement for twelve years with its men; and its president tells us that during twelve years of practical working the results have been satisfactory beyond all former expectation of possibilities. And he gives his opinion to be that a strong organization of workingmen which is of age sufficient to have participated in many strikes and lockouts, * See preceding note on agreements existing in 1908. TRADE AGREEMENTS 213 which is officered by skilful, earnest men, will hold out and maintain agreements with their employers. He adds that it is with regret that he feels obliged to confess that in some cases failures are through the fault of the employers. He also adds that these arrange- ments are to the pecuniary advantage of the employer. Another association in the same trade, the National Founders' Association, includes some of the largest manufacturing corporations in this country, and it has made a similar agree- ment with its men. These include corporations like the Edison General Electric Company, the Yale & Towne Manufacturing Company, the Thomson-Houston Company, the Amer- ican Locomotive Company, Cramp & Sons, Allis- Chalmers, the American Shipbuilders' Com- pany, the International Steam Pump Company, and many others. It is the largest organized body of employers in the United States, com- mitted to this main object of preventing strikes by agreement with the men. It includes a membership of five hundred firms and cor- porations. It has a collective capital of over 214 MEN THE WORKERS $300,000,000, and employs 27,000 men in the foundry trades. Since its organization there has been but one interruption to the peaceful operation of the system, and that was successfully settled. The ex-president of this association says: "The consequence has been that a more experienced, intelligent, and tolerant body of men has been called into action in the trades-union, and the rank and file of the men are rapidly becoming educated to the new method of dealing with their affairs." The American Newspaper Publishers' Asso- ciation comprises about two hundred of the leading daily newspapers of the United States and Canada. Since May, 1901, it has had an arbitration agreement with the International Typographical Union, made at first for one year only; but it was so successful that it has now been continued for five years. Its commis- sioner, appointed to take exclusive charge of its labour business, reports, at the close of the year 1902, that in only eight instances was the National Arbitration Board called upon to settle local disputes. Then he de- scribes how this Typographical Union has TRADE AGREEMENTS 215 jurisdiction over a number of subordinate unions, and can enforce its discipline upon them in the maintenance of these contracts with the employers, to the extent of revoking the charters of these subordinate unions. He says he has always found the officers of these labour associations ready to cooperate with him in adjusting differences and settling trouble when it first arose. There has not been a single strike, he says, in any of the offices of the mem- bers of his association during a period of two years and eight months. He adds: "I can most cheerfully testify to the honour and good faith which has characterized the International Union in the multiplicity of business which we have transacted with it. I am sure its guarantee can be depended upon as well as though it was incorporated." The annual interstate conference held every year by the bituminous mine operators and the bituminous mine workers of Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and central and western Pennsylvania, Professor Commons describes in the Review of Reviews as "the most picturesque and inspiring event in the modern world of business. 216 MEN THE WORKERS Here is an industry where, for many years, indus- trial war was chronic, bloodshed frequent, disgust, hatred, and hostility universal. To-day, the leaders of the two sides come together for a two weeks' parliament, face to face with plain speaking, and without politics, religion, or demagogy; and there they legislate for the industry that sends upon the market 200,000,000 tons of product a year." The testimony of the president of the United Mine Workers of America gave the Commission an uncontradicted account of its methods and its success. Its first trade agreement was made in the spring of 1898, after the very bitter strike of 1897. There has been no strike of any importance since this contract was made in any state under the contract; but there have been strikes, and very serious ones, in states where there were no contracts. Wages have been increased, hours have been reduced, the number of children employed in the mines has been lessened by the efforts of the miners' organization; better mining laws have been enacted, and existing laws have been better enforced. There is not one instance in which the TRADE AGREEMENTS 217 organization has failed to keep its contract. There have been few more dramatic episodes in the labour movement than the special National Convention at Indianapolis last July to determine whether the bituminous miners should break their contracts and strike sym- pathetically with the anthracite men. In his address to the Convention opposing the sug- gestion, President Mitchell said: "They may destroy our union, but they cannot make us violate our contracts." The vote against striking was unanimous; and the anthracite delegates voted against the strike as well as the bituminous men. The Illinois agreement with the miners has this clause: "This contract is in no case to be set aside because of any rules of the United Mine Workers of America, now in force, or which shall hereafter be adopted; nor is this contract to be set aside by reason of any pro- vision of their national, state, or local con- stitutions." They put their contracts above their constitution. A somewhat similar pro- vision is incorporated in the agreement in the building trades of Boston, where it is 218 MEN THE WORKERS stipulated that the constitutions of the various bodies represented, labour unions and capital unions, must incorporate articles in their respective constitutions making them subor- dinate to the contract made. In the bituminous field no strike can be ordered by a district contrary to the approval of the president, without an appeal to the national executive board. Neither the presi- dent nor the national board ever ordered a strike. No strike can be inaugurated by any local union that would affect another district without the consent of the president of the national union. There is no trade agreement here or abroad better or better known than this. Prior to the interstate joint convention movement, chaos prevailed in the Illinois bituminous fields and the others. Strikes or lockouts occurred almost daily. There was always a strike or a lockout somewhere; and such a thing as industrial peace in the bitu- minous coal fields was unknown. The system of settling disputes and preventing strikes by these annual interstate conferences, Mr. TRADE AGREEMENTS 219 Justi, the labour commissioner of the Illinois operators, told the Industrial Commission, has worked admirably. The meeting of the oflScers to settle grievances is usually at the mines, where the trouble exists. "At times," Mr. Justi says, "we organize by selecting a chairman, and at other times we simply gather in an informal way and invite testimony. We always announce that the fullest latitude will be given to all witnesses, and that they will be permitted to say what they please with- out interruption, so long as they are respect- ful and do nothing to provoke a breach of the peace. No effort is made on either side to embarrass the witness, and no advantage is sought upon mere technicalities. The purpose of these joint meetings of the oper- ators and the miners is to bring out the truth; and every man is encouraged to speak the truth with perfect freedom and without fear of any consequences. The moral support of both organizations is pledged to protect him. Law- yers are never brought into this conference." The agreement for the state of Illinois pro- vides that the miners and mine labourers. 220 MEN THE WORKERS and parties involved, must continue at work pending the investigation and until a final decision is reached; and the agreement also proyides that if any day men refuse to continue at work because of a grievance, the pit com- mittee shall immediately furnish men to take their places.' In Illinois, during 1901, there were two hundred cases of grievances before this commission. In only three of those cases were the state officers and the com- missioner unable to agree. They were there- upon referred to the president of the United Mine Workers and the commissioner, and easily settled. ' Eighty per cent, of the two hundred decisions were against the miners, but they were all loyally accepted. There are fifteen different nationalities in the Illinois coal field, and the agreements have to be translated in all these languages, and explained to all these dif- ferent kinds of men. Mr. Justi says these conferences have been of tremendous advan- tage to the operators as well as to the miners. Special pains are taken to make all the matters discussed and the reasons for the actions TRADE AGREEMENTS 221 of both sides plain to the operators, miners, and the public. The proceedings of the Miners' Convention are printed in full, as are the proceedings of their joint convention with the operators. Also the agreements made in the districts and sub-districts, providing for all the local variations in the trade, are printed, and these are all published in one volume which gives the joint state agreement, the Illinois state agreement, and the district and local agreements. Never, until this was done, had any association of coal operators in Illinois, or elsewhere, undertaken to publish in one volume all these different agreements. Copies of these agreements are very gener- ally distributed throughout the state. They are furnished to all the operators, all the superintendents, all the managers, and they are also furnished to all the leading officers, state, district, and local, of the Mine Workers' Union, so that the exact language of every agreement is readily obtainable, and known to all the parties on both sides of the contract. Similarly, among the longshoremen, where there is an agreement; in order that every one 222 MEN THE WORKERS of their 70,000 members may be fully informed as to the terms of the agreement under which he is working, each one of these workingmen is furnished with a copy of his contract in book form, printed in his own language, and the rules of the association require him to have a copy of this book with him at all times, so that, if a question arises, he can consult his book and see what is expected of him. Could there be anything more civilized than such a method of procedure as that which produces this mutual enlightenment? While this successful stream of arbitration has been flowing through these private mills of justice, arbitrations by the state boards have been less important. During the year 1901 there was not a single case referred to the State Board of Arbitration of Illinois. The State Board has no power to enforce settle- ments. The private court established by the bituminous industry has this power by the agree- ment of the two parties. A revelation was made before this Commission of the intimate way in which the oflScers on both sides of this bituminous movement cooperate, one might TRADE AGREEMENTS 223 almost say conspire, to help it along, Mr. Mitchell, you remember, testified to the same general effect as Mr. Justi's statement, that these trade agreements were a success. This statement of his to you, you will remember, was challenged by the other side, who produced a letter from Mr. Justi severely criticising the miners because the quality of their work was steadily growing worse year by year, and he added: "The operators of Illinois cannot be expected to participate in future agreements unless a better grade of coal is mined." You heard Mr. Mitchell explain that that letter was written at his own suggestion, in order that he might use it as a text in an appeal to the miners to improve their methods, which he did; and in the letter in which he did this he warned the miners that in view of the many hardships which they had endured in secur- ing the agreement, it would be a calamity now to lose it or be compelled to strike for its maintenance. If the Illinois operators were to divide, it would necessarily follow other states would do likewise, and the miners would have to return again to the old method of strikes 224 MEN THE WORKERS and lockouts, which proved so disastrous to the welfare of our craftsmen in years gone by. "It is therefore necessary," he said, "that the members of our local unions exercise every precaution in producing as large a percentage of marketable lump coal as is consistent with good workmanship. And if there are in your local unions men who will not observe the true spirit of true unionism, it is the duty of every loyal member of our organization to see that they are properly disciplined." That is the spirit which is created among the workmen by placing them in this way upon an equal plane of contractual responsibility. Both of these bodies make provision for the discipline of their members; the miners' organ- ization at its annual convention in 1901 added to its constitution a clause imposing a fine of $10 upon any miner who, from any cause, throws the mine idle, and the Illinois Coal Operators' Association, in its constitution also makes provision for the punishment of mem- bers who are guilty of bad faith. The agreement in the soft-coal fields, as you will see, is with the state and National Union TRADE AGREEMENTS 225 authorities, and not with the locals. When the local does some foolish thing, the operators call in the higher union authorities to deal with the locals as subordinates. They do not need to deal with those. This succeeds in the bituminous region, but in the anthracite field the agreements, so far as any exist, are with the local committees and individuals, and are considered a local affair, and the operators have permitted the general body no right to interfere. All real and unfair restriction of output by the iron moulders, for instance, is done by local unions, and it is thoroughly disapproved of by the national president of that organization, and for this reason many manufacturers in the iron business will not recognize, or have anything to do with, the local unions. They make their contracts only with the National Iron Moulders' Union. In these agreements they demand that this national organization shall control its subordinate unions and make them live up to the agreement. The trouble in the hard-coal field is, the operators have been trying to be original, and see how wrongly they could do things, by 226 MEN THE WORKERS ignoring the only power that could hold the local lodges in check, that is, the National Mine Workers' Union. The coal operators have invited whatever unpleasant experience they have had. In fine, the systerof of trade agreements has been found both in England and in the United States to be a practical and successful method of settling the arrangements for peaceful industry. There have been, indeed, instances where a particular system broke down tem- porarily; but if you will examine these instances carefully, you will find that they were owing to defects in the method of organization, and the lesson learned has resulted usually in not breaking up the organization or the agreement, but in remedying these defects. This expe- rience has been wide enough and varied enough now to make it possible to lay down some general principles and conditions under which such a system can be successfully oper- ated. These conditions are mainly the following three : First: The agreement should be made with a national organization of employees able to TRADE AGREEMENTS 227 enforce discipline upon local bodies. Strikes almost invariably originate in particular localities, and spread from thence to the trade. Local members being in the midst of the heat and the passion of the controversy are unable to take the dispassionate view which the national officers are able to take when they are called in to deal with the local situation. Second: A provision that there shall be no strikes or lockouts pending investigation and decision by the standing committees representing both sides. This is absolutely essential, since it is easier to prevent hostilities than to restore peace. It devolves upon a national organization on each side to enforce this provision upon the local membership. Third: An umpire, to be called in only when the parties cannot agree, and his decision to be only on the specific points of disagree- ment, and in no case is he to split the difference, but is to decide one way or the other so that the two sides, instead of being encouraged to make extravagant demands, are warned they must not make extravagant demands because all will be rejected. This proposition is 228 MEN THE WORKERS lacking in many of the successful trade agree- ments, but in the present controversy it seems essential, since the duty devolved upon you is to provide for permanent peace in the anthra- cite field. It is much better that the umpire be not required. Provision should be made for calling him in only when the parties have made every effort on their own account to bring about a settlement. The provision of umpire is especially necessary in the early years of the system, until it gets into working order. These trade agreements need not, and do not, interfere with the employment of non-union men. The president of the United Mine Workers of America stated before this Commis- sion that his organization had never gone on strike against the employment of non-union men. It is a frequent feature of trade agreements that the employment of non-union men is not objected to, but is provided for by making the wages and terms of employment the same for all. This agreement takes away that possibility of the use of the non-union man by the employers as a throat-cutter, because a wage-cutter, which clothes him with his terrors TRADE AGREEMENTS 229 and drives the trade-unionist to regard him as an enemy not only to himself, but to the cause of labour and society itself, concentrating his fierce anger and scorn in the awful word "scab." Agreements which provide for the employ- ment of non-union men as well as unionists are called "open-shop agreements." This is a very recent development in the trade- agreement movement, one of the latter-day evolutions of labour democracy proving its sanity and practicalness. The union men find it easy in these open shops to induce non- union men to join the union. Those who will not do so are practically powerless to injure the union man, because the wage scale is agreed upon and there can be no strike. The metal-trade manufacturers of St. Louis, forty-eight in number, have formed an asso- ciation with their employees, and have made agreements with all the trades related to their business, and by these agreements non-union men and union men work side by side. There is no country in the world where unionism is so completely recognized as in New Zealand. There, first, the organization of labour was 230 MEN THE WORKERS made a function of the State. Substantially all the industries of New Zealand, outside of farming, are carried on by organizations of capital and organizations of labour made at the invitation of the government, and to gain special inducements which are offered by it; but New Zealand does not dream of exclud- ing non-union men from employment. The awards of the court sometimes decree that trade - unionists shall have precedence over non-unionists, in industries where unionists are greatly in the majority, and where it is well known that wages and the terms prevail- ing have been won by their efforts; but more than this first chance at a job is never given. In its very first award, the New Zealand Court of Arbitration decreed that the employer should not discriminate against the members of the union, and that they should not in that arrange- ment, or in the dismissal of their hands or the conduct of their business, do anything directly or indirectly for the purpose of endangering the union; and this clause is repeated in every award where there is reason to believe that the union might be trespassed upon by a power- TRADE AGREEMENTS 231 ful organization of its employers. On the other hand, where there is reason to apprehend that a strong union might attempt to shut out from work the non-unionist, the court decrees, as it did in the case of the Reef ton Gold Mine, that the union men shall have pref- erence only provided that the union shall admit all workingmen of good character and competency to become members upon the payment of a moderate fee which the court specifies. The arbitration court also provides in prac- tically every award that when non-members, that is, non-unionists, are employed, there shall be no distinction between the members and the non-members; that both shall work together in harmony, and both shall work under the same conditions and receive equal pay for equal work. The spirit of this is carried by the agreements made by the Western Pottery Manufacturers, the National Asso- ciation of Builders of Boston and elsewhere in the country, in the Founders' agreement, and in many others. The easiest objection of all to meet is that 232 MEN THE WORKERS a monopoly of labour will be created by "recog- nizing the union," which we hear so often. There can be no monopoly if non-union men as well as union men are allowed to work side by side. Your award, by fixing the terms of employment, will remove the special causes of anger and enmity between these two classes. It is not the non-union man that the unionist fears, but the "scab," the strike-breaker by trade, who lives by getting odd jobs of indus- trial assassination at high wages, and loafs between w;hiles, on the theory that it is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all. It is the renegade to the inter- ests of his class, the ingrate, who will take the better hours and higher wages, like some of the witnesses in this case, though they con- fess that they would not move a step to assist the struggles of their fellows to win them; men who do not care who sinks so long as they swim. During the strike in the anthracite region many non-union men went out with the union men. They received the same strike benefits, as often happens in cases^of strikes; they were TRADE AGREEMENTS 233 invited into the meetings to decide whether the strike should be discontinued. There are men among the capitaHsts who do not care to join the capitalists' trade-unions, the trusts. Why are there no distinguished divines, presidents of universities, great statesmen, to cry aloud in the public places over the denial by the capitalistic unions of the sacred right to work of these capitalistic scabs ? Some of the most interesting results of the system of agreements are its by-products The Chairman: Mr. Lloyd, while you are on that interesting subject, and at that point as to the non-union man and the one you characterize as a strike-breaker, who loafs in between times, what have you to say of those who, being non-union men, refuse to desist from work; who prefer to continue at work through the strike, in the exercise of the right that they suppose they have to do so — those who are not loafers between times ? Mk. Lloyd: Of course in doing that they are strictly within their legal rights, but to me they seem to violate a moral duty of the high- est sanctity, which is that a man must do what 234 MEN THE WORKERS he can to help along a necessary struggle for the elevation of his own class and of society at large. The Chairman: Well, are such men pro- tected by the union — those who prefer to continue at work, in the exercise of what you concede to be their right to do so ? Mb. Lloyd: The union certainly withdraws no legal protection from them. They are not protected by the union from being visited with that obloquy which properly falls upon a man who will not join in with a common effort for the common good. I should class this man precisely with the Loyalist in the American Revolution. I certainly character- ize the strike as an industrial war, as an incident in a great uprising. The Chairman: Calling it an industrial war, and using that figure of speech, you do not quite carry it, do you, to the extent of likening it in all respects to a war? Mr. Lloyd: No, indeed. The Chairman: In our theory, there is only one war-making power, and that is the great Union represented by the government TRADE AGREEMENTS 235 of society, and they tolerate no wars — strictly wars — inside of their influence or sphere. We may, for the sake of rhetoric or analogy, speak of a war, but there can be no war toler- ated, in the proper sense, within any peaceful community governed by law. Mr. Lloyd: There would be no necessity even for the pictorial use of the word "war" if society would only organize this sphere of conflict so that proper methods of settlement could be reached. The world in which strikes occur, which are called war, is a world which society at large has so far refused to organize except in the case of New Zealand. I appre- hend that one of the greatest results to be hoped for from this Commission is that you will push forward one step further the evolution of the development of some organic authority in that field of conflict. The Chairman: Pardon me for interrupting you, Mr. Lloyd, but I wanted to hear you on that point which I was so much interested in. Mb. Lloyd: Some of the most interesting results of the system of agreement are its by-products. Thus, under the New Zealand 236 MEN THE WORKERS arbitration law, fraud upon the consumers is prevented. The unscrupulous manufacturer cannot keep his frauds secret when the search- light of the publicity of the arbitration can play upon them, Mr. Justi, the Commissioner of the Coal Operators' Association, showed the industrial commission that the existence of the trade agreement in that trade had had the effect of preventing the unscrupulous oper- ators from taking an unfair advantage of their better rivals. A trade agreement makes the trade more stable, establishes a fairer scale of wages, insures the operators greater safety in their business, and they are enabled to operate the mines a greater number of days, which gives the miners steadier work, and so increases the busiiiess of the country. In every way the system seems to be a great help to the public, because upon the steady employment and upon the fair wages of the masses depends the prosperity of our country. The most interesting by-product of all of this institution of peace and industry, however, is the fact that besides putting an end to TRADE AGREEMENTS 237 sympathetic strikes, it has created the inovel institution of sympathetic arbitration. This is found illustrated in the agreement between the Typographical Union in Chicago and the book and job publishers there. Under the head of strikes, it provides that "any employer signing this iagreement having altercations with the Mailers' Union, the Photo-engravers Union, the Stereotypers' Union, the Newspaper Writers' Union, or the Type-Founders' Union, also agrees to refer such altercations to arbi- tration in the same manner as in the alter- cations with the Typographical Union No. 16." In this enlightened way does this powerful trades-union use its strength to help younger and weaker unions in a better way than by striking or encouraging them to strike. It uses its sympathy to guarantee them the right of arbitration. The Typographical Union also underwrites, so to speak, the local agreements of the trades allied with it. After the wages scale and questions of recognition or non-recog- nition of the local unions are all fixed up, and the local agreement is signed, the Typographical Union, by a supplementary arbitration contract. 238 MEN THE WORKERS guarantees the right of arbitration to those whom in the old days it would haTe protected by a sympathetic strike, or more likely would have failed to protect. Another of the by-products of the trade agreement is, that by it the walking delegate problem, which to so many persons seems insoluble, has been settled, by a recognition of the right of workingmen to have such a guardian and investigator looking after them and their affairs. The agreement, for instance, made between the Mason Builders' Association of Boston and vicinity and the Stonemasons' Union provides that the business agent, that is, the walking delegate of the Stonemasons' Union, shall be allowed to visit all jobs dur- ing working hours to interview the steward of the job. Henry Martin, the wit of the Cromwellian Commonwealth, declared that what the people of England demanded was that the government should restore them the rights they ought to have had. Our contention is that you shall restore to us the right of contract that we ought to have had — the right of equal participation TRADE AGREEMENTS 239 in initiating, framing, consummating, inter- preting, modifying, and annulling the contracts by which we labour and live. Our demand is that that which pretends to be a contract shall be made a real contract. An arrangement by which men take the labour of others must be either a relation of contract or servitude. This anthracite strike was an uprising of the people against servitude masked as contract — made by one side without consultation, or regulation, or negotiation, some- times with no notice except by proclamation from the masters, posted on the gates as if workingmen were slaves, and the reward was offered for their return. When the masters in this business — the ex-masters — make contracts with each other they insist on full notice, representation by the ablest experts that their money can com- mand and by experts of their own choice, ade- quate consideration, and every formality, and they never dream of being allowed to manage more than one side of the contract. But they who insist upon all this for themselves, face about when they deal with a miner. They 240 MEN THE WORKERS refuse him every right of representation and negotiation they claim for themselves. They make both sides of the bargain, his and theirs; and this arrangement they ask him to call a contract. Hypocrisy could go no further; it is not even gentlemanly. The arrangements under which the anthra- cite miners have been working are not con- tracts. They could have been broken without legal or moral fault. The payments made under them were not payments in full. Under the doctrines of the law, the victims of this duress, with a just judge, could recover any additional amount that they could show their labour to have been worth. The workingmen deserve to be given democ- racy, for they give it. The true ' depositories and votaries of democracy to-day in this coun- try are the trade-unions. These labour organ- izations, with their referendum, initiative, voting by mail, their strict majority rule, with their strikes to enforce the laws, are far more democratic in their self-government than the churches, the political parties; infinitely more so than the corporations. That deliberate, TRADE AGREEMENTS 241 ordered, accepted usurpation of the rights of majorities by little minorities, little individ- uals, which has come to be an ordinary thing in both our political parties and many of our corporations, would not be tolerated for an hour in a labour organization. The working- man who lives by product-making waxes; the capitalist who lives by profit-taking, wanes. The capitalist is degenerating in his own affairs into puppet and parasite; the working- man generates, and becomes not only the dominant, but the only, type of Christian, democrat, gentleman. The general fact of the violence that has been proved here as reason for not dealing with the union we claim as part of our case. We claim as part of our case, too, the multitude of petty insurrections and local strikes. We do not claim the violence that has not been proved. A tally of twenty-one murders was paraded before the President and the country by the coal roads magnates. Of eighteen of these twenty-one not a word more has been heard in this testimony. They must have been stuffed figures, like those of which some 242 MEN THE WORKERS corporations' statements are made. Perhaps these missing murders might be discovered if search were made among the statistical averages of the operators. We heard much from the statisticians during this case about "composite" men. These must have been composite murders committed by these "com- posite" men. What violence there was, however, we charge in the gross and in the main upon those who held in their hands the control of the livelihood of a whole population and refused to negotiate or reason with them. The denial of arbitration, the contemptuous and cruel reference of a whole people to star- vation as a judge, was itself a monstrous act of violence. The far less immoral physical violence that followed, what there was of it, was precisely what would have been foretold by any student of human nature. We claim, too, as part of our case, the instant hush of peace that succeeded when these same people, through the intervention of the Presi- dent, and the appearance of this Commission, were able to get the work and "the reasoning TRADE AGREEMENTS 243 together" for which they had been appealing for so many months. We claim, too, as part of our case, with regard to violence, the calm which prevailed among the men of precisely the same mixture of ng,tion- alities, and of the same pursuit — ^the miners of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania — dur- ing the same months. The same in all other chief respects, the situation of these two, the anthracite miners and the bituminous miners, was different in this great particular, the equality of the one in the making of the bargains by which they live was recognized; that of the other was denied. The calm there, the uproar here, are both parts of our case. Draw the picture of what you call the anarchy of the five months of last summer as black as you choose; the blacker is the condemnation of those who, for two generations, have ruled these regions as masters, to use their own words. They have been the captains of industry here; theirs have been the ten talents of wealth, industrial guidance, social direction and political rule. These are the fruits of their stewardship. The special 244 MEN THE WORKERS report of the United States Commissioner of Labour upon this anthracite coal strike said: "There is no confidence existing between the employers and their employees. Sus- picion lurks in the minds of every one, and distrust in every action on either side." Under the coal capitalist's portrait of the miner I write the words of Omar Khayyam: ^'Why, then, who set him there .!*" And those strikes, scores and hundreds of little strikes since 1900, we claim as part of our case. We claim those as part of our case for the recognition of the union, the trade agreement, the restoration of the rights of contract. Their cause was not too much, but too little, union. The operators would not deal with the power to which these miners had delegated their allegiance, the United Mine Workers of America, who could have kept the miners at work and in order. They could have had the perfect order that prevailed at the same time in the bituminous fields on the same terms. The most sentimental of all the sentimentalists is the capitalist who, to preserve the tradition of being "master," will TRADE AGREEMENTS 245 allow ruin to overtake himself rather than to give his men the most ordinary rights that he claims for himself in every transaction of life. The miners are willing to be disciplined by the power which exists by the joint agreement of themselves and their employers. They are not willing to be disciplined by the employers alone. Miners, like other men, hate and love. The greatest business proposition before the owners of the stocks and bonds of the anthracite coal roads to-day is whether their managers can be statesmen enough and good business men enough to turn into their service that power of coalescence which made these people one during the last strike. That is a power which cannot be gotten by force nor by refusing to treat men as reasoning beings in their own afifairs. It is only the fool of authority who thinks that compulsion will compel. Here he called out, one after the other, first a company, then a regiment, and then the whole state guard of ten thousand men; and then his own general told him before you in this room that there are not fifty thousand soldiers in existence to-day 246 MEN THE WORKERS who can guard every colliery and every home and every road in a district as large as the anthracite coal field of Pennsylvania. And if the fools of authority had succeeded in deceiv- ing the President into calling out the whole Federal army, the strike might not have been over yet. A mighty stream of loyalty to each other and to their leaders flows among these miners. That stream can be used to generate a vast force for the successful management of this industry. How long will they be considered good business men who make this force destruc- tive by denying it an outlet, and regale their stockholders with yarns about "reigns of terror" when they ask for dividends ? Here is the same old question of the rule of man which has confronted the rulers from the very beginning. Shall we rule over men or rule with them? Enslave or enfranchise? Shoot or educate ? Drive or lead ? The greatest social fact of our day is that that instinctive, universal spirit of democracy which has written so much history in govern- ment is now making history in industry. TRADE AGREEMENTS 247 Absolutism is making history on its side, too. The high- water mark of absolutism was thought to have been reached by the French monarch who said "I am the State"; but the absolutism now rising in industry goes beyond that, and claims for itself and the Supreme Being that identity which the French monarch, more modest, claimed only for himself and the earthly state. The sociology of this situation is to be found in its psychology. Absolutism, veiled as pater- nalism, has been tried in the coal country for two generations. It has brought the hard (very hard) coal region, and the whole country with it, to the verge of ruin. The country wants another regime. It shivers in moral dread now every time it sees, in the morning, news of a blizzard starting eastward, for fear that the glacial age may again descend upon us and a coal famine be brought again upon this country by those who provoked a strike and cessation of mining in the midst of the greatest expansion of industry and demand for coal that modern times have known. It is to be hoped that the strike of last 248 MEN THE WORKERS summer was the Waterloo of capitalistic abso- lutism in this country. It broke down as merchant, miner, diplomatist, profit-maker. It proved itself incompetent in every forecast, every negotiation, every enterprise. It had declared that if only unmeddled with, it would prove finally and forever that there cannot be, in its own words, "two masters" in the manage- ment of business, and that it was the master. Organized labour never did civilization a greater service than when it whipped this master to a finish, and settled, let it be hoped, for the third and last time in America, that the only business in which there is one master is slavery, and that in free business there are as many masters as there are parties, each one master, if he can be, of himself; of no one else. And in this, labour was but the vanguard of the consumer, who has immediately in his future the necessity of fighting the same battle for life with the same despotism which claims to be master also in the market for the necessaries of life. Labour has been defending the rights of the whole people, of you and of me, as well as its own. TRADE AGREEMENTS 249 The conflict proved an economic truth not less important — that no one set of men have brains enough nor energy enough to go around all sides in any business . Industry, like government, demands all the abilities, all the activities, all the goodwill, all the cooperation of all — of labour and capital, of producer and consumer, of individual and community. These antediluvian captains of industry who call themselves masters, walk on Market Street or on Wall Street as if it were Mount Ararat, and they were just landed from the Ark. Thanks to their incompetency, the supply of fire in our age of fire has been so disturbed that at least two years will pass before it becomes normal again. Their industrial sagacity has taken their industry, and all industry, away from its natural foundations on the everlasting hills and put it on the thermometer and the weather-vane, where a south wind means life, a north wind means death. Was he really a man of the world who, in February, 1902, declined a conference because it "would unsettle all".? His words were: "The proposition to unsettle all the labour 250 MEN THE WORKERS conditions of the various anthracite districts each year by holding a conference between persons who are not interested in anthra- cite mining, and cannot have the technical knowledge of the varying conditions at each colliery, is so unbusinesslike that no one charged with the grave responsibility of con- ducting industrial enterprises can safely give countenance to it." Compare these words — words, words — with one fact given in yesterday morning's papers. After a fortnight's conference in one room in Indianapolis, operators and miners, for the sixth year in succession, settled all the labour questions for the coming twelve months, in a coal business with as many varying conditions as the anthracite region, \fith the same differ- ing nationalities in its labour, and which turns out a product of four times the sixty million tons that this anthracite industry produces. Twice during these six years, by conference, advances of wages amounting to twenty mil- lions of dollars each time have been granted and never a shot fired nor a dying woman evicted. TRADE AGREEMENTS 251 The country wants another regime. It wants coal. It wants peace. Coal can be had only by peace, and peace can be had only by justice. Give these miners here a voice in the man- agement of their own labour. Adopt represen- tative methods of discussion, decision, and enforcement. These miners offer, they have actually begged to be allowed, to become guarantors of each other in discipline, production, contract, from the face of the breast up through every part of the industry. When the people got a voice and a part in their politics, the same energy that had flowed against government flowed with it; the rebels became citizens. By the same recognition of rights the striker can be turned into a cooperator. The same miners who, their ex-masters say, scheme how to send out the largest amount of rock and slate with their coal, we can convert into mutual insurers of the purity of their product, if we will give them mutuality of interest; and in the same way we can make them guardians of each others' contracts and of industrial peace, and sentinels to see that our fires never go out. We are not asking for favours, but for rights; ^52 MEN THE WORKERS for government by representation in our indus- try. We acknowledge the superb act of justice by which the President and the people inter- vened; but we are not grateful. One must not be grateful for justice. We have won the right to this justice, this right to equality in the negotiations of our own bargains, by sac- rifice and a struggle which whitened the faces of a whole people, and shortened thousands of lives. But we are grateful that we live in an age where justice is not denied to those who are strong enough to gain it. It is something that our civilization has advanced as far as that. We ask for more than merely recognition of the union. We ask for recognition of the union plus. We want recognition with the guarantee of future recognition and continued recognition. We want estajslished a system of agreement that will, as far as possible, per- petuate recognition and the mutual settlement of bargains and grievances on a "just and permanent" basis, as the President has said. XII SPEECH AT THE MITCHELL, DARROW, LLOYD RECEPTION, 1903.* ^ I ^HERE are many here to-night who can -■- contrast this assemblage with the meet- ing held in Chicago eight or nine years ago, at which the workingmen of this city met to welcome D^bs after his cruel war was over. It was a meeting like this, but not like this. The Pullman strike was not won, though it deserved to be. But to-night we come together again in this greater meeting to welcome a victor and a victor in a greater contest — John Mitchell — first in strikes, first in arbi- tration, and first in the hearts of the workingmen. Things have changed a good deal in these eight years. That meeting was held in the dim and dingy old Battery D. This Mitchell meet- ing finds itself perfectly at home in this, the * Address at the reception given to Jolin Mitchell, Clarence S. Darrow, and Henry D. Uoyd, at the Auditorium, Chicago, February i6, 1903, by the labour organization! of Chicago, to celebrate the arbitration of the anthracite coal strike of 1903-1903. SB3 254 MEN THE WORKERS finest and largest assembly room in America, which is still not large enough nor fine enough. Because it interrupted railway transpor- tation the railway strike of 1894 made the public, blind with prejudice, wild with terror, throw themselves against it like a cyclone. The strike of 1902 likewise interrupted trans- portation and production of coal; but the public opinion of 1902 filled its sails with the favouring breezes and filled its pockets with the contributions that made its success certain. Public opinion has learned something since 1894. It knows now that, whoever may be responsible for these interruptions, it is not the men, who only ask for reason and arbi- tration. But there is one thing which is not different from what it was eight years ago. By the side of both those leaders, the leader of 1894, the leader of 1902; by the side of the successful and the unsuccessful, stood the same steadfast champion of the rights of the people, Clarence S. Darrow, that rare bird, a lawyer whose first love is love of justice, and who remains true to his first love. Debs came to his reception from jail; a jail RECEPTION AT AUDITORIUM 255 which set him free but keeps prisoner forever, in durance vile, the memory of the Federal executive and the Federal judiciary who put him there. But Mitchell comes to us respected and honoured even by his opponents, with his hands pressed not by handcuffs, but by the hand-shakes of the White House. The strike of 1894 was broken by the Presi- dent of the United States, a President who tore the Constitution of Illinois in two to make a gap through which to march his Federal troops. A President who by that act, in one mouthful, swallowed all the domestic rights of forty-five states; a President who talked about the "communism of pelf," while he fattened on the communism of self — himself. The strike of 1902 was likewise broken by the President; a President who also in his turn broke through the precedent, but not like the other, to bind the people hand and foot for their oppressors, but to deliver them. There was a louder cry in Pennsylvania in 1902 for Federal bayonets than in Illinois in 1894; but the cry was unanswered, the troops did not move. There was a soldier in the White 256 MEN THE WORKERS House, not a corporation lawyer, and the soldier knew what the proper uses of soldiers are. But the soldiers might have .gone into Pennsyl- vania if the coal monopolies had persisted for forty-eight hours longer in their piratical policy of famine and defiance; but they would not have gone there; to drive the miners back into the mines. They would have gone there to keep the peace while Federal judges, acting upon the initiative of the United States, took possession of the mines by due process of law, and invited the miners, in the name of the people of the United States, to mine coal for the people of the United States. Where Cleveland gave us military usurpation and government by injunction, Roosevelt gave us arbitration, the most novel, the boldest, the greatest stroke of recent statesmanship — a short-cut across lots in real American style. When the American people helped John Mitchell and his miners, they were helping themselves. The whole people have before them in the immediate future the same fight, with the same would-be master. The same master seeks to fasten his fetters upon them RECEPTION AT AUDITORIUM 257 as upon the miners, and pray God that in our time of need the people may find as good a leader as the miners found. That affair in the valleys of Pennsylvania was the first real uprising of the American people against the monopolists, but it was only the first, and there, as always, organized labour furnished the forlorn hope of victory because it was organized. The same men who claim to be masters of labour in the coal industry claim to be masters of the consumers, of the people, of us. They mean to be masters of all the labourers, of all the consumers, of all of us in all markets. They are all the same men. It is all one great conspiracy, and the conspiracy has gone so far that the more pros- perity the country gets, the less we see of it. They advance your wages 10 per cent, with one hand, and then with the other they take it all back, and more, by increasing the cost of living. Well, Mr. Mitchell and his miners gave that conspiracy its first black eye. They whipped it to a finish, and with their starving bodies built a wall around all of us. The sweetest words that any lover of justice 258 MEN THE WORKERS ever heard were the words that we heard George Baer utter last Thursday before the Arbitration Commission in Philadelphia: "We surrender." It was not George the Third, it was George the Last, as Darrow calls him. Had Mitchell and his miners surrendered — but they never would — there is not a monop- olist in any of the markets, there is not a corrupter of politics anywhere, there is not an oppressor of the people in all the world, who would not have gone down on his knees to give thanks to his God, Baer's God, the God who, "in his infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country" to them. If those men had broken the miners of the East they would next have attacked the miners of the West; they would then have attacked, one after the other, all the organizations of labour, and would have been able, at their leisure, to dispose of all the organizations of labour, and would have had at their mercy the unorganized masses of the people. For it is accurately, scientifically, alarmingly true, that between the people and the money-monopoly power — that most dreadful of all tyrannies — RECEPTION AT AUDITORIUM 259 there stands to-day but one organization that can hold the fort while the people rally, and that is the organization of labour. The bosses of both political parties are in the pay of the enemy, those corporations who make campaign contributions to both political parties at every election. Watch the farce to-day of anti-trust legislation in Washington. See the confectionery-makers of Congress moulding their pretty little candy castles to imprison the giant tyrants of the trusts. The best friends the people have to-day are the unions of the workingmen. We must keep them from being destroyed. We must learn the lesson they teach us, the people itself must organize if it would survive. A very beautiful United States Treasury note had to be withdrawn from circulation a few years ago. It was discovered that its most decorative feature, a majestic American eagle, had been engraved so that when it was turned upside down it became a jackass. It is said that the engraver was an Englishman. If the American people allow themselves to be stood on their heads much longer by the monopolists. 260 MEN THE WORKERS their national bird will look like that eagle. Mitchell and his miners have taught the eagle to stand on his feet, with his feet on the monopolists. Let us remember how it was done, and go and do likewise — all of us, everywhere. ADDENDA THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CHILD LABOUR* T1E7HEN the Earl of Shaftesbury, then ▼ ~ Lord Ashley, tried, in 1842, to get Parliament to limit the slow murder of chil- dren in factories to ten hours a day, he was opposed by Brougham, Peel, and Bright, and even Cobden did not vote for the bill. The cruel attitude taken by these good men was a logical necessity forced upon them by the prin- ciples of their political economy. This pseudo- science, with its fiction of free contract, and its gospel of competition, teaches the extermination of the weak by the strong, with an assurance of authority equal to that of the Hebrew prophets who commanded the Israelites to smite the Canaanites hip and thigh, and kill them all — men, women, and children. This is the sum of the laws of trade, as generalized by professors for the use of the business world. Under their gospel the survival is not of the • Published in Knights of Labor, May ?• »887. 261 262 MEN THE WORKERS fittest, but of the fightingest. Inevitable in a system where the struggle for existence is a warfare without quarter, the trophies are in direct proportion to strength, the sufferings in direct proportion to weakness. This is the logical development of the doctrine of the orthodox political economy. Such teaching is gladly put into practice by greed and cruelty. It is a direct consequence thki children, being the weakest workers, are the worst treated; that women, being a little better able to take care of themselves, are a little better off; and that the unorganized, unskilled day labourers, stronger than the women and children, get more than they, but less than workingmen who can make a harder fight for survival. By his treatment of the helpless we can infallibly tell how good a man is, and the same test will measure the virtue of a community. So judged, our industrial civilization is industrial savagery. The immortal sentiment in the play of Terence, " Nothing human is foreign to me," comes from the mouth of a man who is advising his wife to kill the child soon to be born instead of exposing it in the market-place to be carried CHILD LABOUR 263 off by beggars or brothel keepers. In two thousand years society has progressed so far under the inspiration of the saying, "Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven," that it consents that children shall be dwarfed, tortured, and killed only in the factory and great dry-goods stores, not in the family. Civil- ization in the family is that much ahead of civilization in business. The life of the world is as yet only streaked with civilization, like the sky glowing in spots before sunrise. Our whole firmament is not yet ablaze with the light that is coming. The law of love is part of the true political economy, and it must rule in the factory as in the family. The dry-goods prince and the rich manufacturer must not imagine the vain thing that they can put upon "society" or "business" the responsibility for their maltreatment of children. They are blood-guilty for every wrong they do to their neighbour's child, just as much as if done to their own. And society is guilty to the extent of the sum of individual guilt. The promise of the future lies in the fact that here, as 264 MEN THE WORKERS elsewhere, the recorded memory of mankind proves that progress is being made, and we know that a day must come when infanticide will be prohibited to the employer as now to the father. CIVILIZATION THAT IS HERALDED BY LABOUR DAY* ^ I "^HE civilization of which Labour Day •*- is the herald is to be the opposite of that which has produced the slums of industry and the camps of war. The horrors of Camp Wikoff, Camp Alger, Camp Thomas, are not the fruits of war. ^hey are the fruits of capitalism — of the religion of Self-InteresC] Where the Spaniard has slain us by tens the American has slain his own by hundreds, by army contracts and "pulls" for incompetents and politicians. The country stands pale with rage at the tragedy of the fever, the hunger, the naked- ness, the delirium visited upon those who have laboured for it on the fields of battle. But capitalism, business, has been visiting these horrors year in and year out on those who labour on all the other fields not less necessary to our safety and honour. •Copyright American, Journal Examiner, reprinted from tlie New York Evening Journal, Sept., 6, i8p8, by permission of W. R. Hearst. S65 266 MEN THE WORKERS Camp Wikoff and the other camps are only dress rehearsals of a drama of greed — greed for money and greed for office and titles — which now holds the stage in every department of our government and business life. There are camps of typhoid, starvation, and destitution in every mining field, manufacturing town, and commercial and financial metropolis. They are not merely as bad as these in which we are now uniforming our soldier sons with winding sheets; they are worse. The victims at Montauk and Chickamauga are fighting men; those, more numerous ^rippled every year by the perpetual malaria of avarice and the yellow fever of the Almighty Dollar in New York and Boston and Chicago, are largely women and children^l Our trade and industry are wholly in the management of the capitalists, and our Gov- ernment is wholly in the hands of their politi- cians, and this is what they have brought us to in peace and war, at home and on the field — slums and camps, workless men and working children, the soldier dying of typhoid on the wet ground within three hours of the richest city of the world, because the capitalists and LABOUR DAY 267 the politicians, given a million and a half dollars a day by the people, can not and will not give him roof, food, bed, or medicine, or even a pure drop of water. Against this, civilization of Making Money the spirit of Labour Day raises the flag of the better civilization of Making Men. The celebrations of Labour Day are the primary meetings of a new Constitutional Con- vention the people are getting ready to hold, to declare the Commonwealth in which Equal Rights shall mean that the riches created by all shall be owned and managed by and for all. On some Labour Day a new spiritual reve- lation will descend on the congregation of the workers, which will revoke the ancient curse against labour, and in setting all to labour for others as they would that others should labour for them will make labour free, fruitful, and reciprocal, and therefore the greatest of earthly blessings, the surest foundation of law and order, and the highest act of worship in the religion of love and the golden rule, making man the creator of a diviner life "on earth as it is in heaven." INDEX INDEX Absolutism, in industry ruinous, 247-260. Adams, John, 3, 24, 88, 187. Adams, Sam, 89. American, colonists, 9. Federation of Labour, 98. liberty, enemies of, 141. Newspaper Publishers' Asso- ciation, its arbitration agreement, 214. Railway Union, 184. Americans, true and false, 28, 29. Anarchists' case, 195. Annual interstate conferences of bituminous mine workers and operators, 21S, 218, ■ 250. Anthracite coal operators' lack of ability to manage business, 245-260. refusal to deal with miners, 244. Anthracite coal miners, charged with violence, 241. contrast between conditions in anthracite and bitumin- ous mines, 243, 260. murders diarged against them, not proven 241. violence against, 242. ApoUodorus, 46. miti-trades union law, 138. Anti-trust law, 138. Anti-trust legislation farce in Washington, 269. Arbitration (also see Conciliation) Australian Report on, 103. by state boards, 222. cause of failure of, 108. compulsory, 103. compulsory and voluntary, 208. Arbitration — cordinued. Conference in Chicago in 1900, 210. employers refuse, 100,102,104, 108. guaranteed by trade agree- ments, 237. in New Zealand, 208, 210, 230, 231, 236. in settlement of disputes between governments, 86. National Board of, 214. on Chicago Board of Trade, 108. public opinion and, 105. through trade agreements, 208. workingmen in favour of, 100, 104. Association of Chicago Clothing Manufacturers, 111, 112. Atheists, 31. Attorney-Greneral of New York issues mandamus to com- pel railroads to operate, 169, 160. Australian Royal Commission on Strikes, 103. Australia, Victoria Factory and Shops Act, 122. Baer, George, 268. Bankruptcy, British Registrar in, 13. Bargains between imions of em- ployers and mobs, 74. Bargain worship, 61. Beaconsfield, Lord, 8. . Bebel, August, 34. Bellamy, Edward, 38. Brewer, Justice (in note). 111. Bright, John, 127, 261. 269 270 MEN THE WORKERS British War OfiBce abolishes con- tract system, 85, 86. Brotherhood of Humanity, 47-49, 76. Brotherhood of labour movement, 17, 19. Brotherhood of American citizen- ship, 19. Brougham, S61. Brown, John, 181, 153. Bunker Hill, 7, 88. > Burke, 157, ,166. Bums, John, 83, 86. Business civilization, 363, 365, 266. Business, evils of, 11-14, 71. mad with- competition, 11. modem principles of, 14. money power danger to, 72; organization of, 61. perpetual panic of, 21. Campaign contributions, 165, 259. Campbdl, Helen, 38. Camps of business, horrors of, 266. Camps of war, 266. Cannibalism, social, 20. Captains of dynasty, 105. Captains of industry lack ability to manage industry, 249. Capitalism, fruits of, 265, 266. Capitalists, Union of, 73. Carlyle, Thomas, 26, 37, 38, 39. Carnegie, Andrew, 54. Carnegie Company refuses arbi- tration, 100, 101. Catholics of Maryland, 27. CentraUzation of industry, 129. Cbanning, 42. Charity, 21, 64, 93. Charters, forfeited, 189. Cheapness, 17, 107. Chicago Auditorium, built by scab labour, 68. Board of Trade, 108. civic patriotism of, 128. manufacturers, on demands of workingmen, 136. Child labour, 261-264. China, Taiping rebellion in, 51. Christ, 162, 183. Christians, in early Rome, 9, 46. Church, and the workingmen, 17. labour movement in advance of the, 16. lack of democracy in, 22. theory and practice of, 19. Civilization of business, 263, 265, 266. principles and practice of, 51. symptoms of dechne of, 13. CSvil war between einployed and unemployed, 105. Class conflicts, 131. government of poUtics and industry, 87. laws, danger of, 70. Classes, 23, 54. of Great Britain, 87. middle, of America, 177. Cleveland, President, 255, 256. Coal miners, contracts altered to disadvantage of, 204. grievances of, 203, 204. of England, 79. strike to enforce laws, 204. unanimous vote against strik- ing, 217. Coal mine operators, claim right to refuse work, 203. Cobden, 107, 261. Collective ownership of produc- tion and distribution, 87. Committee of Congress investi- gates sweatshops, 117. Common, good, 96. sense of the law, 156. Commons, Professor John R., 215. "Composite" men, 242. Competition, an excuse for crime, 14. evils of, 66. free, 25. prohibition of, 64. Concentration of wealth, 129, 146. Conciliation (also see Arbitration) : based upon equal contractual rights, 208. boards of Massachusetts, 108. Wallace Act of Pennsylvania, 108. INDEX 271 Connecticut Commissioner of Labour on trade agree- ments, 212. Contempt of court, right of judge to punish for, 182. Contract (also see Trade Agree- ments) : fiction of free, 261. free, 143. repudiation of, 129. to be real, both sides must be recognized, 239. Contract, under compulsion void, 189. labour, abolition of, 83, 84, 87 or servitude, 239. system, abolished by British War Office, 85, 86. Contracts, 75. bitununous coal miners, 201. evils of miners, 203. interference with, 116. made by one side only are void, 240. sacred right of, 116. under state control, 115, 116. Codperation, 154. in business, 74. in governments, 74. Cooperative commonwealth, 193, 198. Cooperative, groups in New Zea- land, 84. industry, 190. labour, 84, 85, 154. Cordage trust, 95. Corporations have no right to complain of public com petition, 187. Cost of production, 152. of subsistence, 153. Counseils de Prudhommes, 101. Coxey, 169. Cromwell, 24. Darrow, Clarence S., 253, 254, 258. David, King, 18. Death rate, 68, 142. Debs, Eugene, 169. Debs, Eugene — caniinued. and his associates denied right of appeal, 182. impersonates the defeat of organized labour, 194. in jail on untried charges, 174. leader in sympathetic strike, 179. martyr of government by injunction, 180, 194. reception to — on release from jail, 179, 253, 256. United States Supreme Court refusing, right of trial, 181. Declaration of Independence, its first celebration, 4. Democracy, must rule in industry, 90. must be progressive, 96, 96. of labour organizations, 240. spirit of, in industry, 246. Demonetization of silver, 60, 114, 129. Depew, Chauncey, 148. De Tocqueyille, 165. Didius, Julianus, 45. Dilke, Lady, 122. Duff, Sir Grant, 47. Economic, freedom, the new Uberty, 97. patriotism, 199. Egypt, 23. Eight hours, see Labour. Emancipation, economic, 97. the new, of the labour movement, 191. of Negroes, 173. Emerson, 11, 26, 30, 41, 71, 123, 167. Eminent domain, 144. Empire of the money power, 49-54. Employers' opposition to factory laws. 111 el leq., 126. refuse arbitration, 100, 102, 104, 108. Engeb, 58. 272 MEN THE WORKERS England, business men of, favour unions, 62. factory conditions in, 121. in fifteenth century, 68. Reform Bill of 1832, 172. working day in, 41. England's gain through American War of Independence, 172. English factory law bill, 261. Episcopal International Con- vention in 1888, 33. EquaUty, in guilds, 65. as the law of industry, 190. of service, 170. EvaMeBcal, Alliance, 22, 34, 42. Convention in 1887, 32. Exchange, combination to stop, 12. Extradition treaties, 64. Factory law, of IlUnois, 111. opposition to English, 261. Factory legislation, origin of, 127. Factories and Shops Act, Victoria, Australia, 122. Farmer's Congress at St. Louis, 71. Fears of poverty, 126. Federal Government interferes with state rights, 196, 265. judges and injunctions, 165. Feudlalism, the new, 60. Force, use of, 166-168. Foreigners, 26, 27, 28, 29. France, Conseils de Prudhommes of, 101. government by coup d'etat, 171. Franklin, Benjamin, 24, 88, 187. Freedom, the new, 170. Free speech, right of, in danger, 176. French revolution, 37, 129 Garrison, 24, George, Heniy, 38. George HI., 9, 69, 172, 184. General welfare, is the object of sodeiy, 96. Grermany, coal miners of, 104. refugees of 1848, 27. Gladstone, _ 87. administration, 85. Glasgow owns and operates its street railways, 186. Golden rule, of labour movement, 16. of poUtical Ufe, 167. Gordon "Chinese," 12. Gould, 141. Government, by injunction, 180- 183, 266. largest employer of labour, 86. misuse of, 144, 145. of industiy by consent of all, 186. the greatest cooperative insti- tution, 43. Great Britain, business men of, favour unions, 62. commercial classes of, 13, 87. labour laws of 1842, 116- opium trade forced on China by, 51. paupers of, 41. trade agreements in, 210. workin^en of, against war, 34. Guilds of Middle Ages, 64. advantages of 66. protection of workingmen through, 67. Hale, Sir Mathew, 166. Hamilton, 24. Hampden, 24. Hanfie, Keir, 88. Harlan, Justice, 168, 160. Harvester trust, 94. Henr^, Patrick, 69. Heretics of to-day, 17. Hindus, 47. Hindustan, 48. Homestead, 82, 100, 101, 104. Houghton, President of the Typothetse, 141. Howard, J. & F. propose eight hours day, 125. INDEX 273 Huguenots, 27. Hufl House, 190. Huinan_ nature, 19, 47, 48, 132. Hypocrisy, 11, 240. Idaho miners, 101. Independence, a new industrial, 5-7. in guilds of Middle Ages, 65, 66. India, a heterogenous mixture of races, 47. brotherhood and unity of, 48. labour condition in, 133. Individuahty gained through organization, 73. Industrial, democracy, 40, 249. freedom, 7, 82. government, without consent, 93. power, comes from the people, 109. religion, 199. war, 93. savagery, 262. Industry, administered by consent of all, 186. by force, 166-170. can only succeed by coopera- tion of all, 249. centralization of, 129. exists by cooperation of all, 91. of broUierhood, 14. Inequality, 42. Infidels of to-day, 17, 31. Injunctions are law by procla- mation, 180. Federal law on, 158. goverimient by — threatens freedom, 180, 182. trial by jury, taken away by, 165, 176, 180-182, 196. to prevent strikes, 156, 168, 163, 180 et seq. United States courts and, 164, 165. Injustice of judges, 160. Illinois, coal miners, two hundred ■ disputes settled in one year, 220. Illinois — eoniirmed. Coal Operators' Association, 224. miners of, 12, 95. State Board of Arbitration, 222. International, conferences, pro- posal of, 98. Congress of Miners, pro- poses general strike, 154. Congress of the Workmen of the World, 33. Congress of the Workmen of the World meet in Paris 1889, 36. Convention, Episcopal, in 1888, 33. Labour Congress favours abolition of war, 20, 34, 35. organization of workingmen, 154. Typographical Union, 214._ Intersta,te, Commerce Commis- sion, 108, 175. Commerce Law, 175. Investigation of sweatshops, 117. Ireland, peasantry evicted, 12. Irrepressible conflict of to-day, 89, 110. Italian workingmen societies pro- test against war, 35. Jefferson, 24, 30, 69, 88, 164, 183, 187. John, the Baptist, 30. Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 150. Judge Hunger and Judge Reason, 102. Judges' decisions, 138, 148, 158, 160. Judge's power, through injunc- tions, 181, 182. Jury trial taken away by injunc- tions, 166, 176, 180-182, 196 Justi, Mr., labour commissioner of the Illinois coal opera- tors, 219, 220, 223. Justice, see Law and Justice. 274 MEN THE WORKERS Kingsley, Charles, 58. Knights of Labour, 100, 154, 164. Labour (also see Arbitration, Conciliation, Trade Agree- ments, Trade Unions, Strikes. Wages) : advantages of unions, 6S, 63. by compulsion, 95 child, 59, 60, 261-264. commodity doctrine, 143. conditions in India, 133, 134. cooperative, 84, 85, 154. cost of, to society, to em- ployer, 59. day celebrations of, 267. demands of, 75. division of, 59, 60. Grolden Age of, 78. independence of 154. intolerable conditions of, 134. non-union men receive strike benefits, 232. scab, 68, 89. superior to capital, 70. sweatshop investigation, 117. troubles of 1877, 196. vote, 88. walking delegate, 136, 238. women and children, 133, 134. women in English coal mines, 116. Labour, eight hours, agitation for, 9, 40,/60. in Australia, 122. in Middle Ages, 64. in Woolwich Arsenal, 86. law of Illinois, 111 et seq, 122. Labour legislation, bureau of Massachusetts, report on, 122. conservative, 124. effect of, 122, 123. evolutionary, 123. Labour movement, against money power, 49, 57. brotherhood of the, 54, 55, 192, 193. creator of wealth, 191. Labour movement — continued. conservatism of the 37, 43. for imiversal peace, 20, 82, 34, 36. growth of the, 56, 57. m advance of churches, 16, 17. in poUtics, 88. is not a fanaticism, 10, 36. is the new emancipation, 191. mission of the, 14, 15. most religious movement of the day, 17, 191, not a class movement, 22. not lawless, 25, 26, 32. of 1886, 195. promises a better civilization, 8, 15, 16, 155. saving ferment of the, 16. social settlements part of the 190. stands for freedom, 22, 25. third great historic crisis of democracy, 190, 191. unselfishness of the, 23, 58. world wide uprising of the people, 190. Lamennais, 137. Land, conunon ownership of, 10, 78. held for speculation, 90. nationalization of, 154. people shut out from the, 104. private property in, 39, 104. Law and justice, not the same, 156, 157, 160, 176, 177. Law, anti-trades imion, 138. anti-trust, 138. by proclamation instead of legislation, 180. eight hours in Australia, 1874, 122. effect of ten hours, 122. factory. 111 et seq. fugitive slave, 138. Dhnois eight hours, for wo men and children. 111, 122, 128. Ilhnois, takes away right to bear arms, 195. INDEX 275 Law — continued. of liability, in the anarchist case, 195. of constructive responsibility, 177. opposition to English Factory, 261. prohibiting women from working underground, 116. protects professional unions, 74. sweatshop. 111 rf seq. ten hours, 121. two distinct administrations of, 174-176. violation of Interstate Com- merce, 175. Laws, conspiracy, 54. of the body, 30, 31. of trade, 12, 261. Liberals, 88. Liberties in danger, 177. Liberty in danger through de- struction of unions, 149. true and false, 26, 31, 82. laeber, Francis, 82. Lincoln, 24, 26, 70, 96, 131, 193, 206. Living wage, 79-82, 85, 160, 188. London, bakers and dockers of, 68. County Council, 82, 83, 85. Daily Chronicle, 124. dockers, 104. municipal railways, 85. Times, 13. Louis XIV., 132, 133. Lowell, 183. Luxury, 41, 136. Machinery, 41, 104. kept idle, 90. Magna Charta, 182. of labour, 86, 98. Maine, Sir Henry Sumner, 10, 13. Mandamus issued to compel rail- roads to operate, 160. Markets, mania of the, 10. Martin, Henry, 238. Martyrs, 24. Maryland, Catholics of, 27. Massachusetts Board of Con- ciliation, 101. Materialists, 31. May Day, new gospel of, 138. Mazzini, 26. Middle Ages, barons of the, 38. guilds of the, 64. Michigan, miners of, 89. Mill, John Stuart, 39, 41, 63, 80, 152. Minimum wage, 205. Mitchell, John, 217, 223, 224, 228, 253, 256-258, 260. Money Power, pretensions of the 55. rule of the, 49, 50, 51, 63. 54. selfishness of the, 58. trade is the war of the, 52. tyranny of the, 257-259. Monopoly, compulsion of, 95. futihty of trying to regulate, 199. Morley, John, 18, 41, 63. Moses, 183. Mutuality of interest, 251. Napoleon I. 187. National Arbitration Board, 214. Negroes, emancipation of, brought benefit to all, 173. New conscience, 70, 171. New feudalism, power of the, 50. New South Wales, 103. New tyranny, 176. New York Board of Mediation and Conciliation, 101. New York Constitutional Con- vention, 77. New York freight handlers' strike, 159. New York, poor of, 38. Night work prohibited, 64. Noah, 32. Non-union men, 142. New Zealand, abolishes con- tractor in pubUc works, 84. arbitration law prevents fraud upon consumers, 236. 276 MEN THE WORKERS New Zealand — canimued. compulsory arbitration, 208, 210. cooperative groups doing public work, 84. New Zealand Court of Arbitration demands equal condititions and equal pay for union and non-union workers, 231. does not allow discrimination against unions, 230. gives trade unionists pref- erence over non-unionists, 231. recognition of unions by the state, 229. Oastler, 120, 127. Ohio, too many people vote in, 77. Omar Khayyam, 244. Opium trade, SI. Organized citizenship, 88. Organized labour, its moderation and conservatism, 37, 39-41. Overproduction, 90. Panaceas of reformers, 38, 39. Panic, perpetual, 21. Parliament, Labour members, in, 88. members aid strike, 80. Paternalism, 155, 247. Pauperism, heaviest on labour, 41. Paupers of Great Britain, 41. Pax Britannica, 47, 48. Pax Romana, 46, 48. Plato, 8. Peabody, Rev. Dr., 131 Peel, 261. Pennsylvania, Wallace Arbitra- tion Law of, 101. Persian proverb, 192. Pharaoh, 127, 170. Philanthropy, 140. Phillips, Wendell, 24, 26, 128. Pierson, Rev. Dr., 22. Pilgrim Fathers, 27. Plutocracy, power and danger of, 71. Plutocracy united in action, 196, 197. Political Christianity, 199. Poverty, enforced, 97. fears of, 126. we miscall wealth, 107. Power, progressive, 162, 164. Prisoners of poverty, 25, 38. of property, 78. Privileges, unjiist, 14. Property, for all, 23. not more sacred than govern- ment, 75. of the people, 145, 147. of the privileged, 145. rights of, 75. Proprietary interest, 137. Public duties, 148. opinion, 254. "Public opinion" manufacture of, by plutocracy, 196. Public, rights, 148. schools, 96. Pullman strike, 184, 195, 253, 254. Puritans, religious Uberty of, 19. Pym, 24. Quakers, 27. Railroads, defiance of law by, 129. eminent domain and the, 144. fortunes of, created by mis- use, 144. mandamus issued against, 160. power of, 143, 162. refuse to arbitrate, 100, 101, 104. strikes on, 159. violation of law by, 175. Reform Bill of 1832 in England, 172. Reformers, 38, 39. lack of union among, 197. Regulation of guilds, 64. Reign of Terror, 37, 130. Rehgion of cooperative common- wealth, 198. INDEX 277 Religion of self-sacrifice by coSp- eration, 198. Representative of business, of labour, 136. Repudiation of contract, 129. Revenue of corporation, a tax on the people, 75. Review of Aeviews, 103, 216. Ricardo, 80, 152. Ricks, Judge, 138, 148. Right, denial of, of free meeting and free speech, 195. divine, 133. of contract, 238. of free speech and of meeting 176, 195. of meeting by police suffer- ance, 195. of state to control contracts, 113. of union, 128, 166. to bear arms taken away by law, 195. to nole, 127. to share, 82. to strike, 147. to work, 82, 142, 143, 146, 148. Rights, of employer and employee in ancient guilds, 64. of labour, 79. of Negroes; 173. of organization, 77. of property, 75. public, 148. vested, 133. Rogers, Thorold, 41, 63, 78. Roman empire, freemen of, 62. Roman state, greatness of, 45. Roosevelt, President, 201, 202, 205 206, 246, 252, 255, 266. Rules of the market, 142. Rules'of the ring, 124. Ruskin, John, 18, 26, 86, 38, 89, 136, 151. Sacredness of the body, 80, 31. "Scab," 199, 282, 233. Scab labour, 68, 89. Scotland, crofters of, 12. Scott, Sir Walter, 26, 87. Self employment, 91, 94. Self interest, of plutocracy, 196, 197. of the public, 187. with organized abuses, 18. Self sacrifice needed, 198. Seligman, Professor, 66. Shaftesbury, Earl of, 26, 121, 127. 261. Shearman, Thomas G., 146. Sherman, Senator, 138. Smith, Adam, 88. Smith Sydney, 66. Social cannibalism, 20. Social inequality, 173. Social settlements, 190. Socrates, 183. South, the, and slavery, 140, 146, 171, 173. Sparta, slaves of, 148. Spencer, Herbert, 39, 116. State rights, interference with by Federal Government, 196. St. Augustine, 72. Strikebreakers, 232, 233. Strike against wage reduction, 169. by ballot, 186, by trusts, 175. general, 154. of 1894 and 1902 compared, 267. of New York freight handlers, 169. of street railway men of Glas- gow, 185. sympathetic, 179, 180, 186. 200, 237. the poUtical, 185, 189. Strikes, a civil war, 131, 149-161. Australian Report on, 103. could have been prevented, 104. cure for, 163. necessity of, 63, 68. industrial wars, 234. injunctions to prevent, 166, 168. public support of, 80. 278 MEN THE WORKERS Suffrage, qualification for, 77. Suffrage lefonns and organized labour, 87. Supply and demand, 55. Supreme Court, of Illinois, 111 128. power of, 164. 'the people are the, 112. of the United States, decisions, 111. of the United States, refusing trial to Debs, 181. Surplus goods, 142. Surplus labour, 143. Sweating, repudiation of, 84. Sweatshops, conditions in, 117- 120. hours in, 117. investigation of, 117. law. 111, et seq. wages in, 117. Tacitus, 52. Taft, Judge, 138. Taiping rebellion in China, 51. TanS legislation, scandal of, 129. Taxation, by corporations, 75, 95, 129. heaviest on labour, 41. without consent, 24, 129. Tennessee miners, lOl. Terence, 262. Thomas, Rev. Dr. (of Chicago), 103. TiUett, Ben, 80. Total dei)ravi1y doctrine applied to industry, 15. Toynbee Hall, 190. Trade Agreements, advantage to employers, 213. benefit to employer, employee, and the public, 236. by-products of, 235, 236, 238. conditions necessary for suc- cess of, 226-228. Connecticut Commissioner of Bureau of Labour on, 212. corporations and firms in fevour of, 212-214; Trade Agreements — continued. demand for permanent, by the miners, 201, 252. difference between, in bitum- inous and anthracite re- gions, 225, 243. do not interfere with non- union labour, 228, 229. employers' associations in fevour of, 213. general distribution of, 221, 222. good results of, in coal mines, 216. guarantee right to arbitration, 237. 238. have created sympathetic ar- bitration, 237. in Great Britain, 210-212. Illinois agreement with miners, 217. in various industries, 208. local unions and, 225. make for trade stability, 288. most important development for industrial peace, 208- 210. "open shop agreements,'' 229, 231. permanent, a necessity to prevent future disputes, 206. power to enforce, 222, 224, 225. prevent strikes and lockouts, 209-227. prevent unfair advantages, 236. provisions of 217-224, 287, 238. put above constitutions of unions, 217. recognize right of working- men to be represented, 238. testimony on practical work- ing of, 214-216, 219, 220, 223, 224, 228. United States Commissioner of Labour on, 210. INDEX 279 Trade in primitive communities, 11, 13. Trade, laws of, 12. Trades Union Congress, Great Britain, 33. at Belfast, for collective ownership, 87. demands nationalization of lands, 154. protests against war, 34. Trades Union Congresses of England, conservatism of, 37. Trade Unions, advantages of, 61- 63, 127, 128. British opinion of, 62, 63. democracy of, 240. doctrines, 20. labour legislation achieved through, 127, 128. mutual sacrifice of, 70. necessary for welfare of all, 66-68. of Middle Ages, 64. precursors of union of hu- manity, 72, 96, 97. produce harmony, 68. public support of, 69. recognition of, 60. should be encouraged, 61. Treaties, ejrtradition, 54. Trumbull, Jjyman, 165. Twain, Mark, 139. Tyranny of the money power, 257-259. of government by injunction, 180. the new, 176. under various forms, 1S2, 142. Underbidding, 118. Under consimiption, 90. Unemployed, 20, 22, 42, 75, 78, 90, 94, 95, 104-106, 138, 139, 199. United Mine Workers of America, 207, 216, 217, 228, 244. National Convention at In- dianapolis, 217, 250. United Mine Workers — continued. demand mutual settlement of grievances on permanent basis, 262. first trade agreement, 216. unanimous vote against strik- United States Commissioner of Labour, at Arbitration Conference, 210. on anthracite coal strike, 244. United States, large fortunes in, 52. United States Treasiuy note and American eagle, 259. Universal dominion, two com- petitors for, 49. Utopia, 36. Valley Forge, 7. Vauderbilt, 141, 144. Vested Mhts, 26. Victoria Factories and Shops Act, 122. Wages, advance of, 68, 69. in sweatshops, 117. starvation, 118 Wage, Uving, 79, 80-82, 85, 160, 188. TnmiTmim, 205. Wage scale, cannot be made per- manent, 202. Walking delegate, 136, 288. Wallace Arbitration Law of Penn- sylvania, 101. War, heaviest on labour, 41. labour organizations protest against, 20, 34-36. no protest from church against, 33, 34. of Independence, its good results for England, 172. protest against, by Trades Union Congress of Great Britain, 84. Washington, 24, 69, 88, 158, 188, 187. Wealth, concentration of, 129, 146. greatest destroyer of, 191. 280 MEN THE WORKERS Webb, Vice-President of New York Central R. R., 101. White flag of peace, 200. Wilberforce. 150. Willard, Frances E., 80. Williams, Roger, 19. Wilson, Henry, 131. Wisconsin lumber mill owners re- fuse arbitration, 100. Woman, emancipation of, 150. Woman's suffrage, 1S9. Woolwich Arsenal, 86. Wordsworth, 86, 104, 127, 134, 153. Workingmen, attitude toward de- mands of, 185-137, 141, 150, 161, 162. conservatism of, 37, 39, 40, 43. duty to join unions, 67. Workingmen — continued. international organization of, 154. lack of united action of, 196, 197. make mistakes, but theirs is the right side, 132, 184, 186. reasons for organizing, 73-76. right to orgamze, 61. subject to government by injunction, 195. through labour troubles of 1877, are deprived of right to bear arms, 196. violence of, 11, 102. Yorktown defeat a victory for English libertiei. 172. Cornell University Library HD 8072.L65 Men, the workers, by Henry Demarest Lloyd 3 1924 002 356 305 Ho So 7^ L(o5