GIFT F 
 
MY NEIGHBOR 
 THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 By 
 JAMES ROSCOE DAY 
 
 Chancellor of Svracuse University 
 
 THE ABINGDON PRESS 
 NEW YORK CINCINNATI 
 

 T/ 
 
 
 
 
 Copyright, 1920, by 
 JAMES ROSCOE DAY 
 
 
 First Edition Printed May, 1920 
 Reprinted April, 1921 
 
AFFECTIONATELY AND GRATEFULLY 
 
 I DEDICATE THIS BOOK 
 
 TO MY WIFE 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PREFACE 7 
 
 I. MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN n 
 
 II. WHAT CAN BE DONE? 34 
 
 III . MY NEIGHBOR'S FALLACIES 57 
 
 IV. THE WORKINGMAN'S ORGANIZATION 81 
 
 V. MY NEIGHBOR'S STRIKES 98 
 
 VI. MY NEIGHBOR'S BAD EXAMPLE 120 
 
 VII. MY NEIGHBOR'S PROPERTY 140 
 
 VIII . MY NEIGHBOR'S ADVANTAGES 164 
 
 IX. MY NEIGHBOR'S COUNTRY 187 
 
 X. MY NEIGHBOR'S PATRIOTISM 211 
 
 XI. MY NEIGHBOR AND THE CAPITALIST 229 
 
 XII . MY NEIGHBOR'S WALKING DELEGATE 245 
 
 XIII. MY NEIGHBOR, A FREE MAN 268 
 
 XIV. MY NEIGHBOR HAS A JUST REMEDY 284 
 
 XV. MY NEIGHBOR'S EMPLOYER 302 
 
 XVI. MY NEIGHBOR'S FRIENDS AND FOES 318 
 
 XVII. MY NEIGHBOR'S RESPONSIBILITY 338 
 
 XVIII. MY NEIGHBOR'S FUTURE WAGE 358 
 
PREFACE 
 
 I HAVE written this book in no spirit of antago- 
 nism to the American workingman. I have always 
 looked upon him, when he has been a true American, 
 as the vertebral column of the republic. I know him 
 and have lived with him. I have been a working- 
 man and know his thoughts. I have been with him 
 from the field to the forest. I have rounded up 
 cattle with him in the Far West, on the back of a 
 mustang, before the cowboy was known as a 
 distinct race, have rolled a truck on the deck 
 of a steamer, and driven a stage. I have been 
 through the whole gamut of the workingman, omit- 
 ting the saloon and its kindred precincts. I have 
 been pastor in the greatest city of the land, and 
 known both the capitalist and the workingman 
 there, both of whom were in my congregation. For 
 more than a quarter of a century I have been a 
 college president, and have raised many thousands 
 of dollars to help the workingman's sons and 
 daughters through college, and there are no better 
 students than they. 
 
 I have not written, therefore, as a theorist outside 
 of my subject, nor as one unfriendly to the men 
 whom I discuss. I am in hearty sympathy with 
 them from the man who labors with the pick and 
 shovel to the skilled mechanic. There is no better 
 
PREFACE 
 
 citizen than the true, loyal, unperverted American 
 workingman. He is instinctively loyal. He is in- 
 telligent. He knows his country and is proud of it. 
 He looks upon his vote as a sacred obligation, and 
 no man has more bravely responded to his country's 
 call in war. It is only when he permits himself to 
 follow the enemies of his country, the alien leaders 
 who have insinuated themselves into his counsels, 
 that he forgets that his first duty is to his land. 
 These blind guides have spoiled his unions by plot- 
 ting to use them for their selfish purposes. It will 
 not be long before these perilous leaders will make 
 an open political declaration, more dangerous than 
 anything of the kind we have had. I venture to talk 
 with my neighbors plainly, as their friend, about 
 their mistakes and the dangers to their country and 
 to their homes and to their employment. 
 
 If it may be thought that I have used severe 
 language in characterizing the workingman's enemy, 
 the destructive socialist, the obtrusive and patroniz- 
 ing leader, and the cowardly assassin of innocent 
 men and women and children, the bomb-planter, in- 
 cendiary, and murderer, I 'have no apology to make. 
 They are unrepentant and boast their denial of God 
 and their purpose to destroy all government of men. 
 There ought to be one common and universal 
 execration that shall never cease until these loath- 
 some foes of humanity are forever exterminated. 
 Public sentiment should leave no room for the 
 destructive socialist in our country. 
 
 8 
 
PREFACE 
 
 I have only to call the attention of the readers 
 of this book to the events which have followed since 
 it was put into the hands of the publishers. They 
 are the insistent demands by union laborers that 
 the President shall reverse the action of Congress, 
 done by representatives of all the people, the 
 threats of prosecution and injunction in the courts 
 if the railway bill became law, and the plans follow- 
 ing the passage of the bill to defeat at the polls the 
 members of the United States Senate and House 
 of Representatives "who voted for it as enemies 
 of labor." Is this country to be governed by any 
 class of men by intimidation? What could be more 
 abhorrent to the spirit of our constitutional liberty 
 and the representative and lawful forms of our 
 government? The day has passed it never was 
 here when laws can be passed or defeated by 
 threats upon our free and fearless franchise. It is 
 time that some one drew the line plainly and fear- 
 lessly in matters of individual and governmental 
 rights. 
 
 J. R. D. 
 
 Syracuse University. 
 

 CHAPTER I 
 MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 FIFTY years ago it was comparatively easy to de- 
 fine one's neighbor in the same country. The people 
 were mostly of one race and kind. There are cer- 
 tain conditions that make the definition easy now 
 nearness of residence in a neighborhood, intimacy 
 of friendship, social relations, or the broad prin- 
 ciples of a fellow being. 
 
 The old conditions of homogeneity and proximity 
 have passed out by a marvelous change wrought in 
 two generations. We are living in a new world. 
 
 Fundamental laws of nature remain the same. 
 Fire burns, water drowns, gravitation weighs, elec- 
 tricity energizes or devitalizes, the light is trans- 
 parent. They are the same from age to age. The 
 air is unchanged 1 , but it is found to have another 
 adaptation, and ships float upon it as upon a new 
 sea. 
 
 The inventions of man, his explorations and dis- 
 coveries, within the realms of space and force, would 
 present to our fathers a bewildering world. But 
 to us they have passed into the commonplace. 
 Many of the startling things in the head lines of 
 our daily papers yesterday become our habit and 
 practice to-day. 
 
 11 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 These vast changes all have their place in a most 
 rational and accommodating way. They excite no 
 friction. They are welcomed in our business and 
 given a cordial place in our homes. We make new 
 machinery to apply their efficiency to our shops and 
 factories. Franklin's kite and key drives our ex- 
 press trains and lights streets and homes of every 
 metropolis. We rejoice in an age in which un- 
 fathomable mysteries have been penetrated to such 
 inner secrets that faith in the future of time and 
 immortality is greatly simplified. 
 
 But the perplexing and difficult problems are 
 man's adjustment to changing estates. He takes 
 care of everything but himself. He can measure 
 the forces and make them serve him. He can put 
 a harness upon the lightning and apply chemical 
 force to commerce. He compels water and food 
 to yield the secret of their distinctive bacteria, and 
 changes the character of the metals. He brings 
 millions of wealth out of the by-products that were 
 thrown hopelessly into the refuse heap. There is 
 no limit to his capabilities and facilities to turn all 
 things to his use. But the adjustment of himself 
 is an endless and unsolved puzzle. 
 
 Study the philosophers who are busy with prob- 
 lems in all their phases, from eugenic to hygienic, 
 from prenatal to psychic, with every possible domes- 
 tic economic solution, in the development of citizen- 
 ship, the slow progress, the failures, the revisions, 
 the hopeless tasks. The man will not stay placed. 
 
 12 
 
* 
 
 MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 You are not dealing with natural force or substance 
 or law. There is nothing fixed about him but his 
 restlessness. He is changing oftener than the moon 
 its phases. Like a child, what he sees he wants, 
 and what others have he thinks belongs to him or 
 is held by the possessor in some unjust way. And 
 he becomes the victim of every jealous and danger- 
 ous secret purpose. It is that mind, that passion 
 of ambition and desire, appallingly active or equally 
 stupid, which eludes us and which cannot be put 
 into amperes and kilowatts. And it does not dwell 
 apart, an isolated particle. The great mistake has 
 been in reckoning with it as an impotent unit, stand- 
 ing alone and failing to appreciate the cumulative 
 force of these small personalities as they gravitate 
 under a common impulse and become a collective 
 and consolidated energy. The solitary socialist 
 amused us. The soapbox orator who assailed our 
 government in a jargon only intelligible with diffi- 
 culty excited passing curiosity. 
 
 A train leaves the New York Central station for 
 up country. Along the Hudson River a solitary 
 snowflake strikes the smoke stack of the locomotive 
 and is as quickly gone. Only the engineer sees it. 
 The passengers give it no attention, if it passes the 
 engineer and strikes the car window, for it melts 
 away. Others follow in increasing numbers. They 
 attract attention and excite passing remarks. At 
 Albany the station platform is covered and the roofs 
 of the buildings. The track is white as the train 
 
 13 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 pulls up the grade. Through the Mohawk Valley 
 you cannot see across the narrow river. At Utica 
 the smoke stack is covered with snowflakes; they 
 came faster than it can melt them. At Syracuse a 
 snow plow is sent on ahead. The next day the trains 
 are stalled along the road. The snowflake was 
 joined with others and together they became a storm 
 that blocked the mighty railway. The solitary flake 
 that melted on the smoke stake was a symptom, 
 a forerunner, a menace. 
 
 Are we in the midst of the gathering storm? It 
 has been brewing a long time. Are we creators of 
 the storm? Can we command it to cease and be 
 calm? Are we wise to let it rage and send out our 
 plows powerful rotary plows? Is it wise to in- 
 crease our storm and trust to our devices, our poli- 
 tics, our free land, our industries, our commerce, 
 our philanthropies, our churches and universities, 
 and let the storm rage ? 
 
 Our solitary malcontent did not melt. He did 
 not even fall into the melting pot. It was not 
 heated for him. While he was outside unassimi- 
 lated and increasing his discontent, others joined 
 him, and to-day when we look about at this strange 
 condition of surging discontent in a contented land, 
 we find the conditions unfriendly to our attempt to 
 be neighbors with thousands who live in the same 
 neighborhood. But they live in Adullam's Cave. 
 
 They have organized their discontent, and they 
 have insisted upon political recognition. They are 
 
 14 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 not strong enough to rely upon their votes to form 
 a new national party, but the politici-ans reckon with 
 them. And without votes to command a control- 
 ling place as a political party, they take advantage 
 of the free country they curse, and assert their 
 protests with bombs. It is no longer a snowflake 
 of feeble, solitary protest or of collective energy. 
 It is a bomb. It is death. 
 
 The more respectable and law-abiding protest by 
 strikes, by which business is paralyzed and enormous 
 losses are incurred by strikers and stricken, and 
 judgment is often compelled without regard to jus- 
 tice. And the national administration opens the 
 inner door to the representative of this tyrannical 
 form of government within the government and 
 increases wages millions beyond the earning capacity 
 of the business to pay, and debts mount up to billions 
 of dollars and strikes are kindled in every part of 
 the country. It was the policy of increasing the 
 storm and trusting to the rotary plow. 
 
 Has there ever been such widespread and uni- 
 versal discontent? And the blind continues to lead 
 the blind. The elements of discontent are used to 
 create discontentment. More snow, more shovel. 
 But it is our snow and our storm. More high cost 
 of living and more wage; more pay for less work; 
 more envy, less satisfaction. It is the endless circle 
 into nothing. It is two dollars now, but two dollars 
 are worth less than one. And the man who inquires 
 for real and permanent remedy is not a neighbor. 
 
 IS 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 He is met with epithets and he will be fortunate 
 if his home is not bombed or a bullet put through 
 his brain, not by the men at the head of this organ- 
 ized unrest, but by the victim of insane spasms who 
 takes too literally the speeches which attack builders 
 and contractors and the defenders of a country 
 founded upon the doctrine of equality of privilege 
 under law, and only under law. 
 
 There must be a common interest to establish 
 neighborliness not a common estate, but an inter- 
 changing relation and a recognition of mutual de- 
 pendence. But we are widening the separating 
 space, not in dollars but in opposite theory of gov- 
 ernment and privilege, the right of another's prop- 
 erty by preemption. 
 
 Men to be neighbors must work to a common 
 end for a common good. It would be logical and 
 consistent if those who have the same concept of a 
 land and country would join themselves together 
 to secure their ideal. If they cannot adopt the 
 principles with which millions are content into whose 
 country they come, why seek to destroy that coun- 
 try, overthrow its institutions, and scatter its prop- 
 erty by a destructive communism? Such men can 
 establish no claim upon tolerance. It is gigantic 
 impertinence for them to attempt to assert any right 
 or privilege. An hundred and fifty years pass with 
 a government that has excited the amazement of 
 the greatest statesmen of modern times and that 
 has been the shelter of refugees from all parts of 
 
 16 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 the world. Its developments of national resources 
 are fabulous. Its progress and successes have ex- 
 cited the emulation of all lands. Suddenly there 
 appears among us an outbursting flame of enmity 
 and wanton destruction. 
 
 The clamor is not for a better government, but 
 for none. The demand is for a return to conditions 
 of the tribal forces which welcomed the first white 
 man to these shores with abandonment of all of the 
 fruits of civilization which they attempt to over- 
 throw. 
 
 Our country provides an orderly way for the re- 
 visions of the government. If a sufficient number 
 agree, they can proceed to change the constitution 
 by amendment and substitute changes in those parts 
 where men are oppressed. Great latitude of free 
 speech is given while the work is in progress. If 
 that is hopeless, discontented men have a second 
 choice, to return whence they came or content them- 
 selves with the conditions as they find them. If 
 they seek to destroy the loyal and consecrated sub- 
 jects of a republic founded for freemen by freemen, 
 they should be treated as wild beasts upon the throw- 
 ing of the first bomb. 
 
 Our government has been too careless of such 
 deadly reptiles. It is our country while we protect 
 it. We owe no man anything who seeks to over- 
 throw it. He should not be sheltered an hour 
 where he incites others to join him in his effort to 
 tear that shelter into pieces. Our presumption 
 
 17 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 upon our security, our mistaken devotion to the 
 cause of human freedom has cost us two of our 
 greatest Presidents. In no country do its foes pre- 
 sume so safely upon the indifference of the loyal 
 people to attacks upon their governmental institu- 
 tions. It is mistaken for supineness. It is the con- 
 fidence of loyalty. 
 
 The time is past when we can treat the menace 
 lightly. The great men of our people are too ab- 
 sorbed in their pursuits. The country offers them 
 too many opportunities to permit them to stop for 
 any serious thought of the socialistic ranters. We 
 do not fear anything more than effects upon our own 
 kind. But Adullam's Cave is a rendezvous for all 
 kinds who have any real or imagined ailment to be 
 cured. Anything that promises cure will secure a 
 large following, for while there is a variety of 
 complaints the desire for a physician is common to 
 them all. To the well, none are sick. To the loyal, 
 none are traitors. And one day, when all are happy 
 and it is a gala day, there is a terrific explosion 
 among women and children and scores are killed and 
 maimed. 
 
 When the carpenter was at his trade and the 
 artisan was pursuing quietly and contentedly his call- 
 ing, a fiend in some infernal cellar or attic is com- 
 pounding his fatal explosive, and when the little 
 children are being dressed for the pageant and are 
 starting from home with gleeful voices, the fiend, 
 whose heart never knew pity, is loading death into 
 
 18 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 his crude shell and placing with a grin of satisfaction 
 the time fuse. It is an unsuspecting multitude. 
 Why should they be suspicious? They know that 
 there is no reason or remote excuse for anyone to 
 harm anyone in that company, much less the women 
 and children. The mothers and children of the 
 poor are there. It is not a company that ever 
 oppressed any people. Their fault is that they are 
 happy and their homes are clean and wholesome. 
 The men have a day off from their work. They 
 are workingmen the clerks from the stores, the 
 mechanics and artisans, the young women from the 
 telephone and telegraph offices. The wives of the 
 industrious released from care have a day off with 
 their husbands and the children. To-morrow they 
 will be back cheerfully at the toil that makes their 
 happy homes. An awful blast! Scores of those 
 women and children lie dead and scores have limbs 
 torn off and eyes extinguished, and that gala throng 
 is wailing in agony; ranks are broken. 
 
 The whole country feels the tremor of that worse 
 than earthquake shock for a 'day until the next 
 day's papers spread out in double leaded type the 
 next sensation, and we forget what was done to the 
 innocent that happy morning; and, worse, we forget 
 what was done to our beautiful land and country. 
 
 We leave it to a small group of prosecutors to 
 bring the offenders to justice and make it difficult for 
 them to succeed, invoking the national administra- 
 tion, mustering preparations of sympathetic strikes 
 
 19 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 and raising volumes of questions as to the possibility 
 of wrong convictions in the face of all available 
 courts and executive reviews. 
 
 We have a sure way in our land of making it com- 
 paratively safe for this fiendish business. If we 
 were smaller, it would shake the circumference more 
 quickly and more mightily. Before the victims are 
 buried, soap boxes are mounted in distant cities by 
 apologetes for the dastardly murders. It did not 
 slack our pace. But in the cellar and the attic the 
 fiends are working with black curtains drawn to-day. 
 Meetings are being held all over the country in con- 
 siderable cities at night without lights. A flash of 
 lightning, if the shutters were not closed, would 
 reveal the startling company of a thousand malcon- 
 tents, the stuff out of which they make fiends, who 
 had come in with the padded tread of a tiger. And 
 they slink away to their lairs with the poisonous 
 infection of hate without cause, to be wrought upon 
 they care not whom if it may only fill hearts with 
 terror and tear them away from loyal devotion to 
 the country whose freedom their sires bought with 
 their priceless blood. 
 
 We present a strange spectacle to the world. 
 We were pioneers of freedom. We drove the 
 Indian back from our frontier farms because of his 
 tomahawk and scalping knife, and he had some 
 justifiable excuse for his attempt to exterminate the 
 invaders of his lands. They were destroying his 
 hunting grounds and damming back the waters of 
 
 20 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 his fishing streams. He wanted to be friendly, a 
 neighbor on common terms. We -have resisted in- 
 vading foes and shown a remarkable strength of 
 self-defense. We have had no difficulty of fighting 
 our foes in the open. It is passing strange that we 
 should be so impotent against the enemy who lurks 
 in darkness. He defies us. He harangues us in 
 our streets and murders us in our patriotic celebra- 
 tions. Is there no element of fear restraining us, 
 no patriotism among us? The homes of our mayors 
 are torn into pieces by mysterious explosions. 
 Bombs are set off against the residences of judges. 
 The incendiary torch is applied to our stores and 
 factories. 
 
 Should our methods be less aggressive? Shall 
 we be charged with cowardice? "What are we?" 
 is a practical question. Why do these marauders 
 go about with impunity? Here and there a man 
 and a woman, so notorious as to compel resistance if 
 a modicum of self-respect is to remain to us, receive 
 a short prison sentence and plan to return to their 
 old stamping ground. There is a spasm in a Legis- 
 lature and an appropriation of a few thousand 
 dollars to put down foreign Bolshevism and the 
 wave subsides. There will be a report of a junket- 
 ing committee, but no round-up of bomb-throwers. 
 Secret meetings will go on in darkened halls. The 
 secret propaganda will flourish. 
 
 Is America unable to protect herself from her 
 most insidious and perilous foes? Are we without 
 
 21 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 resources of protective enginery? Is detective 
 energy a past art and name? Are we to be beaten 
 at the game of secretiveness? These are questions 
 that relate to the morals and safety of the country. 
 
 The country is not independent and free while 
 these things are so. We make a boast with a vic- 
 torious foe ambushed in all of our precincts. We 
 are not protected when defiant threats are made 
 against courts which condemn criminals and business 
 is menaced by men who claim the right of force to 
 redress their fancied wrongs by the destruction of 
 property or by the death of the builder of that 
 property. It is a great thing to furnish shelter and 
 protection to the persecuted and oppressed, but it is 
 equally great to protect ourselves, our business, and 
 our homes. We may as well reckon that this is 
 imposed upon us as a first obligation. 
 
 Bombs, lynchings, and incendiarism do not belong 
 to advanced civilization, and there can be no apology 
 for them. They belong to a crude and undeveloped 
 condition. It is small pride to point to our vast 
 territory and the limitless resources of mineral and 
 productive wealth of our mines, our prairies and 
 forests, our commerce and manufacture, while we 
 are threatened and terrorized in our cities and towns 
 by a raw and savage element which we can neither 
 control nor expel. 
 
 The strength of a people is in its self-control and 
 in the mastery of all opposing elements. The force 
 of this control is not in police assertion, an/ artificial 
 
 22 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 and hired protection which itself joins the foe, but 
 in the resident energy of moral endowment a 
 country to which such things find no congenial root, 
 nor the possibility of secret growth. It is true that 
 the same soil will produce weeds and corn, but which 
 shall grow depends upon the farmer. It is not a 
 flattering discovery that we have millions of adults 
 among us who can neither read nor write, when the 
 condition of alien citizenship is the ability to read 
 the constitution of the United States. We have dis- 
 covered that it is not enough that tens of thousands 
 communicate with each other and with those of their 
 own kith, in language which we cannot understand. 
 They must know an interchanging tongue and 
 language by which they shall be reached by the 
 country. They must have a language with which 
 they may know our -laws and our history as well as 
 our current thought, and by which we may know 
 them. 
 
 The greatest source of our peril is the ignorance 
 of the common mind. Upon them is imposed the 
 wild teaching of fanatics and the self-seekers. We 
 do not forget that out of our college faculties have 
 come some of the most dangerous foes of America. 
 They have learned much, but they have never 
 learned that freedom and restraint go hand in hand 
 and that law and personal liberty are not in conflict 
 if one wishes to be lawful. Such men, however, are 
 not especially dangerous. They stand out and are 
 seen and known. Some of them are in Atlanta, or 
 
 23 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 the verdict of the university is pronounced in ex- 
 pulsion from its faculties. But their pernicious 
 teachings are in the air like the Scotch thistle down 
 borne into all countries. The ignorant who leave 
 their thinking for others, and who take their posi- 
 tions at a dangerous premium are as easy victims as 
 the fish to which the bait floats down on the stream. 
 
 It is told that a transatlantic ship landed Pat at a 
 New York dock, who came striding down the gang- 
 plank with his little all in a bandana-bound bundle 
 hanging from a shilalah over his shoulder. The 
 ever ready small politician representing the big poli- 
 tician received him with cordial welcome : 
 
 "What party do you belong to, my friend?" 
 
 Pat replied, "Be gorry, I don't know, but I'm 
 agin' the government." 
 
 That is the answer of the overwhelming ma- 
 jorities who land on our shores from European 
 monarchies, where from childhood they have been 
 taught that the ills of their parents, the squalor of 
 their apologies of homes, the scant food and cloth- 
 ing, the difference between their poverty and the 
 nobilities' riches is the government, and that when 
 they should reach this Eldorado they would them- 
 selves be able to overturn the government and make 
 one to suit poor folks. That it is unlike the one 
 they have left is unknown to them. They enroll for 
 their novitiate with the thought that they are to 
 overthrow something and set up a better something. 
 Left without the instruction of all knowledge except 
 
 24 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 the partisan forum of the crudest form, and excited, 
 as has been too true in past generations, by the argu- 
 ments of the saloon, you have the dangerous citizen. 
 When the immigrant comes to much here that is 
 promotive of the highest citizenship, he finds among 
 us much that is removed from that calm contentment 
 that argues a serene and confident life. We are a 
 restless people. We never seem to have reached 
 a goal. We are in a state of constant exploration 
 and venture. 
 
 We restlessly change from one form of business 
 to another, and have for a common center in which 
 all may speculate, exchange of stocks and bonds 
 where we follow up and down the shifting scale of 
 prices. While it is true that much among us is 
 stable and fixed, it is also true that moving in all 
 business forms is a restless discontented multitude. 
 They answer you with examples of "get rich quick." 
 
 That they pass over fortunes at their feet does 
 not change the nature of this restless animal. His 
 highly wrought nervous energy is contagious. He 
 returns to view lost opportunities and plunges on 
 again. He makes great fortunes and so do those 
 who inherit the by-products of passing enterprises. 
 It is a great venture to launch out, but it takes 
 courage to remain and seize the things that are 
 left. 
 
 In a Maine lumbering village of my boyhood 
 the time came when the great pines had yielded to 
 the ax. In that village were three prominent lum- 
 
 25 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 bermen. There was also a sturdy Irishman who 
 drove the little locomotive that hauled the lumber 
 four or five miles to the seaport from which it was 
 taken to Boston and New York. There was no 
 more promise in the small timber of spruce and 
 Norway pine that remained. The three men sought 
 their fortunes in California and Oregon. None of 
 them greatly increased his estate in the new voca- 
 tion, though all were men of large ability and enter- 
 prise. The Irishman, who worked at monthly wages 
 and had saved all beyond a bare living, neither strik- 
 ing nor drinking, and blessed with numerous sons and 
 daughters, bought, at a very low price, the forsaken, 
 worthless land which promised no large return for 
 investment of capital and labor, as fast as he could 
 pay for it. He ventured to borrow some as his 
 credit increased. He soon owned the mill site. De- 
 mand sprang up for spruce and Norway pine. 
 Small white pines grew rapidly released from the 
 lumberman's ax. The contented and frugal Irish- 
 man lived to see himself worth a million dollars, a 
 vast fortune in those days. He came with nothing 
 but his hands. He could have bought out, when he 
 died, several times over, the three men whom he had 
 envied in his young manhood. But he was an excep- 
 tion. It is true that not all who are content with 
 the old life are so successful in the accumulation of 
 property. The greater misfortune that the restless 
 spirit is not often content within spheres of enter- 
 prises and progress, but consumes itself in envy and 
 
 26 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 accuses fortune and the order of things with being 
 unfriendly. It apologizes for its failure by charg- 
 ing it to the unjust and dishonest competition of suc- 
 cessful neighbors. 
 
 Cornelius Sullivan, to whom I have referred, 
 makes no impression as an example. He is an excep- 
 tion. There is no law proved, you say. With such 
 answers your malcontent goes on to stimulate his 
 grievances. And if merely reaping the aftermath 
 where other men have wrought is all of life, disap- 
 pointment would not be surprising. But our mal- 
 content seems to have no objective. Everything is 
 wrong. Nothing pays. Everyone is in better 
 fortune, and there is nothing for him but to know 
 the pain of his own heart. He is made unhappy by 
 the happiness of others. 
 
 The great trouble is that such men have not made 
 a study of themselves. It is a problem. There are 
 many who do not master it, and many more who 
 have never thought of it as a problem. They think 
 with their eyes and with their ears ; and having eyes, 
 they see not, and having ears, they hear not. Hav- 
 ing no resources within themselves they turn to other 
 men who have what they covet, and having no solu- 
 tion of it, it never occurs to them to improve their 
 own estate and place in life. But the shortest and 
 plainest answer to it all is to blow up the land that 
 fosters partial and unequal prosperity. They pass 
 out of the genera of men and become beasts to 
 destroy for the love of destroying. The law is a 
 
 27 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 barrier to be removed. The officers restrain by 
 artificial authority and are enemies of mankind. All 
 restraining government should be overthrown, not 
 because they have not been given a chance they 
 never have sought one; not because it got in their 
 way they never sought a way. They want only to 
 obstruct everything that made a way, an open way 
 for the enterprises of men who while seeking their 
 own were building for others. It is a strange genus 
 Homo. He stands on two legs, that is all. If he 
 were down upon four legs, we could recognize him. 
 We would not make the mistake of thinking he was 
 a man too late. 
 
 It all seems a species of insanity and yet a re- 
 sponsible insanity. But it is impossible to predicate 
 the actions of such people upon sanity. Nothing 
 could be more useless in securing the end attempted. 
 The world never has yielded the slightest return to 
 cowardly murder. There is nothing that appeals 
 to any noble instinct. Darkness does not create light. 
 It must be dispelled by light which comes into it 
 from without. Darkness would not generate light 
 in a million cycles. Darkness is the absence of 
 light. Hate does not beget love. They are at 
 opposite poles in everything. They have no re- 
 semblance at opposite poles. There is some radical 
 defect which seeks destruction instead of reform, if 
 even reform is necessary. The mental deficiency, 
 the utter lack of mental capacity, suggests the home 
 of the feeble-minded. Never a reason was given 
 
 28 
 
MY 
 
 MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 by a destructive lunatic that satisfied the astonished 
 query of an intelligent man. 
 
 If the whole creation of these murderous fanatics 
 and cranks were in an instant swept off the earth, 
 the sum total would not amount to a suggestion of 
 the loss of a man, of one whole and sane man. 
 They have never added the slightest value to the 
 world's assets. 
 
 In the earth's structure there are spots that seem 
 to serve no purpose of creation. But they do no 
 harm, and sometimes the genius of man turns them 
 to account and they prove to be a waiting value of 
 the earth's varied assets. 
 
 The destructive socialist serves no purpose. He 
 has not the excuse for being a wild animal or a 
 venomous scorpion. He is a blighted, an atrophied, 
 a distempered, a contagious attempt at a man, the 
 most deplorable and disheartening which the world 
 has ever seen. Along some dim line he may have 
 been a man once, but the perversion has been so pro- 
 longed and persistent that all resemblance to God's 
 work has long since ceased. He killed a child. He 
 tore in pieces a baby brought by its mother into the 
 sweet morning air. He set a torch to a house, a home 
 built by an industrious mechanic and his frugal wife. 
 Through years they were building it. In an hour 
 this criminal fiend reduced it to ashes and the parents 
 and the children perished in their home. He did 
 it to reform the government ! Have you ever seen 
 anything in God's work like him? Have you seen 
 
 29 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 anything in the devil's work like him more wicked 
 more hellish ? He is not my neighbor. He is not 
 a workingman. There is nothing in him of which 
 workingmen are made. He cannot appeal to me. 
 If he suffers, I do not suffer. No ! Not any more 
 than I suffer when the wolf that destroyed my child 
 suffers and is dying from the hunter's bullet. Such 
 anarchistic and destructive socialists are justly de- 
 scribed in words once used by the world's greatest 
 Teacher, when he sentenced as "serpents and a gen- 
 eration of vipers" characters who could not escape 
 the damnation of hell. 
 
 And such are to reform my government by blow- 
 ing into fragments its industries, by killing the inno- 
 cent who live under it, by surprising with eternity 
 those whose fate is not committed to them, but who 
 have the supreme right to live? If they reach num- 
 bers to have a name like the Bolsheviki and pretend 
 to a government, they will order instant trial execu- 
 tions a criminal farce. They are I. W. W. 
 murderers and cowardly assassins. They are in any 
 form our foes to be exterminated. These reform- 
 ers elected an addled-brained dupe to kill a McKin- 
 ley, and excited with their crazy doctrines a dementia 
 victim to slay a Clemenceau if possible. 
 
 Has there been any pronounced friend of hu- 
 manity who has not been classed as their enemy? 
 Has there been any form of human or divine gov- 
 ernment that is not the object of their wrath? It 
 matters not whether it be an absolute monarchy or 
 
 30 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 the world's most generous and most democratic 
 republic. Alike they curse the land of lese majeste 
 and the land of free speech, in which they sow sedi- 
 tion and curse its generous institutions. 
 
 The further one reflects, the warmer becomes his 
 blood and the hotter his indignation that such fiends 
 should presume to pass judgment upon the rule and 
 authority of man. That there is lacking every 
 qualifying element is apparent from the red socialist 
 to the Bolsheviki who have intimated no constructive 
 powers. When for an hour they have held sway, 
 progress, manufacture, the arts, learning and virtue 
 have fled in terror from them, and their own doc- 
 trines and diabolical practices have subdued them 
 and overcome them. How long will the lethargy of 
 conceit, the flattery of a false security, drug us into 
 perilous soporific indifference from which we may 
 wake up too late? 
 
 What are the riots of the whites and blacks in 
 our great cities but symptoms of propaganda in 
 secret and earnest operation throughout the land? 
 These destroyers of our peace are upon the alert 
 to stir the discontented who find their place in the 
 body politic for any reason irksome or embar- 
 rassed. 
 
 The colored man is docile and peaceable. But 
 he is coming to acquire some measure of power, in 
 saved wage, in modest home, in small farms and 
 trades. His children are educated. He is entering 
 professions among his own people. The world 
 
 31 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 never has seen such an emergence from bondage. 
 But a class of them is easily excited. 
 
 There are also workingmen loyal and safely in- 
 trusted with the community. They are partners 
 in all of the progress of their town, the public 
 schools, the libraries, the Christian and Jewish As- 
 sociation, and the most of them are in the churches 
 and synagogues. They are the stability and hope 
 of the country. 
 
 These people have a right to protection from the 
 secret machinations of the destroyer that works in 
 darkness. They can be made the greatest protec- 
 tive force of the country. They respond as one 
 voice. They are a common and forceful sentiment. 
 They have an investment in all that their town is, 
 and a blow at it is a blow at them and their families. 
 They will not listen to any doctrine of common 
 property, soviet government, confiscated factories, 
 common wives. They are clean. They have helped 
 to rid the country of the saloon, the workingman's 
 worst enemy. They furnish from their homes the 
 students of the colleges. From them have gone out 
 to the professions many of the ablest men in law and 
 medicine, statesmanship, great business men and 
 scholars of literature, the arts and sciences. 
 
 The homes of the poor are the fruitful soil of the 
 best citizens of any community. As a rule, in what- 
 ever lot they are they are contented, for they em- 
 body the element of the true contentment, and they 
 make the world's earnest progress. They are the 
 
 32 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 chief asset of any community. Whatever business 
 comes, it fails if they do not come and if they are not 
 contented. 
 
 These workingmen are our neighbors. They 
 are the neighbors and helpers of every man who 
 carries large enterprises. We need not fear with 
 such men as our neighbors. They are our safety. 
 
 33 
 
CHAPTER II 
 WHAT CAN BE DONE? 
 
 THAT has been the unanswered question in many 
 lands for many years. It is easy to say that a war 
 of extermination should be begun. That is the way 
 we proceed against outlaws. The claims of our 
 country set aside all considerations for its foes and 
 especially for those who assail her in the dark and by 
 inhuman means a fixed and alert watchfulness of 
 all signs, the tracing of every track of the beast to 
 his lair. Such men live in unusual places and the 
 manner of their lives is marked. They are unem- 
 ployed if they are leaders and chief conspirators. 
 They should be arrested upon suspicion and the 
 burden of their defense should be placed upon them. 
 There should be no safe and secure place left to 
 them. Wild animals are not hunted among flocks 
 and herds. They are hunted in the retreats where 
 they bange. It will be conceded that if the ex- 
 termination has not succeeded in those lands where 
 every effort has been used and where there has been 
 no embarrassment from the plea of freedom of 
 speech and of personal pursuits, but the work of 
 assassination has gone on in the daylight, it is not 
 an easy task in a land where the courts presume 
 innocence until guilt is proved- But there must be a 
 
 34 
 
WHAT CAN BE DONE? 
 
 suspension of the order of things among us and 
 theories of practice that apply in common cases must 
 be laid aside. A special police for this purpose 
 must be assigned and held strictly to the business of 
 hunting down this class of criminals. Meetings in 
 darkened halls, unannounced, are prima facie evi- 
 dence of mischief. They choose darkness because 
 their deeds are evil. The light should be sprung 
 upon them. It may be truthfully said that evils 
 might follow such procedure, but in dealing with 
 this peril such chances must be taken. The national 
 assassin must not hide under a prudence more care- 
 ful of him than of his intended victim. There has 
 been too much measuring of the constitutional limit 
 of privilege. The author of incendiary speeches 
 has been protected by the Constitution he seeks to 
 destroy. 
 
 In a certain city a foul, anarchistic woman, in an 
 incendiary speech to an audience of brutal men and 
 women, attacked the head of the university of the 
 town. She regretted that she could not "kill him 
 and take his worthless hide and make it into drum- 
 heads to beat out the march of human freedom in 
 its processions. " No arrest was attempted. No 
 caution by representatives of the law who were pres- 
 ent. The morning papers did not condemn it, prob- 
 ably considering it too coarse to be noticed and to be 
 harmful. That is not a safe conclusion. It is from 
 such meetings, inspired by such vile and coarse 
 ranters, that some diseased brain goes out deter- 
 
 35 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 mined to serve the cause by bringing in that hide to 
 be made into drumheads. In the abstract such agi- 
 tators are harmless and best not be dignified by 
 marked attention, but there is a concrete and prac- 
 tical side to it. The country would be startled if it 
 knew the per cent of insane who are outside of the 
 asylums. They strangely gravitate to such com- 
 pany. They become dangerous. They do the deed 
 which the soap-box orators, the bomb-makers, dare 
 not do. There is but one course that should be 
 pursued with such irresponsible creatures. They 
 should be put inside of the insane asylums or the 
 prisons for the insane. That woman has just com- 
 pleted too short a term at Atlanta for another 
 offense, but the work of justice was too slow. It 
 should be alert when the attempt now boasted is 
 made to renew the old practices and especially when 
 a demonstration of welcome is made which would be 
 a plain defiance of the law. 
 
 We cannot afford to wink at these practices. We 
 are becoming too dense in population, our cities are 
 covered with the rotting scum that is floating into 
 them on every tide of immigration from Russia and 
 Neapolitan Europe. They threaten us far more 
 than defective sewerage or lax laws against virulent 
 contagion. 
 
 We systematize the protection of health. We 
 leave unguarded against the assassin of our free in- 
 stitutions and men who represent them, every 
 avenue of approach. A President is killed; a judge 
 
 36 
 
 

 WHAT CAN BE DONE? 
 
 shot on the bench. A mayor or a governor is 
 threatened for executing law. We utter our in- 
 dignant protests and wait for the repetition of the 
 offense. The threat should be the capital crime 
 against which we should aim the shafts of the law. 
 The bloody act should not hide under the delays of 
 the court or dallying officials. 
 
 So long as we make a home for scorpions, they will 
 crawl into the place where they are left unmolested, 
 and not strange if they crawl about the house. If 
 we are indifferent to their coming and going, they 
 will come and go at pleasure and we have the chief 
 blame for their virus and its fatal contact. It is an 
 impotent nation that cannot rid itself of lurking peril 
 which takes so little pains to hide itself. 
 
 Now that the war is over, when the propagandists 
 begin their work is time for warfare at home. We 
 have fought no foe more worthy of extermination. 
 The inventive genius that secured such remarkable 
 instruments to the cause of humanity against the 
 tyranny that sought to overthrow all human free- 
 dom should find it no difficult task to rid our part 
 of the world of the insane freaks who attack the 
 foundations of freedom among us. Such assault is 
 friendly to no interest. The tax of extermination 
 will be begrudged by no class, but we will insist 
 that the work be done thoroughly. It must justify 
 itself by leaving no vestige of the pestilence. 
 
 As a precaution we must guard our open doors. 
 There is such a thing as leaving the doors too wide 
 
 37 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 open and leaving them to be swung on their own 
 hinges automatically. We have been too careless 
 of our doors. For generations we had no restric- 
 tions. The immigrants poured in upon us and they 
 served us right well. The disease of anarchy was 
 unknown. The revolutionists who came brought no 
 bombs nor daggers with them. They came for 
 freedom with the spirit of the pilgrims. Their sons 
 and daughters have reenforced a sturdy citizenship. 
 They increase in efficiency with each generation. 
 The fear that we might suffer serious loss to the 
 country by interfering with these wholesome cur- 
 rents of immigration has kept our doors open. A 
 while ago, when southern Europe began to send 
 over her cripples and incompetents, we placed a 
 guard at our doors. We were less careful about 
 the opinions of men seeking our shores, for we had 
 arranged all of that in the arena of free thought. 
 We trusted to the freedom of thinking and sound 
 speaking to assimilate diverging and antagonizing 
 opinions. That men should try to destroy collec- 
 tively the lives of those who did not agree with 
 them, and to overturn the government was new to 
 us. And that those who came to the privileges of 
 our institutions, established at enormous expense 
 and sacrifice and defended with our lives, must be 
 only sporadic. It could not mean a large menace 
 in fact or force. It would correct itself; it was an 
 exaggerated protest of fanaticism. 
 
 The time has come to double guard the doors. 
 
 38 
 
WHAT CAN BE DONE? 
 
 Cripples might come with promise of genius. We 
 might exclude a Byron. Many of the world's great 
 thinkers have been deformed physically. What of 
 the man's brain? What is the type of his thinking, 
 what the school of his instruction, what his bias? 
 Americans should guard that door and bar it against 
 every man whose mind is deformed or who shows 
 destructive tendencies. Let the nation that pro- 
 duced him be responsible for him. Return him 
 whence he came. If anyone with these dangerous 
 symptoms is admitted, it should be with a safe check 
 upon him. He should be listed and followed care- 
 fully through a process of inspection when not under 
 restraint and unconscious that he is being observed. 
 Those who have got by should be deported 
 promptly. The first soap-box speech against the 
 country, the first threat in darkened meetings, 
 should list the offender for an early sailing ship. 
 Clear evidence of such utterances should be suffi- 
 cient for any magistrate to make the deporting 
 commitment. 
 
 Highly intelligent detectives should be sent to 
 the embarking ports of Europe to acquaint them- 
 selves with the Trotskys and Lenines in embryo, and 
 follow them here by the ships on which they sail and 
 stop them at the open doors. It should shut with 
 double boltings in the face of all such. It is not 
 enough to protect ourselves on these shores ; we 
 should know Europe as familiarly as we know 
 America. 
 
 39 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 We are not planning against another great 
 European war. We need infinitely more than a 
 League of Nations, a league of self-preservation at 
 the doors of our seacoasts against a foe more 
 dangerous than Kaiserism. We are not in danger 
 from an invading army by sea or with bombing air- 
 planes. We must guard against the planting of an 
 army of Bolsheviki, by whatever name, to attack us 
 secretly by cowardly assassination. Germany boasts 
 preparations for another war. She will not make 
 her attempts by millions marshaled in battle ranks. 
 She is putting through our open and unguarded 
 doors on the east and west coasts her next army. 
 
 It is not the wooden horse of Troy. It is the 
 steerage of the transatlantic lines and the callous 
 conceits of our over-confident America. They come 
 because a certain large measure of preparative work 
 has been done while we have been sleeping. They 
 do not count yet by millions, but they are every- 
 where. They take the measure of capital and labor. 
 They weigh the politicians. They champion Czech 
 and Russian. They reject the Jew. He is the son of 
 Abraham and a student of Moses's law. He is 
 deep-rooted, as a rule, in the law and order of his 
 fathers. 
 
 The respectable class, however much misguided, 
 who offer their opinions in an orderly canvass with 
 published candidates for the franchise, are exercis- 
 ing the rights of free Americans. They are voters 
 and have a right to influence others to vote with 
 
 40 
 
WHAT CAN BE DONE? 
 
 them. The country will trust to the intelligence of 
 the loyal American to resist their fallacies and to 
 defeat them with the convincing argument of the 
 ballot. Should they by any chance win, the damage 
 wrought by their crude experiment will return the 
 community sobered to the primal principles tested by 
 a century and a half of freedom. A long memory is 
 not required to recall the political spasms of anti- 
 masonry, greenbackism, and free silver, all en- 
 tombed by the intelligence of the people after a 
 premature birth and death by infantile paralysis. 
 A square, open fight in the light is not to be feared 
 in this country. It may be inconvenient. It may 
 work serious loss and disturb the good order of 
 society. It may defeat, for a time, men of solid 
 worth and reduce our administration and judiciary 
 to a travesty, but the turbulent waters return to 
 their banks, the shores are mended, and the normal 
 currents flow on again. 
 
 Capital returns to its place once more and fur- 
 nishes employment in the thousand enterprises which 
 it offers to the world's enterprise, and the working- 
 man fills his dinner pail with something more sub- 
 stantial than the socialistic orator's hot air. These 
 convulsions are not to be classed with Bolshevism, 
 the I. W. W., and the Red Socialists who demand 
 the destruction of the general order with no intel- 
 ligent substitute. We can tolerate the man who 
 thinks he has something of improvement a better 
 thing, however foolish it appears when intelligently 
 
 41 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 analyzed and however much we may deprecate the 
 temporary calamity that must follow the experi- 
 ment. But at the worst he is a mistaken citizen, and 
 he is our neighbor even though we do not fellow- 
 ship his politics. Such men suggest a practical prob- 
 lem. We have encouraging work with him and 
 more with those who follow in years. The informal 
 school, the night school in college halls, in high- 
 school and grammar-school buildings, in profes- 
 sional school lecture rooms where good plain teach- 
 ings may be given by college professors and public 
 school teachers, where the phonograph and movie 
 may be used and lectures and concerts may be given, 
 all of it free, furnished by the state and the general 
 government. Science may be taught in its plain but 
 fundamental outlines, especially as it relates to 
 human progress and happiness. History should be 
 in the schedule : those great events and experiments 
 in human affairs that, if learned, will save the world 
 the repetition of past fatal blunders; history that is 
 more than annals of political intrigue and the shift- 
 ing of rulers in the world's game of chess. The 
 plain, everyday events of the common life : the birth 
 of new nations, the development of industries, the 
 personal and individual achievements in navigation, 
 in railways, in talking cables, and telegraphs and 
 telephones; the numberless inventors who have 
 established a new order of home life, whence they 
 came, by what personal heroism, by what sacrifice of 
 capital, by what tireless toil and labor both of the 
 
 42 
 
WHAT CAN BE DONE? 
 
 working brain and the working hand; the discov- 
 eries, the subduing of waste places, the building of 
 cities; the story of our own land and country, the 
 heroism of its founders, the prescient wisdom of its 
 first lawmakers, the story of the Constitution, its 
 system of jurisprudence, its public schools, the 
 patrons of education, the origin of charities, and an- 
 nuities which minister to the unfortunate and the 
 poor. Let all such students be taught the English 
 language, that polyglot of all tongues, until they 
 can read and study every great life of our history 
 and every translation of the lives of all lands, that 
 they may live among the great men of human 
 history. With the doors of their brains opened, 
 there will come in a new light and our restless citi- 
 zens will live in a new world of thought. 
 
 Natural History has a wonderful revelation for 
 them. Natural law will banish superstition and 
 fear and create for them realms of which they have 
 never dreamed, when once they become capable of 
 interpreting it. There is no remedy like widening 
 the fields of thought by knowledge of the purposes 
 and achievements of thoughtful, earnest men. 
 There is mischief for idle hands to do. There is 
 greater for idle brains to do. They react upon 
 themselves. They become the bare branches in 
 which foul harpies perch. To awaken them, to 
 fill them with engrossing and inspiring facts and 
 quicken them with worthy ambition is the best cure 
 for evil and vicious men. The safety of the country 
 
 43 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 demands another grade of common school related 
 to the rescue of the perilous. The economy is in 
 substituting such schools for the reformatory. They 
 are for those who missed the public schools also. 
 
 The mistake should not be in shutting up such 
 work in the State colleges and normal schools. The 
 public school buildings should be equipped with what 
 they lack, all colleges and technical schools should 
 be used under the supervision of the Department of 
 Education, both national and State, men and women 
 of liberal endowment of common sense and a pas- 
 sion to help the ingenious minds that feel the first 
 pangs of hunger for knowledge. Care should be 
 taken to select teachers with reverence and un- 
 doubted loyalty to their country, faith in the good 
 and confidence that it will prevail. 
 
 Theorists, faddists, and fools in general should 
 be taboo. Young minds, all students feel the force 
 of personality, with an attractive force that will soon 
 penetrate the passions. Such schools will need no 
 persuasions nor enforced attendance. 
 
 The late Dr. Bickmore, the founder of the 
 Museum of Natural History in New York, began 
 to illustrate his subjects to a small group in a room 
 about fifteen feet square on one of the floors of that 
 great institution in the days of its beginning. In a 
 comparatively short time a large hall was crowded 
 with eager throngs following his colored photo- 
 graphs through the wonderful fields of those fas- 
 cinating studies. The day that I was invited to at- 
 
 44 
 
WHAT CAN BE DONE? 
 
 tend one of his lectures, the first subject on the screen 
 was a desert, with its struggling attempt at a palm 
 shrub, in the sands of which was hollowed a nest of 
 the ostrich. Near by stood the adult bird and close 
 by the broken and suggestive shell was the young- 
 ster. The habitat of the ostrich, in colors of sand 
 and shrub and plumage of this bird of the desert, 
 made an attractive and instructive picture. It did 
 not pass as a picture to be forgotten. It means 
 inquiry and the rudiments of research. It was a 
 travel picture that took those men and women into 
 a far country of which they had scarcely heard. 
 Could there be anything better as a preventive of 
 gangsters and bomb-makers? One incendiary fire 
 prevented would pay for the equipment. 
 
 Out of the fetid air, the profane vulgarity, the 
 gas-house lot and sewer odors, into an hour of 
 oxygen of self-respect, the revelations of an unheard 
 of world is a saving religion against which no sane 
 person can raise a protest of jealousy and bigotry. 
 A decade will change the features of that part of the 
 community. It will change the homes and put into 
 the air new odors. The skilled artisan will be 
 sought there by the manufacturer, and the young 
 clerk of the store will come and go on those clean 
 and sweet streets. It is the cities' new investment. 
 It has its place with the parks and art museums. It 
 justifies them, for it is educating appreciation of 
 them among the lowly and forgotten who will be- 
 come vicious if neglected much longer. 
 
 45 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 It is well to improve tenement houses and widen 
 streets and clean up the districts of squalor. That 
 is for those who will come to enjoy it all and pay the 
 investment. Our suggestion is not with the tene- 
 ment but with the tenant, not with the street but 
 with the man. The new man is more important 
 than the new tenement. The wiser man and woman, 
 the brighter children are more important than the 
 wider street. Conditions of squalor are not made 
 by poverty. They are made by ignorance. It is 
 also the seed of vicious habits. 
 
 The woman should be taught at odd times 
 domestic life. The husband's wholesome meal, well 
 cooked if coarse, palatable if bought from the 
 cheap huckster's cart, is an element of contentment 
 and contributes to sound citizenship. Unfortunate 
 women! They bear children in unfortunate num- 
 bers and do not know how to feed them and save 
 their lives. In our new and universal schools, now 
 being experimented in some cities, there are schools 
 of cookery; some newspapers have short courses; 
 some Young Women's Associations have them. 
 They are for first-hand work. They make new 
 homes. A strange contentment conies over the 
 husband. He discovers a new wife at home. He 
 brings home a new voice. He doesn't leave his 
 excuse for a home with a curse to saunter up town. 
 He waits until the dishes are washed and takes the 
 wife in her new dress which she learned to make at 
 the home school. 
 
 46 
 
WHAT CAN BE DONE? 
 
 So strong is the appeal, so rich the reward in 
 good citizenship, that some colleges are founding 
 schools of domestic science where young women 
 by hundreds are studying to lead in the first-hand 
 work of home instruction in cooking wholesome 
 meals and in dressmaking for the mother and for 
 the children. 
 
 These are some of the things we can do to make 
 neighbors of our enemies who are enemies of man- 
 kind. It is a work more important than the educa- 
 tion of the children, the sons and daughters of the 
 rich who should not and who will not be neglected. 
 It is a protective measure. Not that all poor and 
 ignorant become vicious far from it. The rich 
 furnish their quota of spoiled indulgents. But it is 
 perilous to leave the poor to brood over their condi- 
 tion and to teach their children that the state is re- 
 sponsible for it. The state cannot relieve the situa- 
 tion by direct appropriation. It is not to bring 
 something to the man in dollars and cents, it is to 
 bring something into him a larger and better 
 brain something he can do himself. That is what 
 elevates him. Mr. Carnegie had given a large sum 
 for a university library. A German with socialist 
 tendencies said, "Why did not Mr. Carnegie give 
 the money to the poor?" 
 
 The reply was: u That is an old question by an 
 unenviable character; but has not Mr. Carnegie 
 given his money to the poor? You are a subcon- 
 tractor on the building; are you a rich man? Are 
 
 47 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 any of these men rich? Are not these scores of 
 workingmen the hodcarriers, the stonecutters and 
 masons, the bricklayers, and carpenters and painters 
 are they not all poor men?" 
 
 The answer was in the affirmative. 
 
 "Well, could he have given them this large sum of 
 money in a better way? Is it not a way that pre- 
 serves their self-respect? They are contributing 
 for what they get." 
 
 Men are elevated in this world by using their 
 own energy and applying their own time. If by 
 some process our unlearned and ignorant men could 
 have knowledge put into their brains as sunlight is 
 poured into the rose petals, they would be scarcely 
 above vegetables. The tree takes the rains that fall 
 about it and pumps it and transmits it along its 
 branches and out to its twigs. And it blooms and 
 bears fruit. Whatever may have been the first 
 divine office of labor, it is not now a curse; it is a 
 blessing. It is not benefactions of pensions, it is 
 not stipends that the unplaced and unfortunate need. 
 It is opportunity; the privilege of the reach of know- 
 ing things, just so much as to help them to know 
 more. Then the character begins to sprout. The 
 purpose is not that of a pensioner, a dependent. He 
 has become a subscriber for his paper; a popular 
 science magazine is on his table. He learned at the 
 night school enough English to read them. A dic- 
 tionary is beside him. Like Dwight L. Moody, he 
 is not ashamed to spell out hard words. Henceforth 
 
 48 
 
WHAT CAN BE DONE? 
 
 he does not go to the polls to sell his vote. It is 
 not for sale, for he is not for sale. 
 
 The newcomer into the country, without knowl- 
 edge of our language and the common English 
 branches, should be directed to these schools of 
 privilege. They are not penal schools. They bear 
 no mark or sign or thought of that kind. They are 
 not reformatory, but they have a mighty saving in- 
 fluence. They are offered to help those who for 
 some one or another reason failed to secure their 
 elemental preparation for a most useful life. They 
 are to help men and women to acquaintance with the 
 past and with current events and to practical affairs, 
 all of which will increase their efficiency and their 
 incomes and make it possible for them to advance 
 their positions which others have taken from them 
 because they knew a little more just what they 
 learned in the night or vacation school. The 
 stranger who comes to our shores may not lack the 
 knowledge which will fit him for self-support and 
 put him beyond charge to our country, but he may 
 and often does have the dangerous notion that he 
 is to make over the state of things to which he finds 
 it impossible to adjust himself because of his ignor- 
 ance. He broods distempers and creates unrest in 
 those like himself. Such a man must be compelled 
 to study our language and to know sketches of our 
 history. It is light that he needs, and not fire. He 
 must be made to apply his idly vicious hours to 
 knowledge of what has made us great. He must 
 
 49 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 have English, that he may read our great peri- 
 odicals. If he intends to live here, whether he 
 wants to become a citizen or not, he must be com- 
 pelled to read our Constitution and our Declaration 
 of Independence, the beatitudes of Christ, the Ten 
 Commandments of Moses, the lives of the founders 
 of our republic. And if at the end of two years he 
 does not qualify in these, he should be deported. 
 This is friendship to the poor, ignorant, misguided 
 fellow whose life holds no promise. It is due our- 
 selves, who are in imminent peril of becoming his 
 victims. We are taking away no liberty. We are 
 using no oppression. We are doing no injustice. 
 We are conferring an immense benefit, greater than 
 any moneyed gain he might find here. We are do- 
 ing for him what was not done in the land from 
 which he came. We are adding to the wealth of 
 our own country, for we are making from very crude 
 and unpromising material a neighbor. 
 
 Our work is twofold to guard our shore doors 
 against the hopeless vicious and make the man who 
 is made by immigration or birth an American, a 
 whole and sound and nothing-else American. 
 
 In this hour we have a home duty of American- 
 ism which is in danger of being passed over in a 
 sentimental appeal to exorcise the devils of anarchy 
 and Bolshevism out of Europe. We are being 
 urged that our war task has left upon our shoulders 
 the burden of all the crude conditions and threaten- 
 ing elements of old and effete lands, and "we shall 
 
 50 
 
WHAT CAN BE DONE? 
 
 break the heart" of the Old World with its century 
 problems unfinished, if we leave it to carry on the 
 business which it has done so poorly. To many of 
 our thoughtful minds there is an impending danger 
 in an assumption of the new order. We are a great 
 people, but we are not great enough to manage the 
 universe and ourselves also*. There is a saving 
 yeast in that heavy dough over there in Great 
 Britain and France. We have no business there 
 because we have more business at home than we can 
 do. They would prefer to have us remain at home. 
 We need desperately at this time administrative 
 leaders who appreciate the appalling tendencies 
 among us. When the head of our government, who 
 had spent six months in Europe, returned from 
 mending its affairs, with scarcely a word or thought 
 of home interests, in his absorption in constitution 
 making for Europe, it is not strange that he should 
 be filled with alarm and exclaim, "I did not imagine 
 these things!" and that he should appeal frantically 
 to Congress to begin curative legislation at once. 
 Some of us are so old-fashioned in our Americanism 
 that we believe our field of operation is here. We 
 have no commission to go over to Europe to under- 
 take the work of government-making there. We 
 find no obligation for it, and we fear no ridicule of 
 narrowness and lack of vision. With a land that 
 belts a hemisphere and the world's mighty oceans 
 to guard and the shores of two continents to patrol, 
 with a hundred conflicting nationalities to amalga- 
 
 51 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 mate, with most intense strife of ideas contending in 
 all parts of a tremendous area, with a people of the 
 fiery passion of the South, the cool inquisitiveness of 
 New England, the phlegmatic temperament of the 
 middle Northwest, the bold adventure of the far 
 West, to say nothing of the world's greatest cities 
 not yet self-governing, it is not an unreasonable 
 thing to urge America first, and to insist that Ameri- 
 cans shall be first in our administration and our 
 lawmaking bodies. We can neglect nothing that 
 sacrifices our own Constitution and jeopardizes our 
 own peace. We have done our duty and our whole 
 duty in war, even if we were late about it. We can- 
 not afford to be drawn away by the appeals of an 
 impracticable and thoughtless sentimentalism from 
 our stupendous business of carrying forth the work 
 of our fathers. We have stood ready, and now 
 stand ready, to rescue those of any continent or isle 
 that are about to perish by the hands of the oppres- 
 sor, but to all political appeals, to all entangling 
 alliances we must answer,. u We are doing a great 
 work and cannot come down." 
 
 There has been brought to us in the shape of 
 work that has been mapped out for Europe, the 
 greatest peril this country has known since the great 
 republic was founded. Our own interests have 
 been neglected and treated with an indifference that 
 would not permit our recently elected congressmen 
 to consider American questions while an increasing 
 discontent has threatened our railways and im- 
 
 52 
 
WHAT CAN BE DONE? 
 
 periled our manufacture. It has been thought more 
 important to set up boundaries for Poland, Czecho 
 Slovak, and Jugo-Slovak than to administer in 
 America a return to normal prices and habits from 
 the war-time costs of living which threaten the 
 peace of the country and menace to suspend alto- 
 gether its operations. 
 
 Not an hour should be spent upon a League of 
 Nations, or the German Treaty, beyond a declara- 
 tion of cessation of war, until our internal conditions 
 have taxed to the uttermost the statesmen wisdom 
 of both houses of Congress in measures that return 
 us to pre-war times. 
 
 A mighty shock caused the timbers of the world's 
 mightiest republic to tremble. Another shock has 
 come since the war closed. It is a test of coordinate 
 government. The great republic is returning to its 
 stability. Reds and Blacks, Soviets and World- 
 Wides must be sent to their own place. With the 
 President in the White House, and, as soon as it 
 could be assembled, the Congress at the work of 
 restoring the people's business, home prices should 
 have been begun as measures of protection. Con- 
 tentment, ample returns of business and wage, em- 
 ployment for all who will work, is a country's great- 
 est safeguard against the socialist in whatsoever 
 form he may appear. We could take the chance of 
 breaking the hearts of foreign lands rather than 
 break up the homes of our own people with hunger 
 and discontent. It is well to feed all mankind if 
 
 S3 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 we can; but if we do not feed our own, how can we 
 feed anybody anywhere? 
 
 There is not so vast problem in the world to-day 
 as our own, left to wander aimless and unanswered 
 for the want of interest and intelligence in those who 
 have become infatuated with distant lands. It may 
 be well to prevent war, if it can be done as it can- 
 not by any chimera now urged upon us but it is 
 more important to secure the sure foundations of 
 the world's greatest people in restored industries 
 and prosperity. 
 
 America has a first claim. We have work 
 enough on hand for a full, intelligent administration 
 if we devote ourselves wholly to our internal ap- 
 peals. We cannot leave them to the fate of chance. 
 We cannot make a happy people, all of the people, 
 by an administrative edict that fixes an arbitrary 
 price for the farmers 5 wheat without knowledge or 
 regard to the laws of supply and demand, nor by 
 proclaiming increase of wage with no attention or 
 question of how it is to be paid by the business 
 assessed by it. 
 
 Intelligence must return to the helm and to the 
 legislative halls. It cannot too soon if the sturdy 
 workingman remains contented and if the business 
 concerns venture to put forth their manufacture and 
 trade. 
 
 While men slept the enemy sowed his tares and 
 hurried away. Our great land has been astound- 
 ingly overgrown with pernicious weeds since it was 
 
 54 
 
WHAT CAN BE DONE? 
 
 left to go waste with the close of the war. No in- 
 dustries came to Russia after its ill-judged revolu- 
 tion, and the Bolsheviki came. 
 
 Race riots are not without their cause. A few 
 more threats, such as have just been made by leaders 
 of railway employees that they will fix the railroads 
 so that not a wheel will ever turn again, will not stop 
 the railways but they will open the flood gates of 
 blood and kindle the torch of incendiary flame. 
 They are idiotic threats, but they are addressed to 
 wild passion and unrestrained selfishness. 
 
 The whole country as a whole is lost to sight. 
 We are making leagues. Our chief business is to 
 make America safe. There is a highway sign that 
 Americans will do well to commit to indelible 
 memory: "Safety First." Our people have a first 
 claim. The boys coming back have a prior claim. 
 They may be reasonably surprised and discontented 
 if they find their places of employment and their 
 homes neglected and the cost of living forced out of 
 reach. A peck of potatoes a dollar and twenty-five 
 cents, a quart of milk eighteen cents, a peck of 
 green peas one dollar and sixty cents, and a bushel 
 of wheat two dollars and twenty-six cents, a dozen 
 eggs one dollar. Their country is not cutting each 
 other's throats but robbing each other's stomachs. 
 It has turned into bands of thieves and is stealing 
 each other's pocketbooks. It is making exorbitant 
 prices because it can, because the example has been 
 set for it in raising commodities to artificial costs. 
 
 55 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 The appeal to the farmer instead of being made to 
 patriotism is made to cupidity. With nothing in 
 cost to justify it, living went sky-rocketing, and the 
 escape was in increase of wages. We cannot go 
 back too soon. 
 
 It is not enough to guard our open doors. We 
 must become rational inside. We must guard our 
 doors, and we must study economics. One hundred 
 per cent Americans should burn into their memories 
 the stirring appeal of Thomas Bailey Aldrich: 
 
 "Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, 
 And through them presses a wild, motley throng 
 Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes, 
 Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho, 
 Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav, 
 Flying the Old World's poverty and scorn; 
 These bringing with them unknown gods and rites 
 Those, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws. 
 In street and alley what strange tongues are loud, 
 Accents of menace alien to our air. 
 Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew! 
 
 "O Liberty, white Goddess, is it well 
 To leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast 
 Fold Sorrow's children, soothe the hurts of fate, 
 Lift the downtrodden, but with hand of steel 
 Stay those who to thy sacred portals come 
 To waste the gifts of freedom. Have a care 
 Lest from thy brow the clustered stars be torn 
 And trampled in the dust. For so of old 
 The thronging Goth and Vandal trampled Rome, 
 And where the temples of the Caesars stood 
 The lean wolf unmolested made her lair." 
 
 56 
 
CHAPTER III 
 MY NEIGHBOR'S FALLACIES 
 
 DEEP-ROOTED already and so long neglected, 
 these fallacies will yield only to most persistent and 
 radical treatment. Some of them can be corrected 
 by education. Some of them will demand protec- 
 tion of property and the defense of personal rights 
 by force. If logic will not persuade, the law must. 
 
 We have had to contend with the claims of wages 
 often disproportionate to the profits of business. It 
 will be conceded by thoughtful students that wage 
 has been slowly and grudgingly conceded sometimes 
 when its demands were just. It was not permitted 
 a fair return from the business which it helped to 
 carry forward. The demands of unusual forms of 
 living levied a heavy tax upon the home. It was 
 plain that the patrons of business were suffering no 
 embarrassment. In fact, they seemed to be in better 
 circumstances. This created a friction between the 
 employer and the employee and forced the worker 
 into organization, the whole issue of which was 
 wage. In time he became conscious of his strength. 
 He adopted the boycott never before known to this 
 country. It soon took another name and became 
 the working man's strike. And often the only ques- 
 tion was the power of getting the wages. The 
 
 57 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 leaders were often demagogues. The walking dele- 
 gates were ignorant. They liked the loafing job. 
 They "made good" by agitation. They forced up 
 wages and were popular. The great questions of the 
 best interests of the community were not studied. 
 The plan was not discriminating. It carried up the 
 skilled artisan and also the bungler whose only proof 
 that he was a mechanic was that he carried a kit of 
 tools through the street. He paid the dues of a 
 union. He presented his card as a claim upon the 
 contractor. If he were rejected, the whole gang 
 picked up their tools and left. 
 
 The contractor, who was responsible for finished 
 workmanship, whose bricks must be to the plumb 
 line and who must take them out at the order of the 
 architect, had no redress. He might curse and pro- 
 test. The bungler came back on the job the next 
 morning. The contract was taken at a fixed figure 
 for material and for labor. Saturday night he was 
 notified by the walking delegate or some labor 
 functionary that the next week's wages would 
 be twenty per cent more. But the contract price 
 could not be moved up. The building might be 
 stopped, but the bond held the contractor. Owners 
 decided not to build. That struck the working- 
 man. There had been no increased cost of living. 
 It was simply a chance to pinch. Under no 
 such circumstance did a contractor stop his build- 
 ing to crowd down wages. Periodically came 
 the threatened strike, until the town was involved 
 
 58 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FALLACIES 
 
 the price of the poor man's cottage was prohibited 
 by the added cost of construction. The working- 
 man was working against himself. The cost of liv- 
 ing went up. Protective laws were discussed and 
 the politician was threatened. The whole thing 
 drifted on until to-day we have a state of things not 
 altogether unlike Russia and recent Austria. In 
 many cities for months building business is forbid- 
 den. The current of population is turned to other 
 towns. Millions of dollars of damage is done, and 
 the unions win the battle and threaten another 
 strike. The accumulated fund from fees and fines 
 pays the members their wages fifty or seventy-five 
 per cent. Business is gripped by the throat. 
 
 Recent events show that wage is not the only 
 strangle hold. The success of the conflict over the 
 week's pay has whetted the appetite for a share in 
 the business. This share plan was started by 
 certain manufacturers as a pacifying measure. It 
 was mistakenly believed that it would stimulate an in- 
 terest in the business upon the part of the employee. 
 How long did this fallacy last? It was expected 
 that a minority interest would be all that could pos- 
 sibly be claimed. Not long, and the proprietor hears 
 that a debating society of workingmen has had be- 
 fore it the question: "Who Creates the Capital?" 
 It is decided. Then comes the practical inquiry: 
 "Should not the creators of capital share more 
 largely in its profits, and, further, ought not the 
 workingmen who create capital to manage it?'* 
 
 59 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 It is a startling proposition to steal the property 
 outright and drive the owner out as they do in 
 Russia. That is too much like stealing in America. 
 Let us get the government to buy the railroads! 
 We will set the prices. The stockholders are ex- 
 ploiters. They have no claim. They furnished 
 the money to carry on the business for a share in the 
 income. But that must not be conceded, for the em- 
 ployees of the system furnished the capital ! What 
 they take away for their labor and carry home to the 
 savings bank or to support the family is too inci- 
 dental to have any relation to the main question of 
 u Who furnished the Capital?" 
 
 "Confiscation" might be a more polite term and 
 sound less harsh, but it seems to be out of joint with 
 the events, as there is nothing in war or any emer- 
 gency to justify taking away from any man his 
 property registered to him and defended by the Con- 
 stitution. 
 
 But "What is the Constitution among friends?" 
 And what is the hope of resisting the extending 
 Bolshevism of renewed individualistic Jeffersonian 
 doctrine that sowed these seeds in the beginning of a 
 misnamed democracy which 'has persisted against 
 constitutional government and the majority rule of a 
 republic. What can be expected when the forms of 
 authority are set aside, members of the most dig- 
 nified body of the authoritative control of the repub- 
 lic are assailed as pigmies, and the President mounts 
 the platform with his "fighting blood up" against a 
 
 60 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FALLACIES 
 
 coordinate body which the Constitution has made 
 of equal and in many instances of veto authority? 
 Is it difficult to see what the effect is to be upon an 
 increasingly discontented and restless mass of 
 laborers who are already under the influence of an 
 astounding form of foreign socialism, especially as 
 intimations of sympathy are whispered from sources 
 of highest positions of political influence? 
 
 Is it possible to believe that with Lincoln or 
 Garfield or Cleveland in the presidential chair a 
 demand of ownership of the country's greatest 
 properties and franchises, which are held constitu- 
 tionally if at all, would have been made with threats 
 that if the government did not furnish the purchas- 
 ing funds the property would be destroyed as they 
 do in Russia? When such a malady attacks the 
 people, it is not far to find a cause. The cause in 
 recent developments is not distress and want. The 
 railway employee is the happiest situated working- 
 man in America. He has borne the reputation of 
 being one of the most intelligent until since the war 
 disturbed the equilibrium throughout the whole 
 country. The railway employee was peculiarly re- 
 lated to the carrying business of the government, its 
 munitions, its provisions, its soldiers. It was a posi- 
 tion of great responsibility in which one would 
 naturally expect a high order of loyalty, of the same 
 quality as that of the boys hurrying from the farms, 
 the shops, and professions and college halls to 
 battlefields across the seas. The railway track was 
 
 61 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 an infinite gain of safety and comfort over the 
 trenches of Flanders and northern France. And 
 the wages were multiplied two and three times. It 
 was a splendid opportunity to serve without danger 
 or sacrifice. The whole country was at service and 
 sacrifice. We do not forget how astounded the 
 whole country was when the papers announced that 
 if these citizens of America were not given a large 
 increase of pay, soldiers, munitions, and provisions 
 would be left standing upon the tracks all over the 
 continent! What an opportunity for a Grant or 
 Sherman, for a Cleveland or Roosevelt! What a 
 lesson failed of enforcement that never would have 
 been forgotten nor need to be repeated! Our boys 
 were falling by thousands in the world's decisive 
 battle for the freedom of those very employees of 
 the railways. The blood of our heroes was flowing 
 across the fields of battle. And that very day these 
 home patriots of the throttle and the brake were 
 being coddled and their wage was being increased at 
 the expense of millions of dollars to the burden of a 
 country passing out its millions to the Red Cross, the 
 Christian Associations, the Salvation Army, the 
 Knights of Columbus, and through every avenue by 
 which the brave soldiers of human freedom could be 
 reached by men and women eating war bread. 
 
 At last the railroads told the story. The burden 
 of debt was not millions. It was billions, not to be 
 borne by the rich but by the small trader, the 
 mechanic who had put a few hundreds in the bank 
 
 62 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FALLACIES 
 
 all who had anything to tax, bore the burden in their 
 proportion. The greatest burden, imposed upon 
 this country by any business has been by the mis- 
 managed and abused railways. And now comes the 
 amazing, the incredible demand that the government 
 pay these billions of deficit, go through the pretense 
 of a purchase and hand the entire property over to 
 men who showed their glaring disloyalty to the 
 country in the days of its extremity. We do not 
 believe that these are the men who in the days of 
 Chief Arthur were the pride of all men. It is out 
 of this false interpretation of duty by the administra- 
 tion that they have persuaded themselves that only 
 a demand with a threat is necessary to secure the 
 practical ownership and entire dictation of the great- 
 est railway system in the world. 
 
 Has America ever imagined such arrogance? 
 We thought that this doctrine had been buried with 
 Jefferson in his grave, beyond hope of resurrection. 
 And that the republic had indoctrinated its sons into 
 justice and property rights and government, not by 
 edict and mandate of executives or property by the 
 highwayman's claim, but by chosen representatives 
 of the whole people and by inalienable patents. 
 
 It is a startling awakening. We have seen the 
 fallacious claims of labor in its contest with busi- 
 ness, and sometimes there has been the argument of 
 the Golden Rule. But it had never appeared upon 
 a national horizon that Americans could fall the 
 victims of such appalling, unreasoning fallacy. 
 
 63 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 If the railway, why not the mines, the wheat fields, 
 the factories of every great business, collective farm- 
 ing, and every calling of men that promises a greater 
 return than the wage of the workingman? Why 
 should not all yield to this demand of covetousness 
 and fanaticism? We seemed to have passed the 
 days of "the recall" when the mass without legal 
 training or knowledge should pass upon the verdicts 
 of the courts and the administration of governors. 
 This Jefferson-born fallacy, if we could wait, would 
 revolt from itself upon trial, as Bolshevism is revolt- 
 ing from itself. But the experiment is too ex- 
 pensive. What is left of our railways would be 
 scraps of iron without credit to lay a new rail or 
 turn a wheel. What is the promise of improvement 
 in administration? Has the employee been trained 
 adequately in the locomotive cab or the express mes- 
 senger's car, or the brakeman with his lantern at the 
 train tail-end, or the fireman, or the conductor, to 
 step out into the large field of purchase of rolling 
 stock, the employment department, the freight and 
 passenger tariffs, the schedules, the thousand sup- 
 plies, a gigantic business that taxes the trained and 
 disciplined men who have been years from the rails 
 or who have brought the greatest intellect of the 
 land to the study of railroad economy? We must 
 have been mistaken about the efficiency of our rail- 
 way employees. It has been supposed that, with 
 rare and quickly promoted exceptions, the locomo- 
 tive engineer and train conductor, the fireman and 
 
 64 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FALLACIES 
 
 brakeman were obliged to use all the ability they had 
 to make time and run their trains safely. It has not 
 seemed a small thing to do, just the plain, every- 
 day business of running a railroad train. But now 
 we are told that these men find this all too tame, and 
 they are -ambitious to manage the whole business, 
 and not one of them ever attended a night school of 
 economics of any kind, and on his own confession he 
 cannot figure out the expense of his home on a 
 wage fifty per cent higher than his neighbor, the 
 carpenter and the blacksmith! 
 
 How are these proficient men of the railway man- 
 agement to be found among these volunteers who 
 tell us that -they can turn the profits into their own 
 pockets if they can be permitted to squeeze out the 
 men who have built them the roads? How are they 
 to be found? What test will be made? Of course 
 they will make it themselves. Will there be no 
 contentions and strife? Will no conflicting parties 
 fight out the battle of promotion? Who will con- 
 tinue to run the trains the engine men? the con- 
 ductors? Will the superintendent come to the 
 president's office and preside over a board of work- 
 ingmen chosen by their comrades to determine great 
 financial questions? Or perhaps there will not be 
 any. The government will raise the money out of 
 our taxes. The general managers will be taken 
 from the valuable men who engineered the great 
 steal. What will happen when the deficit takes the 
 place of profit? Will the deficit be taken care of 
 
 65 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 by special appropriations by personal recommenda- 
 tions of the president appearing before Congress to 
 state the case of the poor employees who are serving 
 the country without pay in the management of its 
 railroads? They took their pay from the profits, 
 but what of the year there are no profits? The ad- 
 ministration is not paying $2.26 for wheat any 
 longer, and that has cut down the freight, for the 
 consolidated farmers will not raise wheat unless the 
 government guarantees $2.26 ! 
 
 Perhaps we do not understand the matter. We 
 are old-fashioned. We remember when the pioneers 
 built the railways at great risk to their investments, 
 hiring Irishmen by thousands, who were content 
 with wages and stretched the rails across the States 
 and penetrated the far prairies with the locomotive. 
 We remember how they built cities and towns as 
 they went, until they climbed the Rocky and Sierra 
 Nevada Mountains and bound with steel the two 
 halves of the continent together, replacing the emi- 
 grant trains and driving out the buffalo herds with 
 the parlor cars; how they returned the freight cars 
 with California and Oregon fruits and wheat, and 
 established an internal commerce that became the 
 amazement of the world. And these great roads 
 began to pay a modest dividend. But the rewards 
 of their founders were in the pride and joy of their 
 achievement. They bore the obloquy and slander 
 of the politician who traded on the prejudice of the 
 people, but the land was woven with railroads I 
 
 66 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FALLACIES 
 
 I can but recall how when the roads were built by 
 "the autocrats," who pioneered their right of way, 
 the farmers' farm land values doubled and quad- 
 rupled by the inverse ratio of distance from the 
 tracks, and villages grew in proportion to proximity 
 to the railroad. I have been told that towns of 
 flourishing prospects abandoned their promising 
 sites, because the railways passed them at an incon- 
 venient distance, and moved over to less favorable 
 conditions because the town was on the railroad. 
 The great iron roads went on a half century before 
 those men were born who now assert their Bolshevik 
 right to own them and manage them. 
 
 Our country has been built by railroads managed 
 by the ablest men of the country, manned by con- 
 tented and efficient employees. We left the high- 
 ways of the sea for future generations and laid our 
 rails in every direction where explorers and pioneers 
 were waiting for them. Sometimes they fell into 
 politics and created contentions and bitter antago- 
 nism for a time, but these were exceptions an in- 
 creasing development of the country and a far- 
 extending civilization and blessings equaled in the 
 material agencies of a new land. The railroads 
 made us a common and united people. If as many 
 of them had run north and south as ran east and 
 west, the story of the Southland would have been 
 a different one. 
 
 Is it less than appalling that a feverish and insane 
 socialism, by whatever influence promoted, should 
 
 67 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 dare lay the hands of the destroyer upon the greatest 
 dependencies of the people. A few months they 
 have been out of the hands of their owners. Men 
 who have coveted them as government utilities have 
 toyed and experimented with them. They would have 
 bankrupted them, were it not that the government 
 must pay the price of their disastrous management. 
 What a reckless disregard of the country's future 
 were these roads put into hands unspeakably still 
 more inefficient in managerial ability, were such a 
 thing possible ! What hardihood and reckless pre- 
 sumption that would take over so great a responsi- 
 bility ! Is it really to be charged up to workingmen 
 gone daft, or is there back of it a bold scheme of 
 the government utility delusion by which an invisible 
 appeal is being made to the people through em- 
 ployees, from sources that awake no confidence by 
 their own insistence of further experiment at 
 thirty million dollars per month? Is it after all, 
 perhaps, an original appeal for wages by an argu- 
 ment for less money by increased wages than the ap- 
 palling deficits by feeble management? Is it 
 strategy? Is it to cover a retreat upon the part of 
 those higher up? Let us hope so. 
 
 It is well known that many in the workingmen's 
 unions and many ranting socialists contend that all 
 capital is made by labor and belongs to labor, and 
 should be managed by labor. But this is fallacious. 
 It is not true that capital is created by labor or that 
 labor has any property right in it. If the laborer 
 
 68 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FALLACIES 
 
 has any right in capital, it is because he has invested 
 in it something that he took out of capital, for which 
 capital paid him in full. Labor might work a 
 thousand years and add nothing to the world's cap- 
 ital. Vastly other elements enter into capital. 
 There is discovery and invention. The man on the 
 Northwest shores of Lake Superior who added hun- 
 dreds of millions to the world's capital is not the 
 workingman who digs iron ore and loads it into 
 ships. He did not make the machinery, nor the 
 ships by which this ore is taken away. Ten thous- 
 and of him were superseded and set aside by the 
 inventor whose patrons were men of capital, who 
 made it possible for him to experiment with his 
 inventions. The man who started those streams of 
 ore flowing eastward to the steel mills never did 
 an hour's manual labor in his life. Capital goes 
 before labor and makes it possible for the laborer to 
 put his muscle and brawn into the market. It is 
 not the man who digs the ore, but the man who dis- 
 covers that the ore is iron. If capital, cursed by 
 the workingman, had been contented with iron- 
 bound chests and with vaults, and had lived off its 
 gold, instead of investing in railroads and factories 
 and exploring iron and gold and lead mines, where 
 would labor be to-day? There would not be enough 
 laborers above slaves and serfs to form a union or 
 protest the feeblest claim. Capital has made the 
 workingman and keeps him alive. To say that he 
 makes capital is a bad case of putting the cart before 
 
 69 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 the horse. It might work that way, but it would be 
 a short trip into the ditch, for both the cart and the 
 horse. The experiment could be made of putting 
 labor into the management of capital, but we ven- 
 ture that no one would invest in capital. 
 
 Trace capital as far back as the age we call 
 civilization began its course, and you will find that 
 it began and has proceeded with intellect at the head 
 of the procession. A conception, a discovery, some 
 far-sighted man who could see a railway track the 
 length of the diameter of a continent, and who 
 incited other men to his visions and enthusiasm and 
 who combined together employed men who would 
 sell their muscle for an agreed price and the world 
 moved, the civilized world. Before that their task- 
 masters put the lash to men's backs and fed them 
 indifferently. Capital was conquered and stolen in 
 those days. 
 
 But when the capitalist came along from fields of 
 discovery and invention, the workingman's friend 
 appeared upon the earth. If labor has any partner- 
 ship relation to capital, it is of a coordinate char- 
 acter. Labor, if it is honest, efficient, and intel- 
 ligent labor, helps capital to its achievements. If 
 it is not, it hinders capital. It is a question in recent 
 years if it has not been about as much a hindrance 
 as a help. It is obvious that billions of dollars of 
 capital have been destroyed by strikes and by forc- 
 ing upon enterprises of capital inefficient workmen. 
 The logical order is for capital and labor to work 
 
 70 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FALLACIES 
 
 together. They are interdependent. The laboring 
 man, cursing capital as he may, cannot move without 
 the leadership of the man of capital. 
 
 He would have nowhere to work and nothing 
 with which to work. Even an army without a man 
 with plans of the whole field contested is a mob. 
 Soldiers thus placed may be the bravest men who 
 ever went into battle, but they are helpless and will 
 be defeated if their foe has a general. The general 
 is the capital for them. It would be as consistent 
 for soldiers to accuse a general of not fighting, of 
 never living in a trench, nor firing a machine gun, as 
 for workingmen to talk about capitalists being auto- 
 crats and indifferent to the conditions of the em- 
 ployees doing the work of their railways and iron 
 mines. Is it to be supposed that he knows the quality 
 of steel and all material of construction and that he 
 cares nothing for the efficiency of men, and will not 
 do all that he can to promote it? Capitalists are not 
 stupid, they have a keen appreciation of man 
 power and constantly impress the thought upon their 
 representatives. In the board meeting in New York, 
 in Chicago or San Francisco, in Saint Paul or Saint 
 Louis are the headquarters where every detail of the 
 enterprises into which they have put their money for 
 profit is being earnestly considered with infinitely 
 more pains than it takes to run a railway train or 
 navigate a ship. The only toiler is not the day- 
 or monthly-paid working man. The men who have 
 built the railways and factories are not the indolent 
 
 71 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 rich. The hardest-working men in America are the 
 working capitalists. These men die young, as a 
 rule. They seldom reach extreme old age. Mark 
 the large numbers who pass out before their three 
 score years and ten. What they have is in the vast 
 business. And if one kind of enterprise does not 
 absorb it all, they are found in another by which 
 their country is promoted and more workingmen 
 are employed. It would be impossible to reduce the 
 business men of America to a state of indolence and 
 self-indulgence. No greater misery could be im- 
 posed upon them. 
 
 In a recent heated discussion, in which my neigh- 
 bor the workingman became excited, violent and 
 unguarded language was used. The man who is re- 
 sponsible for the railway, who furnishes the capital, 
 is called an autocrat. Your dictionary will tell you 
 that that means having power of himself, govern- 
 ment residing in a single person, supremacy, uncon- 
 trolled authority "exercising absolute power, a 
 title applied to the emperors of Russia 1 ' ! Could 
 any title more absurd be applied to an American 
 citizen? Whence have these men come? Trace 
 their pedigree. Go back to the farm, the shop, you 
 will find thousands of them in the homes of the poor, 
 the parsonages of the meagerly paid preachers, the 
 homes of the blacksmith and the bricklayer. They 
 bore calloused hands at day-paid labor. This 
 "autocrat" may have fired a freight on the Union 
 Pacific when Mr. Harriman made him an engineer, 
 
 72 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FALLACIES 
 
 and started him up the scale to the superintendent's 
 office. He was a clerk in a store . and attended 
 strictly to business on poor pay and good pay, 
 through all grades of the concern and saved and 
 wisely invested his money. One day he bought a 
 large quantity of railway bonds, and that enlisted his 
 interest in railroading. He does not wear overalls 
 now, but he would know how to put them on again. 
 His supremacy denies nothing to the humblest work- 
 ingman repairing a track of his road. What made 
 him an autocrat waits any boy of brains and applica- 
 tion in the country. The autocrats are made in this 
 country by doing things that other men do not do, 
 or that other men do not do in the same way. And 
 do you say that some men are born to their autoc- 
 racy? They are the worst handicapped of all men; 
 and if you say that the rich men's sons are in the 
 inheritance of the world's great positions, your mis- 
 take is shown in the exceeding small number of such 
 positions you find so filled. We have no conditions 
 to compare with Russian absolutism. For one to 
 begin a cry of "Autocracy!" here is an attempt to 
 make a cause by an empty noise. There can be no 
 autocracy in this country. The richest man in 
 America has but one vote, and the most obscure 
 workingman has the same. And if the rich man 
 buys a vote, he can be sent to State's prison; and if 
 he is not, it is the poor man's fault. There is not 
 much autocracy about that ! 
 
 The danger of autocracy in this country is from 
 
 73 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 those who attempt to take laws into their own hands 
 and dictate the ownership and control of private 
 property, exercising absolute power, such as that of 
 absolute monarchs. Nothing has so nearly ap- 
 proached it as the recent dictation to Congress of 
 the way railroads shall be run. 
 
 It is a fatal mistake for the everyday man of 
 America, who depends upon a free country for the 
 future of himself and his family, and upon whom the 
 country depends for its prosperity, to allow himself 
 to be used by the malcontents who join to the insane 
 socialism struggling for ascendency in this country 
 the alien brand now being imported. Our working- 
 men have no oppressors to be delivered from; and 
 if they had, they have the ballot, the most effective 
 weapon the world has ever known. We are not 
 separated in far-distant villages with slow communi- 
 cation and imperfect interchange of common inter- 
 ests. Nothing can concern one community, that 
 national legislation must correct, which does not 
 concern another. We have quick intercourse and 
 a common mind. The demagogue is quickly dis- 
 covered. Only ignorance can give him any foot- 
 hold, and the controlling element is supplied with 
 sound literature and the common school leaves no 
 excuse for any neighborhood to be misinformed. 
 Where can happier conditions be found? What 
 better thing is promised? What justifies discon- 
 tent? The workingman has to work. Would it 
 be an improvement if he did not? What has the 
 
 74 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FALLACIES 
 
 socialist for us that we have not got? He may have 
 something that some parts of Europe has not had, 
 but his blunder there was in destroying government 
 that should have been reformed and not destroyed. 
 It is a blunder to listen to agitators who wish to 
 destroy and have nothing to offer which will 
 improve. 
 
 Let the communities in their churches and school 
 buildings put the questions: What do we lack? In 
 what can we be improved? What do the street- 
 corner orators mean by their clamor that our gov- 
 ernment should be destroyed? What is it they 
 purpose to put in its place, that they have which we 
 have not? 
 
 This would be practical. There is no fear of the 
 freedom of such speech. Those were good old days 
 of the debating clubs that met in the schoolhouses. 
 There was no harm because the error was answered. 
 
 If the Bolshevists and red-tongued and red- 
 throated socialists are to talk, let them be answered 
 in the presence of sound-thinking, loyal citizens, who 
 will insist upon the reason for their assaults upon 
 the commonwealth by men who have nothing at 
 stake and who have never contributed anything to 
 the common good. Such an examination of prin- 
 ciples would establish more firmly the loyalty of our 
 citizens by magnifying their inheritance and would 
 confuse the country's assailants as well. Such 
 persons thrive by attacking the state in the sympa- 
 thetic crowd when no answers are given. 
 
 75 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 It is not a little irritating to native-born Ameri- 
 cans that comparison should be made with the 
 oppressed and degraded of certain well-known parts 
 of Europe. We are not in such a class. It hu- 
 miliates us to be submitted to such comparisons. 
 Squalor is not common to us. The saloon de- 
 bauched us, but left us summits above the proletariat 
 of eastern Europe. Our people, the backbone of 
 our land, should resent with energy the attempt to 
 classify them with the serfs of autocratic countries. 
 It comes from a foe who would be resisted to the 
 death if he assaulted our shores as an armed force. 
 We would shoot him if he landed a force upon us, 
 but we tolerate him when he tells us that we ought 
 to be killed and our government should be destroyed. 
 Is it because the socialist makes himself so absurd 
 that he excites our contempt? That is best shown 
 by the sturdy laborers of our land resisting as an 
 attack upon their intelligence the blatant harangues 
 of the unemployed agitators who justify their loath- 
 some lives by assaults upon the state. Such crea- 
 tures have no place among the class of Americans 
 with whom they try to affiliate or to join themselves. 
 They claim to represent the world's workers. The 
 American workingman is a citizen, a property 
 holder, and a voter. He is a peaceable member of 
 society and respected. The I. W. W. is a pernicious 
 nuisance, whom self-respecting citizens who know 
 him expel from their midst. 
 
 It is not conceivable that the American working- 
 
 76 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FALLACIES 
 
 man in any numbers can be misguided into joining 
 themselves to such enemies of free institutions. It 
 is a great tax of patience to tolerate them without 
 the tar bucket and goose feathers. 
 
 The value of the workingman's services is at 
 this point. He is a coordinate force in the improve- 
 ment of the city or town. His intelligent labor is 
 joined to the capital of the factory and the improved 
 estate of living. But he is orderly. He knows his 
 country. He belongs to it. He defends it against 
 its aspersers. He is trusted with it. These men are 
 our army of defense in our domestic and economic 
 life. Before them, their sturdy, sound character, 
 their sober habits, their contented industries, the 
 thrift and frugality of their homes, their intelligent 
 ballots, Bolshevism can secure no firm footing. It 
 is put to shame. It must retreat in confusion. Our 
 danger is not imminent from that source. It must 
 be transient. 
 
 In our country labor receives its return in a two- 
 fold way that dignifies the laborer. He contributes 
 to the growth of the nation by his skilled labor upon 
 its enterprises and improvements. The cities have 
 sprung up under his hammer cooperating with 
 capital. The canals connecting inland seas have 
 followed his pick and shovel as he has followed the 
 surveyor's compass and tripod. Ships upon the 
 seas, hurrying trains, the aeroplane, the cables be- 
 neath the ocean interchanging the world's latest 
 thoughts, all represent him. He was capable of 
 
 77 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 interpreting the inventor's creation and became his 
 associate in the world's greatest discovery. In all 
 this he stands man high and is conscious of power in 
 his personality. A million men worked on the Taj 
 Mahal, and not one of them saw its conception or 
 knew upon what or for what he was working. And 
 when it was done it was the tomb of a beautiful 
 queen. But thousands of the workers had been 
 buried in mud with no mark of their burial. The 
 work of their hands, guided by genius, was worthy 
 of the works of God. Your mechanic and artisan 
 shares in the inspiration of his labors in the work of 
 his hands. He breathes its splendor into his soul 
 and he is a greater man for it. He becomes of the 
 stature of what he has done. This is much of the 
 difference among men. The malcontent, the 
 destroyer puts the nature of the work he does into 
 the deformity of his countenance. 
 
 The next thing is the wage. The lower gain is in 
 the wage. That is always so of the nobler man. 
 That is what he takes from the capitalist to sustain 
 life. He has a right to it. He cannot live upon 
 sentiment. He will have to take out a certain 
 amount in the conditions of our times, even if it is at 
 the expense of the great achievement. That will 
 have to be reckoned with by the master builders. 
 The amount will have to be determined by mutual 
 agreement. It cannot be all, or there can be no pro- 
 duct of capital and labor. It must not be enough to 
 stop the work, nor so little as to starve the man or 
 
 78 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S FALLACIES 
 
 render his work inefficient. It may, in certain con- 
 ditions, pay in products of the business, but the 
 worker must then take his chance and share with the 
 holders of the property in receipt of their bonds and 
 stocks, or capital will go elsewhere and labor will go 
 with empty dinner pails. 
 
 The workingman has a practical philosophy and a 
 large one as well. He is sometimes found living in 
 a narrow horizon. He sees only himself. He must 
 not think the world was made for him and that he is 
 all that counts in it. Chanticleer's voice in the 
 morning caused the sun to rise ! It was the sun that 
 woke Chanticleer! Labor has its large place. It 
 is a pity that it wastes so much of it in contention 
 over its relative importance. There are great things 
 to keep us busy. Small things adjust themselves to 
 great ones. The world is looking for useful men. 
 
 The workingmen are no more the victims of au- 
 tocracy than any other men who must chance their 
 place in the world's activities; than, for instance, 
 clerks or teachers or farm hands. Life is a struggle 
 for everybody who makes his way, and it is a mis- 
 take to suppose that the world is against any par- 
 ticular class, and that you happen to belong to that 
 class, and the only reason you do not prosper is 
 because men better situated are crowding you down. 
 The workingman does not need a consolation society 
 any more than others who have to work their way. 
 It is all a mistake to hire a voice to cry in his wilder- 
 ness. It would be far better to make. his "wilder- 
 
 79 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 ness blossom % as the rose" by self-reliance and self- 
 respect. When men form a mutual consolation 
 society they can always find enough for it to do, and 
 when small politicians and demagogic agitators see 
 its increasing proportions and hear its lamentations 
 they know their opportunity and become self-pro- 
 moters by taking it up as their cause. It is a great 
 fallacy for laborers to pose as a downtrodden and 
 abused class. Whining never made manhood. Our 
 country is on its way to become a race of whiners. 
 No man is so independent as a good mechanic. His 
 kit is inexpensive, his work is healthful as a rule. 
 Its exceptions are being carefully guarded. Ex- 
 haustion is neither required nor permitted. The 
 place a skilled and honest workman or workingman 
 occupies in this country is respected. He should not 
 depreciate himself by conceding that he must protect 
 himself against imaginary oppression any more than 
 his fellow men who are contending with like con- 
 ditions. 
 
 80 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE WORKINGMAN'S ORGANIZATION 
 
 IT is both good and bad. It might be altogether 
 good and helpful. It is beyond question that it was 
 wise for him to organize. Advantage was often 
 taken of the fact that the workingman had no court 
 to which to appeal. The rough, unreasonable boss 
 often knew no justice nor mercy, and had the ears of 
 the contractor and the architect. Wages were docked 
 and the man was discharged. Protest upon his part 
 at unfair decisions was answered by profane notice 
 to go up to the office and get his money. The whole 
 issue of wages was in the hand of the contractor, 
 whose margin was between the contract price and 
 what he could save out of labor's wages. These 
 could be screwed down easier than the contract price 
 could be screwed up. The logical result of it all 
 was the combination of the mechanics and working- 
 men, and as it originated in just grievances, it be- 
 came organized warfare upon the part of the work- 
 ingman against what he called capital and the pluto- 
 crats, when capital had nothing to do with the ques- 
 tion except to decide whether it could afford to build 
 at the price. The parties at issue were contractors, 
 who a short time before, in many cases, were skilled 
 workingmen, and their old associates, the laborers 
 
 81 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 of the trowel and the hammer and the saw. Up to 
 this point the argument was in favor of the working- 
 man. The battle raged fiercely, for the contractor 
 determined to employ only nonorganized men, and 
 the organized men attacked those who supplanted 
 them with ugly epithets and sometimes with more 
 effective weapons. Men were maimed and at times 
 were killed. The contractors appealed to the civic 
 authorities and brought to their assistance an 
 aroused public sentiment, for violence was un-Ameri- 
 can. The contest took on the form of riot, and 
 property was burned and torn down. One recalls 
 the Homestead riots and the Chicago railway riots, 
 where hundreds of thousands of property was re- 
 duced to ashes in a few hours and a reign of terror 
 seized the communities. The organization in- 
 creased by its unlawful methods so righteous ap- 
 peared its cause. It was a fight to the death. The 
 law vindicated the workingman at certain points es- 
 sential to their victory. Legal right was given to 
 organize and provision was made for arbitration. 
 The controversy was not outlawed, though the 
 methods could not be sanctioned and in certain cases 
 were suppressed by State and national troops. 
 Destruction of property could not be permitted. 
 The organization secured a place with the public, 
 and with more wisdom would have commanded pub- 
 lic confidence and indorsement. The men were our 
 neighbors. They were for the most part sober and 
 industrious. Many of them were in the church and 
 
 82 
 
THE WORKINGMAN'S ORGANIZATION 
 
 philanthropic societies. They were public-spirited 
 and among our best citizens. It was plain that they 
 were not being treated fairly in many cases. The 
 men had won their cause, and within certain limits 
 were exercising their rights and serving their coun- 
 try. With more intelligence, with a keener dis- 
 crimination and a more careful determination of 
 bounds and limits, their united efforts would now be 
 welcomed by every, community. 
 
 There was opportunity for a large development. 
 There was more than the wage question. But it re- 
 quired a degree of statesmanship not found in unions 
 with only one issue. The walking delegate was not 
 of caliber for the larger discussions. There were 
 larger questions than wages, dues, and fines, and 
 membership, and jobs, and unfair firms and build- 
 ings. The whole morale was the large question, the 
 character of the organization, the service it must 
 render to the trades. It must not be made a milking 
 machine, it must contribute to the success of business. 
 It must not use every advance of the building in- 
 terests before it is tried out as an opening for in- 
 crease of wages. If that is all it has capacity for, 
 or interest in, it will become a burden to the public 
 and will alienate its friends. It becomes a wage 
 machine with a system of barometers on all the 
 street corners. What a vast change in the confi- 
 dence and interest of the public if these organiza- 
 tions had addressed themselves to the improvement 
 of their mechanics and insisted that for increased 
 
 83 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 pay there must be a full equivalent of service! It 
 outraged the public mind to have these bodies insist 
 that the man who could only saw a board straight 
 and drive a nail sent out as a carpenter to be paid a 
 mechanic's full wage. What if the union had stood 
 as the guarantee of first-class mechanics, that it was 
 not enough to have a man come over with the union 
 membership card as an indorsement? What surer 
 way to build up a union than to force the common 
 remark: 'They may charge more. It belongs to 
 them. They are the best workmen in the town. 
 They not only know the trade, but they are on the 
 job, earnest and enthusiastic"? No organization 
 that is founded upon selfish motives and carries for- 
 ward its propaganda in antagonism to everything it 
 cannot use can hope to stand in the confidence of the 
 people. Selfishness is the most hateful thing on 
 earth. "He that seeks his life shall lose it" is one 
 of the scriptures that has its proof and commentary 
 in the lives of the people. It is the mildew on many 
 a promising plant. 
 
 A good motto for the union would be : "We will 
 indorse no man for any scale of wages for which he 
 has not qualified. We will not undertake the cause 
 of any member until the employer has a hearing. 
 We will not stand for drunkenness, nor indolence, 
 nor neglect, nor trimming of the job. We will insist 
 that the hours having been agreed upon must be kept 
 strictly. For what we receive we will return an 
 equivalent. We will impress upon our men their 
 
 84 
 
THE WORKINGMAN'S ORGANIZATION 
 
 debt to the town the public school, pure water, 
 cheap and constant light, reasonable franchise, the 
 public parks, the paved streets, the municipal courts, 
 the police, the fire department. As an organization 
 we recognize these claims upon us." 
 
 And if there were added a sense of responsibility 
 for the best interests of the town its public build- 
 ings, its private homes, the housing of its increasing 
 population a body of men coordinating in the com- 
 munity interests would force its acceptance and be 
 cordially championed by all the people. Such an 
 organization would stand upon its own merits. It 
 would need no arbitrary rule against nonunion men. 
 It would not degrade itself by running men off a job 
 who for entirely American reasons did not choose 
 to join them. They would make their own way by 
 their high merit and not by brickbats and vile 
 epithets. What other form of competition insists 
 upon the destruction of its competitor by either ab- 
 sorption or violent assault? It is un-American. It 
 is petty tyranny. It is not worthy of manly men. 
 It proposes not to allow freedom of choice. All 
 men must wear their badge and unite with their 
 company. There cannot be a mixed choice. If one 
 of these despised men is found in any distant part of 
 the building or upon another building of the same 
 ownership, every man throws down his hammer, 
 puts off his apron and overalls, and walks out, the 
 dictator and tyrant that he is. Other men shall not 
 work unless they work his plan and wear his collar. 
 
 85 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 I know a college where it has not been possible to 
 comply with the insistence of this organization. It 
 is an institution not State supported. Its income is 
 from the gifts of the humble in many cases, and 
 always by the benevolent. The conditions of organ- 
 ized labor would increase its expenses thousands of 
 dollars with less efficient help. The demands are 
 refused after explanations have been made and the 
 peculiar conditions have been explained. It is voted 
 in the organization to permit no work to be done in 
 that institution if it can be prevented. If the threat 
 could be executed, the doors would have to be closed. 
 Its work is charitable. It costs twice as much to 
 educate a student as his tuition fees. The young 
 men and young women must go uneducated if we 
 must compete with capitalists or dismiss men who, 
 though altogether satisfactory and of long service, 
 do not belong to a union. The union will not con- 
 sent. What more direct and indefensible form of 
 tyranny can be boasted by the Bolsheviki? It is 
 astounding that Americans will submit to such in- 
 vasion of personal right. It is this that forces 
 valuable friends to withdraw from fellowship and 
 sympathy with such tyrannical organizations. No 
 such combination against freedom has survived the 
 liberty of this country. It cannot entrench firmly 
 enough to meet the issue when at last the people 
 force it, as they surely will. There is no principle 
 of right and justice upon which such an arbitrary 
 action can stand. A hospital is involved. Its 
 
 86 
 
THE WORKINGMAN'S ORGANIZATION 
 
 laboratory is compelled to stand uncompleted for 
 weeks because union dictators will not permit the 
 class of artisans demanded to finish the equipment. 
 A tyranny that takes no account of the sick and the 
 dying has no claim upon tolerance of humane 
 people. A law should be enacted at once and vigor- 
 ously enforced, which would protect the public from 
 organizations that purpose to perpetuate themselves 
 at the expense of suffering humanity. How can 
 self-respecting men continue in such a body on such 
 terms? Where is our Americanism? We have 
 been under the delusion that a four-square chance is 
 in the Magna Charta of our freedom to every man. 
 Such a spirit once made the choice of a church, on 
 peril of losing heaven, to be Christian duty. How 
 long before such conspiracy will have to answer in 
 the courts? Only so long as some man will feel 
 compelled to test the unlawful assertion of the ar- 
 rogance of such a preposterous claim. 
 
 It is dangerous to leave such unlawful discretion 
 to any body of men. The effect can be only un- 
 wholesome. It tends to disregard law and to assert 
 a right that sooner or later conflicts with good order. 
 Only within a few days we have heard from a labor 
 leader the startling language that if certain conces- 
 sions were not made to arbitrary demands, it would 
 mean a firing squad! By whose authority? Who 
 will command the firing squad? Such astounding 
 assumption is from the seed sown in unions which 
 dispute the right of men to their constitutional 
 
 87 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 privileges. Can the public safely, or with self- 
 respect, harbor organizations when such doctrines 
 are preached and practiced? The order, the re- 
 spect for law, the impartial service of the people is 
 found among the independent workers who with 
 great provocation keep the even tenor of their way. 
 Time will vindicate them. The man who makes a 
 sacrifice of himself for the public good is working 
 upon immutable principles of right; and right, if 
 sometimes slow, is always sure. 
 
 We charge that the labor union is founded upon 
 principles directly opposed to the principles of our 
 government, and that every day these two sets of 
 principles are in conflict and our national principles 
 are defied and trampled upon. It has remained for 
 men among us, citizens, to set at defiance our Declar- 
 ation of Independence and our Constitution which 
 secures to every man liberty of personal choice and 
 action, so long as he obeys the laws made to protect 
 him. It is his right to say what organization, 
 whether church or civil, he shall join, and any man 
 or body of men who seek to coerce him or hinder 
 him because of his choice violates the Constitution 
 which guarantees him his liberty. 
 
 It is difficult to understand how thoughtful men 
 with any appreciation of human freedom can join 
 themselves to an organization which is founded upon 
 the denial of that freedom and which uses its powers 
 to stigmatize and degrade men who do not join it, if 
 they seek employment independently, as the laws of 
 
THE WORKINGMAN'S ORGANIZATION 
 
 their land provide that they may. The American 
 Constitution says they shall; the labor union says 
 they shall not, and if they do, it does them bodily 
 harm and will destroy or close up the place where 
 they try to work. How American citizens who 
 boast a land of liberty have permitted such an 
 outrage against their country is inconceivable. How 
 a congressman can pass through one session of either 
 house of Congress without urging a bill against 
 practices so disloyal and tyrannical we cannot 
 imagine. It is equally amazing that any community 
 will tolerate an organization which has for its de- 
 clared principles preventing men of the town to 
 enjoy and exercise their individual and personally 
 assured right to labor where they please, for whom 
 they choose, and for what they agree in wage. The 
 wonder is that the eighty-five per cent of working- 
 men have not driven out of a town such fifteen per 
 cent of Bolshevist tyrants in the name of the Consti- 
 tution which they violate and outrage. Are men 
 who submit to such things Americans? Are they 
 worthy of their fathers, and safe guides and 
 guardians to their sons? They lack the first prin- 
 ciples of citizenship. They cannot much longer 
 escape the odium of craven cowards. They are con- 
 senting to an authority which asserts itself over the 
 authority of our own laws by petty, tyrannical rulers 
 whose one issue is more wage for less work. There 
 is scarcely a thing in the labor union that is Ameri- 
 can or that justifies a claim upon Americans to a 
 
 89 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 place among them. We say this with full apprecia- 
 tion of the place it might fill and the service it could 
 render to the country if it pursued the course which 
 we have mentioned. But nothing can justify it in 
 obstructing any man in the exercise of privileges 
 guaranteed to him by the Constitution of his 
 country. Who gave any body of men such a right ? 
 It is a mistake for them to think that it secures any 
 protection to their organization. It is deadly in its 
 virus. It is the lion, harmless as a cub but vicious 
 and destructive when grown. It has now grown 
 enough to show its teeth and claws, but it has not 
 grown so big that it cannot be controlled or re- 
 moved. 
 
 The vicious character of the labor union is seen 
 more and more startlingly in an arrogant and grossly 
 impertinent assertion of control over business and 
 the interference with personal rights, as the center to 
 which the soviet, the syndicalist, the I. W. W., and 
 all forms of socialism gravitate. The effort of a 
 few conservative members to resist a radical element 
 which is precipitating ill-considered strikes and in- 
 dulging in sabotage practices is a confession of the 
 fact. 
 
 To what other organization do such dangerous 
 elements gravitate so naturally? Where in all our 
 country do Russian Bolsheviki find the suggestions 
 of the overthrow of law and established order 
 cardinal doctrines with them? That labor unions 
 sympathize with such elements we do not charge ; but 
 
 90 
 

 THE WORKINGMAN'S ORGANIZATION 
 
 if they will examine the principles which they are 
 applying to the determination of the rights of non- 
 union men to choose their own fields of labor, they 
 may not be surprised to find that the world's worst 
 foes claim kinship with them. In two or three years 
 the labor unions have been led far away from what 
 seemed to be rather a mild form of protest against 
 those who would not be led by them. In many 
 places to-day they are being used in the efforts which 
 are being put forth to change the whole social fabric 
 and to destroy all government as inimical to man- 
 kind. 
 
 No severer criticism could be visited upon the 
 labor union than that it has been the rendezvous 
 of men now in prison, and of ex-convicts who 
 have preached the doctrines of destruction to gov- 
 ernment and are leading the unions to paralyze, as 
 far as possible, the greatest industries of our land. 
 No other organized body of men is in studied and 
 boasted violation of law and of human rights. Polyg- 
 amy has gone, the saloon has gone, opium has gone, 
 the gambling dens have gone, but the men, who 
 organize to say where I shall work or not work, and 
 whom I shall employ or not employ, walk the streets 
 boldly and send out their walking delegate to see 
 not that I am obeying the Constitution of my coun- 
 try but if I am obeying his selfish constitution which 
 he enforces by hurling a brick through my window 
 or stabbing a dagger into my back. And these men, 
 who started out with the promise of liberty to the 
 
 91 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 workingman, have become so potent that the poli- 
 tician is afraid of them, and the merchant when they 
 enter his store. The minister preaches about them 
 not to them, for not many of them are at church in 
 very general terms. As we have been coming on for 
 a few years, and the Bolsheviki in different forms are 
 reenforcing the evil, it will not be long before we 
 shall find a government within the government as- 
 serting an authority destructive to every vestige of 
 our old-time liberty. We shall have to write a new 
 national anthem and a new America, for it would be 
 a travesty to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" and 
 "My country, sweet land of liberty." What is all 
 of that to six dollars a day for a painter and paper- 
 hanger and ten dollars a day for a bricklayer and 
 four dollars a day for an Italian laborer for an 
 eight-hour day, all controlled and protected by a 
 union that will send out daily its walking delegates 
 to secure the privilege to its own members only? It 
 is a free country; let the other poor devils get a job 
 if they can. They shall not pollute their holy men 
 by working with them, even if there should be work 
 enough for them all. Is it not time to stop talking 
 about Bolsheviki and the terrors of the new com- 
 mune in Russia? 
 
 It is not possible for principles so at variance with 
 those fundamental to the country to retain long a 
 respected place among us. One evidence of this is 
 the attempt to carry them, not only into the control 
 of a man's right to the use of his own opportunity in 
 
 92 
 
THE WORKINGMAN'S ORGANIZATION 
 
 his own way, without dictation or hindrance by 
 organized opposition, but also into the management 
 of manufacture and business, and into the dictation 
 of terms by what they are pleased to call arbitration, 
 but arbitration under menace of a strike. Not a 
 few people, who wish the workingman well and who 
 would be sorry to see a reversal of labor conditions 
 to the old ways, experience no small satisfaction that 
 this issue is being squarely met by the employers. It 
 must be met if the whole thing is not to be turned 
 over to the employees the hours, the wages, the 
 men to be employed, and the management of the 
 business. Everything has been cravenly conceded 
 except the last, and has been so easily secured that 
 Mr. Gompers expresses excited surprise that Judge 
 Gary should presume to decide for the United States 
 Steel Corporation that that great industry will con- 
 tinue to manage its own affairs and not put them into 
 the hands of socialists and anarchists whose declared 
 purpose is to disrupt and steal the business. It 
 would seem that the corporation managers upon 
 their record may modestly assume that they are as 
 capable of continuing the great corporation as the 
 imports who do not hesitate to attempt the control 
 of all business wherever hated capital appears and 
 the government itself intervenes. 
 
 This particular corporation of steel manufactur- 
 ers not only does not make any demand upon any 
 man to work in its plants who does not find it to his 
 advantage to do so, but has paid without coercion 
 
 93 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 astonishingly high wages through the entire scale of 
 the employment. Its own interests are secured by 
 treating its employees generously, who, left to them- 
 selves, are contented. When the astonishing scale 
 of wages is published the reply made by the union 
 general is that the contention is not over wages but 
 that collective bargaining, or meddling, shall be 
 granted. And that is not to be by the men them- 
 selves, who may be dissatisfied, but outsiders are to 
 be permitted to thrust themselves into affairs that 
 do not concern them and mix the case with outside 
 matters, the chief object being to stir up discontent 
 and strife. 
 
 The steel strike was not a strike by underpaid 
 men, but by leaders in a contention for the closed 
 shop. If the greatest industry in the world could 
 be unionized, it meant enormous fees and fines 
 coveted by the managers of union funds. If it could 
 not be unionized, it meant doom to all other at- 
 tempts of the kind. That it did not succeed was not 
 because the U. S. Steel Company was the greatest of 
 all industries, but because the demands were un- 
 American and anarchistic. It meant the ruin of the 
 business. Better ruin a ruinous union than to ruin 
 the world's industries and liberties. 
 
 Both business and employment demand liberty, 
 and they will have it. A meeting called ostensibly 
 to promote harmony, but really to promote the 
 schemes of unionism, has worked most fortunately 
 for the country. It has educated the people to their 
 
 94 
 

 THE WORKINGMAN'S ORGANIZATION 
 
 danger and turned the inside of pernicious plans out 
 to the sight of all the people. It is not the working- 
 man whose case of underpay can be pleaded tear- 
 fully and pathetically. It is the enormous dues in 
 plain view but barred by the open shop. The open 
 shop is the camel's nose. It is the thin edge of the 
 wedge. But it represents eighty-five per cent of the 
 workingmen of the world. 
 
 Nothing that is destructive of our industries, that 
 obstructs the free use of the inalienable rights of any 
 of our citizens, that spreads class strife and inter- 
 feres with neighborliness in communities has any 
 right to the public confidence and tolerance. The 
 union as now managed comes between men living 
 in the same block, separates their wives, and follows 
 the children into the public schools. It creates a 
 prejudice and hatred toward the men who make 
 labor possible, and who promote public enterprises, 
 by branding with odium the capitalists. It talks of 
 autocrats while supporting the most intolerant and 
 offensive autocracy in the world. It calls the 
 woman's husband and the little boy's father, the 
 hard-working, frugal temperate man of the same 
 neighborhood, a scab for no cause or reason than 
 that he chooses to go his own way and use his own 
 liberty as he chooses. It forgets that a scab is a 
 wholesome sign which nature puts out when a wound 
 is healing, and that the dangerous condition feared 
 by all surgeons is the open sore. 
 
 The whole institution of the labor union will have 
 
 95 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 to change its principles and many of its practices if it 
 keeps a place among self-respecting people. We 
 must either change the Constitution of the United 
 States or change the constitution of the labor union. 
 The first is the plan of radicals in the union. That 
 will not proceed far before thousands of loyal men 
 will withdraw from all association with these covert 
 and secret enemies of their country. Nonunion men, 
 who are eighty-five out of every hundred working- 
 men, will begin to choose for their legislators men 
 who at any cost to themselves will secure to all men 
 equal privileges in a free country. 
 
 A radical witness before a Congressional com- 
 mittee recently admitted that not more than one man 
 in five desired to join the steel strike. Four fifths 
 of the men were forced to desert their employers 
 with whom they were contented. How long can 
 such an organization hold its members, even if a 
 large per cent of them are foreign born? The 
 source of the widespread discontent over the coun- 
 try is four fifths of it due directly to an element 
 within the organization of the workingmen bent 
 upon destruction of the social order and the govern- 
 ment of the country. The people should not miss 
 this plain fact. They should not be blinded by de- 
 mands for union wages. The posters are printed 
 in red letters. The men know that they are well 
 paid. They know that they are receiving their full 
 share of the profits of manufacture and the building 
 trade. But the natural avarice of mankind is the 
 
 96 
 
THE WORKINGMAN'S ORGANIZATION 
 
 Paganini string upon which the agitator plays who 
 has something far on in his plans. . If he were to 
 disclose his enmity to the country, he would be 
 driven out of the union, for the great majority of its 
 members are loyal. It is a question as to how far 
 an organization is safe in the hands of men, and how 
 far are they safe in it, who are incapable of discover- 
 ing the foes within it who are using it for destructive 
 purposes. And it is a significant fact that an organ- 
 ization will be trusted and its mandates followed 
 which does not represent the sentiment of three- 
 fourths of its members. There is something abject 
 about that which does little credit to its member- 
 ship. The explanation is that its appeal is not to 
 reason but to slavish fear. It rules its own mem- 
 bers, as it tries to rule all men, by the arts of tyranny. 
 Our great country cannot afford to tolerate and 
 harbor such a school of perverts, such breeding 
 places for venomous enemies of our institutions. If 
 it wants to learn how to deal with strikes, it should 
 go to their sources and revoke the charter of every 
 organization where the foes of American institutions 
 find a welcome and are given liberty for their trea- 
 sonable harangues. 
 
 97 
 
CHAPTER V 
 MY NEIGHBOR'S STRIKES 
 
 A LABOR strike is a poor way to protest against 
 wage or abuse. The consequences of it are too far- 
 reaching and involve too many who suffer innocently. 
 It damages the business which must support the 
 laborers and injures the workingman and the artisan 
 by reducing the product and profits, which have a 
 direct bearing upon wage. It is shortsighted and 
 reacts upon the striker. It also works serious 
 damage to the community in which the workingman 
 has his home. If it wins an advantage, it is un- 
 reasonable and strains often to breaking the friendly 
 relations between the employer and employee so 
 essential to the prosperity of both. The arbitrarily 
 forced demands of the laborer are as unfortunate as 
 the arbitrary dictation and control of the employer. 
 There can be no harmonious coordination, no com- 
 mon interest. Compelled employment and com- 
 pelled labor are other types of slavery. It is dis- 
 trust on both sides which goes out into the neighbor- 
 hood and disturbs it seriously. It enters into the 
 values of products and creates an artificial cost of 
 building and manufacture. There ought to be pos- 
 sible some way by which intelligent men can come 
 to an understanding of differences, their causes and 
 
 98 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S STRIKES 
 
 remedies, upon the ground of mutual interest in 
 which contention and strife will be subordinated to 
 the common good. If there is a little less profit and 
 a little less wage, it is a contribution to the highest 
 good of the whole community. This large interest 
 seems to be lacking entirely. It is not secured by 
 the promotion of one side, but both sides. This 
 would be secured if those concerned were the con- 
 tracting parties, away from whom should be kept 
 the outside meddler and agitator. We never have 
 had in this country a greater and more conclusive 
 evidence of the fact that discontent and strikes are 
 not from differences between the parties immedi- 
 ately concerned than we are having to-day. Fifteen 
 hundred strikes in all parts of the country, in every 
 form of employment, at a time when men were never 
 paid so high wages, nor were laboring under so 
 favorable conditions, is conclusive proof that the 
 trouble is an epidemic from one and the same cause. 
 The old-time strike is the seedbed in which the I. W. 
 W. and Bolshevist are sowing crops of discontent 
 and unrest. It is not with the thought of increasing 
 wages. With that they have no especial interest. 
 The secret purpose is to use the workingmen to over- 
 throw our government and to reverse the whole 
 social order. This could not be done by direct at- 
 tack nor by open and avowed purpose. The work- 
 ingman would refute any argument that started with 
 such a premise. But too often he will contrast his 
 home with that of his neighbor and listen to the 
 
 99 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 flattery that the difference is in the oppression of un- 
 just conditions, which his neighbor should share with 
 him upon a basis of justice and equity. The ex- 
 planation of the strike epidemic cannot be explained 
 in any other way. 
 
 The labor organizations have passed out of the 
 hands of the conservative men of the unions. The 
 active class in them has been indoctrinated into 
 revolutionary and destructive schemes and is propa- 
 gating the theories of common property by an 
 insidious claim for destruction in the shape of dis- 
 proportionate wage. Men never were paid so much 
 for so little labor as they are to-day. They are 
 going wild with more pay and less hours, which is a 
 shrewd and cunning attack upon conditions which 
 have been stable and prosperous through our whole 
 body politic. 
 
 One of the most serious _eatures of this form of 
 propaganda, is that it is coming fast to be asserted 
 as a right, the claim is for legislative right. The 
 strike must be made lawful, for there are many who 
 will not unite in it if it is unlawful. The far-reach- 
 ing consequences of legalizing the strike are fully ap- 
 preciated by the propagandists who have recently 
 come into it. It is no longer a strike by working- 
 men, but by government employees as well. Police- 
 men of a great city tear off their badges and leave 
 their beats to thugs and thieves, regardless of their 
 oaths of office and the sacred obligation intrusted to 
 them. 
 
 100 
 
MY NEIGHBORS STRIKES 
 
 The time is now fully ripe for our lawmakers to 
 stop all compromises and political timidity and place 
 before this perilous force of coercion the adamant 
 barrier of the law. It should not only be in the case 
 of government-controlled property and manage- 
 ment, but all communities should be equally pro- 
 tected. There is every just ground for such legal 
 restraint and protection. The strike weapon is in 
 the hands of the minority. The majority is firmly 
 against it. 
 
 The strike is a conspiracy and nothing less. We 
 deal promptly and effectively with conspiracies 
 against property and persons in other matters. 
 What delusion has closed our eyes to the true char- 
 acter of the labor strike which is one of the most 
 glaring forms of conspiracy the world has known? 
 It starts with the organization of a number of men in 
 an agreed plan to close down a plant by withdrawing 
 from it at the same moment all of its employees, and 
 by picketing the entrances to the plant against any 
 help entering the plant to take the places of those 
 who have left. It has repeatedly gone so far as to 
 destroy machines and even to blow up or burn down 
 shops and factories. It recently has been boasted 
 that there is no law against the strike. If there is a 
 law against conspiracy, there is one against the strik- 
 ing conspiracy. If there is not, there should be at 
 once. 
 
 What definition of conspiracy do we need if a 
 combination of men who close up factories and pre- 
 101 
 
MY "NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 vent their owners from hiring help to take their 
 places under threats of death is not conspiracy? 
 What can be plainer conspiracy than the blocking of 
 railway trains by leaving trains standing on the 
 tracks away from stations, and the leaving of trolley 
 cars where the public will be most incommoded and 
 sometimes imperiled? If we have no legalized pro- 
 tection against such desperate and riotous conduct, 
 our first complaint should be against those who make 
 our laws or, rather, who do not make them 
 against the foes in our own communities. 
 
 No one will question the right of a man to leave 
 his employment whenever he chooses to do so. But 
 a fair-minded and honest man will give his employer 
 notice and apply the Golden Rule to the act. He 
 will not take a time, or leave in such a way as to em- 
 barrass his employer, as the latter should not dismiss 
 the laborer without notice. That all ought to be 
 understood as in the agreement of employment; if 
 not expressed, it certainly should be understood. It 
 is wide of a square deal when conditions are used by 
 the employee or employer which are unfair condi- 
 tions, and which force disadvantage, embarrass- 
 ment, or loss. 
 
 Public sentiment is rapidly changing toward the 
 character of a strike as something unnecessary and 
 dangerous to the community. It is plain enough 
 that in a time when laborers are the best circum- 
 stanced of any in the country, in wages and cost of 
 living, the strike is unreasonable and without excuse. 
 
 102 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S STRIKES 
 
 Everything is not wrong everywhere. The labor 
 union man is the malcontent. He is the striker. 
 The majority of workers in our country are non- 
 union. They are contented and at work. If they 
 believe that they should have more, they say so and 
 adjustments are made by conceding more or by an 
 understanding of reasons why it cannot be done. 
 The order of this world is a law not made by labor 
 unions or social agitators. It is deep in human life 
 and the nature of things, and when followed, things 
 harmonize. 
 
 The social order is not going to be changed 
 radically. Whatever changes, if any, ever come 
 into it will not be by the ignorant and certainly not 
 by the vicious. The greatest of all Teachers, 
 who chose the poor and the rich for his friends, 
 brought no railing accusations because the plan of 
 creation provided inequalities, but taught that the 
 rich and the poor live together and the Lord is 
 the Maker of them all. He taught an adjustment 
 of varying talents and properties which the world 
 has provided for two thousand years, and with 
 which it has made its supreme experiment in our 
 great land. 
 
 The laboring man is not the only man, and his 
 wage is not the only value to be considered. Wages 
 are not the only thing to think about. A thousand 
 things have been done for him which have to do with 
 his improved conditions in all phases of his life, 
 which he must credit to the capitalist whom he 
 
 103 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 permits to be called the autocrat and against whom 
 the red socialist seeks to array him. 
 
 There is no other country which can be compared 
 with our workingman's country, and any visionary 
 country must be worked out before we leave the 
 certain for the uncertain. 
 
 It is significant that the extended strikes and the 
 discontent are with the unions. The discontent is not 
 with the men, but with the management. There are 
 those who must prove up, to use a phrase well under- 
 stood, who must make good. They have authority. 
 They use money; hundreds of thousands of dollars 
 pass through their hands. It has been stated re- 
 cently that "national labor leaders collect, disburse, 
 and audit millions of dollars in dues." "Grafters 
 get rich out of such opportunities. These men draw 
 good salaries, live high, and are practically mil- 
 lionaires." "If they can persuade or force three 
 hundred thousand steel workers to pay dues, they 
 would get three million six hundred thousand dollars 
 from them per annum. They can tell the men they 
 can get much bigger pay, less hours to work, if they 
 will strike. If the strike fails, the strikers lose." 
 
 How far is the strike to become a recognized in- 
 stitution of our country with the sanction of the 
 courts? It is becoming so general that it is resorted 
 to upon the slightest provocation; it involves the 
 country in values so vast, trampling liberty so ruth- 
 lessly under its feet, that it becomes a serious ques- 
 tion as to whether it can be tolerated safely. At 
 
 104 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S STRIKES 
 
 this hour it extends all over the country. The entire 
 front page of great daily papers is covered with all 
 manner of strikes of nearly every trade. Even the 
 theaters are closing their doors. It is about time 
 for the churches to be closed for easier terms of 
 religion! The minister is about the poorest paid 
 servant of the public. Why should he not strike! 
 The whole thing is becoming a farce. With the 
 sympathetic strike, the whole land can be put in 
 revolt. If it is not a gigantic conspiracy, will the 
 Supreme Court tell us what it is? And if conspiracy 
 is not a crime against the public rights and privi- 
 leges, against personal freedom and property, what 
 is it? Was not the Danbury hatters' case decided 
 against the strikers? Is there no way to settle dif- 
 ferences of opinions that stop railways on their 
 tracks, machines in the factories, buildings in their 
 construction, hospitals in their repairs, and farmers 
 with wheat and corn rotting in the fields? We can- 
 not too soon come to a clear understanding that ad- 
 justments of differences must find some way which 
 will not destroy the property and the lives of the 
 innocent. The plan is unjust and bears unequally 
 upon its people. What is it to nine tenths of the 
 populace that there is a wage disagreement between 
 certain carpenters and a contractor? Why should 
 trolley cars stop until the difficulty is settled? What 
 have thousands of the people in the town to do with 
 the controversy of tin roofers or slaters of some 
 building under construction? And why should the 
 
 105 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 bricklayers be compelled to stop work until the 
 roofers are satisfied? A short time ago, in a 
 certain town, a trolley line extending into the suburbs 
 of flourishing villages and resorts of summer resi- 
 dences, was tied up because a little branch road con- 
 tinued to hire, as it had done for years, men belong- 
 ing to another association. People were shut off 
 from travel to their summer homes, and the inhabi- 
 tants of the villages could not go into the city where 
 many of them were employed and doing business. 
 
 They must contribute comfort and profits to the 
 settlement of an arbitrary question which in no way 
 concerned them, that had no moral or commercial 
 feature attaching to it. A dozen communities were 
 incommoded and distressed all to determine the pro- 
 found question of which union should be forced to 
 yield, not by merit but by arbitrary dictation. Men 
 were forced to remain away from their families or 
 hire, when they could be found, private conveyances 
 through the storm, elderly people with enfeebled 
 health, persons summoned to beds of fatal illness 
 and death, also suffering from inconveniences and 
 for necessities. There was only a feeble protest 
 from a few persons immediately concerned, however 
 much indignation expressed itself privately. It was 
 all passed over as a current event. It was forgotten 
 with the next sensation. 
 
 It is strange that it should be so, for it is not a 
 question between parties of local interest only. It 
 is reaching out over the entire country, and threatens 
 
 106 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S STRIKES 
 
 to control government, the legislature, Congress and 
 the courts. It is producing no small .timidity among 
 politicians of the better class. It has begun to 
 threaten a strike by employees of the government. 
 That means an attack upon the business of the ad- 
 ministration of a great department. It is only what 
 must follow as a sequel to the settlement of business 
 and labor contentions. It is not a legitimate conten- 
 tion with appeal to the franchise or the ballot. It 
 purposes to stop the United States mail, the trans- 
 portation of farm products, the travel of persons on 
 government business, and of the people in trains 
 under government control. That becomes a more 
 serious thing. It is constructive treason. It is a 
 betrayal of trust. The element of loyalty which 
 enters into such employment and wage is not to be 
 passed about by the whims and notions of the em- 
 ployed. It is not a case of profits, but of securing 
 the proper service at or near cost as may be. Men 
 may leave that service quietly, if not content, but 
 they have neither legal nor moral right to destroy 
 property nor to imperil lives to compel greater 
 wage. If dissatisfied, they must wait investigation 
 and action by the government department con- 
 cerned. The man looking to a return to office by 
 election cannot afford to subject himself to the de- 
 gradation of a threat by a body of voters. And no 
 men with a keen appreciation of propriety under the 
 circumstances will make such an appeal to members 
 of the government. This country has seen its first 
 
 107 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 and, it is to be hoped, its last shocking impropriety 
 of this kind "Not a wheel will be left so that it can 
 turn." Are these men Mexican greasers or Russian 
 Bolsheviki? They are not talking in the language 
 of American citizens. As such they should be 
 repudiated instantly as a new type of national 
 enemy. Such a threat should remove every man 
 guilty of it from the country's employment at once. 
 There is a difference between the freedom of a 
 democracy which governs and controls by strikes 
 and a republic which is jealous of law and order and 
 which, while securing liberty to citizens within the 
 law with full emphasis, resists all trifling with the in- 
 stitutions and authority of the state. It ought not 
 to require much more of riotous thought and 
 language to give ample warning of what is coming, 
 if the people remain supine and temporize in such 
 matters. Organized bodies of men in large num- 
 bers, separated by their pursuits from contact with 
 the people, have a tendency to become laws unto 
 themselves and to proclaim themselves imperiously 
 and foolishly. 
 
 We mistake the temper of the American people 
 if this condition is permitted to extend and dominate 
 the country much longer. The fact that every 
 grievance, real and imagined, is resorting to the 
 foolish strike, with its interruptions of all kinds 
 from the Foofers to the plumbers until the whole 
 town is in uncertainty and turmoil and no man can 
 predict what his business is to be from one week to 
 
 108 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S STRIKES 
 
 another, will call for a decisive remedy. And the 
 man who leads in it will find himself with an en- 
 thusiastic following. An encouraging feature of it 
 all is in the fact that the rioters and strikers are in 
 the minority. They are outnumbered nine to one. 
 
 Millions in majority of workingmen are conserva- 
 tive. A majority of forty to seventy-four of the 
 workingmen in the British House of Parliament are 
 moderates. In the United States the majority of 
 members of labor organizations do not favor ex- 
 treme means, and if they consulted their own judg- 
 ment would not strike. If they struck at all, it 
 would be to utter a protest and not to resort to 
 violence. The unfortunate thing is that the union is 
 in control of vehement men who enforce their 
 opinions with strong personalities upon persons 
 without reason. The average laborer is not fo- 
 rensic. Passionate appeal influences him and com- 
 pels many decisions against sober second thought 
 and against the sound first thought of a majority of 
 the members. When into so unstable an organiza- 
 tion there comes the protest of the people, it will fall 
 like a house of cards. Its foundations are in 
 demagogy. It cannot stand against the wisdom of 
 its own members and the rights of law-abiding 
 citizens. 
 
 It should be conceded, and is conceded by thought- 
 ful people, that workingmen should receive from a 
 contract or manufacture all the wages that it can 
 afford to pay. The demands of living have remark- 
 
 109 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 ably increased in two generations, in location, in 
 sanitary requirements, in common cleanliness, in the 
 home habits, in food, in clothing, in the education of 
 children. These insist upon more wage. As the 
 cost is now, the pay must be more. Business must 
 share in a fair percentage between the proprietor 
 and the laborer. If it will not, it will have to close 
 and some other business will have to be substituted 
 for it. But it can no more be carried on with vio- 
 lence than it can be made to pay a profit that is not 
 in it without robbing the workingman's home of its 
 wages. 
 
 The sympathy of the people of this country is 
 with the workingmen, not patronizingly nor as of an 
 inferior caste; that the workingman would not per- 
 mit, and that the people have not thought of doing. 
 But while that is true, Americans expect all men to 
 act with the dignity and self-respect of Americans. 
 We have a Constitution, we have a prescribed way 
 of settling our difficulties. There is no excuse 
 among us for any men departing from those estab- 
 lished usages. If law can be violated in one way, it 
 can in another. What difference is there between 
 burning a business or destroying its efficiency? It is 
 destroyed in any case. Who pays the bill, who reim- 
 burses the lost receipts? It would be a crime for a 
 body of men to go into a trolley office and demand 
 the previous day's receipts. What about tying up 
 the cars and preventing the return of to-morrow's 
 receipts? To have stolen the money out of the com- 
 
 110 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S STRIKES 
 
 pany's safe would have left the police to go about 
 their business. Of the two modes of stealing, the 
 first seems less embarrassing. In the second, the 
 return is not quite so prompt, but it is for the pur- 
 pose of obtaining the cash nevertheless. The one 
 great lesson which the striker seems not to have 
 learned is that beyond stopping his own work, his 
 right to physical protest stops. He is close upon 
 conspiracy and assault and the abuse of his em- 
 ployer's time and property. There are two sides of 
 the question. It cannot be decided by the success of 
 one side only. The fact of a dispute shows opposite 
 opinions. Both disputants cannot be right. One is 
 wrong or both are wrong; both cannot be right. 
 Both may be so nearly right that they can compro- 
 mise. Here is where sound sense will take in a 
 third party, like some retired judge with a reputa- 
 tion for probity and fairness, or three well-known 
 citizens who enjoy the full confidence of the town. 
 Arbitration between contestants is honorable. 
 Juries act upon that principle in civil cases; sports 
 are judged so. Disputed lines are run by neighbors 
 of well-known fairness. Men who are willing to 
 see both sides and it is a strange question that has 
 not two sides will try every fair method before be- 
 ginning a course that will let loose the worst passions 
 of the neighborhood and often costs not our prop- 
 erty but lives as well. William Hohenzollern little 
 dreamed what force he was releasing when he re- 
 fused to arbitrate a dispute with which in any event 
 
 111 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 he had no business. Men can never tell to what 
 length a strike will run when once it starts. Some- 
 thing, however, may be inferred from the length to 
 which the workingman's resort for the settlement 
 of his wage has already run. 
 
 We have remarked upon the strike against gov- 
 ernment authority; but we see the head of the labor 
 federation in Paris fluttering about the peace coun- 
 cils like an agitated and affrighted bird and a bird 
 of no good omen. The result appears in the claim 
 of the federation, that the terms of the peace with 
 Germany are too severe and should be protested, 
 because they are opposed to internationalizing of 
 the brotherhood of labor. The labor federation is 
 appearing where nineteen twentieths of the work- 
 ingmen never have been found themselves in their 
 wildest fancies, and for which they do not remotely 
 qualify. Labor unions of America are to determine 
 great ambassadorial questions, and with startling 
 egomania take issue with the United Council of 
 all nations upon the principle of how the con- 
 clusions of peace will affect labor! They pro- 
 pose to federate all bodies of men in the country, 
 the army, the police, and all industries, to have 
 all ready for instant use in case of foreign war 
 an adroit subterfuge for the control of every 
 domestic question. We confess that we have not 
 been prepared for such a far-reaching assump- 
 tion. The consequence must be a change of govern- 
 ment altogether. When a change is desired as 
 
 112 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S STRIKES 
 
 under such circumstances it often will be we are 
 not to call upon our representatives in Congress to 
 consider our plan, by a committee in the Senate or the 
 House of Representatives, but we are to serve a no- 
 tice in any public matter that we advocate that if it is 
 not considered favorably we shall strike and we will 
 tie up the Congress until it comes to a better mind ! 
 
 What about the rest of us who are of the old- 
 fashioned mind? The authority of our land is no 
 longer to reside in the houses of Congress or the 
 State Legislature. The army will be organized by 
 the federation and can be used by the federation. 
 The police belong to the organization ! Great ques- 
 tions of state are to be resolved in the secret 
 chambers of the unions. I would not misjudge 
 them. We are forced to our opinion by published 
 and undisputed statements from their inner councils. 
 What use can our Congress, our courts, serve? The 
 federation is sufficient and the head of it is a Czar, 
 more autocratic than any ruler on earth. 
 
 All privileges will be issued and vised by the 
 unions. It is no longer who shall work and who 
 shall not. That is a small question long since 
 worked out. Nothing so paternal has ever been 
 seen among men. Then the prison doors at Atlanta 
 may swing open joyously. Nearing and Debs and 
 the whole like-minded brood of harpies will come 
 flying home. Where will the rest of us fly? Our 
 wings will be clipped that we cannot fly. We shall 
 be in the post-diluvial mud. 
 
 113 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 No peril so serious has threatened our country as 
 impends at this hour. The Civil War was a small 
 affair in comparison with the massing of millions of 
 our citizens in a selfish combination to put their 
 interests before all others, to push into second place 
 all manufacture and all trade and all transportation, 
 and set aside the representative government itself. 
 This is "uber alles" beside which Germany is trivial. 
 A people is gone, resolves itself back into tribal bar- 
 barism when it forgets law and tramples under its 
 feet the commonest rights and claims of men. Gov- 
 ernment does not stand in Parliament and Con- 
 gresses, forgotten now, in statutes ignored and 
 spurned. It stands in loyal men and women who 
 might forget their Bibles but not their constitutions 
 and their laws. But who will remember both? A 
 ship at sea with compass thrown aside, trusting 
 to dead reckoning, is as safe as a country given over 
 to the impulsive passion of bodies of men who push 
 aside our courts and laws and settle disputed ques- 
 tions by angry and vindictive impulses. Voyagers 
 would not wish to sail with such a mariner. We 
 were as safe with him as with lawmaking strikers, 
 or, more truly, unlawmaking strikers. 
 
 The world has given its lessons upon the subject, 
 so plentiful that we cannot mistake the impending 
 calamity. No suffering of low wage, no discomfort 
 of high cost of living, can compare for an instant 
 with dethroned authority and order. We once saw 
 a fire raging in the primeval forests of the State of 
 
 114 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S STRIKES 
 
 Washington, when it was a Territory. Firebrands 
 were hurled at great distances, kindling instantly 
 other fires in the tops of the giant firs. It rushed on 
 with terrific force of increasing wind and flame, sur- 
 passing any picture of inferno or the destruction of 
 the world that has ever been created by the imagina- 
 tion of man. The days that followed for the con- 
 flagration burned itself out at last by the force of its 
 own heat and flame witnessed a blackened and 
 wasted land. The proud monarchs of the forest 
 stood gaunt specters of death for many miles, the 
 streams were chocked with fallen branches and 
 blackened boughs. 
 
 It was started by a careless hunter's match. That 
 forest has never been recovered. That fire could 
 have been stamped out by a fire warden's boot. 
 There was no fire warden. It was not thought that 
 he was needed. The loss of the great timber, the 
 death of settlers fleeing too late from the torrent of 
 flames, were not in the horizon of the thoughts of 
 the people. The careless hunter did not dream of 
 the awful calamity of his carelessness. 
 
 Our country to-day offers the conditions to a 
 social and domestic, an economic, upheaval which we 
 cannot guard too jealously, nor too soon resist. I 
 predict that the time of strikes on this earth is grow- 
 ing short. Intelligent people will not much longer 
 submit to contempt of their laws by an increasingly 
 defiant and reckless body of men who comprise only 
 fifteen per cent of the workingmen of America, and 
 
 115 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 whose places could be substituted in most instances 
 upon twelve hours' notice. The issue has ceased to 
 be an equitable adjustment of wage. It has now 
 come to be a question of respect and regard for law. 
 The decision is not to turn upon who has the right 
 of a controversy, but who is obeying constituted 
 authority. It is not to be whether men shall have 
 more wages, but whether they shall strike. They 
 shall not enter a conspiracy that puts aside law. It 
 is not so important to prevent strikes to save prop- 
 erty from destruction, but to save law from destruc- 
 tion. It is more valuable, inestimably more valu- 
 able, than property or human life. It has been esti- 
 mated that institutions of human freedom are worth 
 more than human lives. We have just settled that 
 question at the cost of millions of lives. No organ- 
 ization, under any plan whatever, should be per- 
 mitted to tie up any railway or any factory or any 
 building. The statesmanship of the United States 
 must devise some way of protecting all men against 
 all forms of oppression. There is enough statesman- 
 ship left to furnish legislation which will render the 
 modern strike unnecessary and which will place it in 
 the category of crime. Before this issue that enters 
 into civilization itself all industrial questions become 
 subsidiary. A menace of law by our own citizens 
 is a summons more severe than the invasion of a 
 foreign foe. We would not tolerate the infringe- 
 ment of our laws and usages from outside. It is 
 worse from the inside. 
 
 116 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S STRIKES 
 
 A law should go forth at once from the 
 Congress so recently menaced that all men who in- 
 dulge in industrial strikes, or any combination 
 against their fellow men, will be held to criminal 
 accountability, not for damage to property or 
 injuries to persons, but for criminal conspiracy. 
 The union of ten or more men in public demon- 
 stration against a railroad, or any form of in- 
 dustry shall be a strike, and a strike is forbidden 
 with fixed penalties by law. Until this is done we 
 shall have confusion and rioting at any time upon the 
 smallest provocation. 
 
 Ignorant men, and men of small property inter- 
 ests at stake, asserting themselves as of superior 
 influence and power, will not heed nor be restrained 
 by anything but the accomplishment of their own 
 desires. How far they purpose to go is seen by 
 their plan to get under their control the army, 
 always perilous to the state under such conditions, 
 and the police, as though it could belong to any one 
 party. 
 
 A strike should be forbidden, first, because it is a 
 minority attempting to control by conspiracy against 
 majorities. Second, because it is a body of men 
 which assumes authority over property in which it 
 has no right. Third, because it is reckless of conse- 
 quences to the extreme of property destruction and 
 danger to human life. Fourth, because it drives out 
 of their employment men who as free American 
 citizens have the right to labor. Fifth, because it 
 
 117 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 assumes right of determining the matter without a 
 vestige of authority from any source whatever. 
 Sixth, because it decides the quality of the men apply- 
 ing without regard to the protest of the contractor. 
 Seventh, because it involves all business by calling 
 out by sympathetic strikes employees of all trades 
 representing the federation unjust in the extreme. 
 Eighth, because it fixes an arbitrary wage with no 
 discrimination as to the amount of work done or 
 whether one does a much larger per cent of accept- 
 able service than another. Ninth, because the 
 organization limits apprentices and attempts to de- 
 crease skilled labor. Tenth, because labor insists 
 upon full pay for men good and bad and indifferent, 
 and recognizes no protest by the builder or employer 
 against unfit men. Eleventh, because a strike is a 
 growing menace to the stability of our country and 
 outrages every source of justice and inculcates in 
 forms new to our institutions loose ideas of loyalty 
 which will work against the peace of the nation. 
 Twelfth, because the strike and its doctrines are 
 working deplorable mischief among the striking men 
 themselves, stimulating arrogance and carelessness 
 concerning fundamental obligations of citizenship. 
 We have a marvelous heritage which our sires at 
 Concord and Lexington, at Valley Forge and York- 
 town, at Monmouth and Bunker Hill, handed over 
 to their children and their children's children. 
 Worthy men, the peers of the greatest men of all 
 time, closely followed them and united with some of 
 
 118 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S STRIKES 
 
 them in the construction of a Magna Charta for the 
 preservation of all for which they fought. What 
 they suffered and what they achieved, more than the 
 world then knew of human freedom, passed into our 
 protection as the greatest inheritance of which 
 mortals were capable. What shall be our answer if 
 by careless diplomacy we negotiate a peace which 
 will rob us of any guarantee of that constitution, 
 the hope of not only our own land but of all lands 
 now struggling blindly for light? What shall we 
 say for ourselves if in careless indifference we allow 
 unquestioned the rioting against our own laws by 
 our own workingmen who set up rule and authority 
 arbitrarily among us, disregarding the first prin- 
 ciples of human freedom themselves and teaching 
 men so? The country waits for the spirit of Valley 
 Forge among our men of Congress, both of the 
 Senate and the House, to protect us against our- 
 selves. Will they chance their political fortunes in 
 a cause for which their fathers died? 
 
 119 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 MY NEIGHBOR'S BAD EXAMPLE 
 
 THE profiteer is the legitimate business man, with 
 his just profits, after that business man runs wild by 
 the appeals which great fortunes are making in our 
 land. He is the business man degenerated. Busi- 
 ness has much with which to reckon and none too 
 carefully. This is shown by the fact that a majority 
 of business men fail. There is much more to it than 
 buying at a given price and selling at a higher price. 
 The question of property, of the tendencies of 
 customers, their tastes and fancies, the expense of 
 the establishment, and much more than need be 
 enumerated, enter into what we call the merchant's 
 life, so much that it has made him one of the most 
 respectable and dependable citizens of a community. 
 In India he belongs to the lowest and most despised 
 caste. Among the more advanced nations, judged 
 by the highest standards, he is one of the foundation 
 characters, having his place in all that concerns the 
 town in which he lives. He is a fixed and estab- 
 lished resident. His home is among us, wisely 
 chosen. His place is one of increasing influence. 
 Much of his capital is in the good will of the people. 
 He must stand by his goods and his prices must be as 
 low as those of like men in his and neighboring 
 
 120 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S BAD EXAMPLE 
 
 towns. He is not a wandering pack-peddler. He 
 must answer in the same place all the time. 
 
 The merchant's calling stands on equal premium 
 with that of the secular professions. It is quite as 
 honorable for a son to go into a business house as it 
 is for the other son of the same family to go into law 
 or medicine. Merchants are patrons of all char- 
 itable institutions, and this is so not because it is 
 good business to do it. Merchants, like manufac- 
 turers, are cordially disposed to the best things 
 among which they reside. They are, perhaps more 
 than any other business, besieged by multitudes who, 
 as pretended or active customers, plan to take ad- 
 vantage of them. We say this much because we 
 feel that the time has come when vigorous and fear- 
 less utterances should be made against another class 
 of traders, sometimes merchants, sometimes manu- 
 facturers, and sometimes promoters. They have 
 been grouped under the head of profiteers. They 
 are out for what they can make. It is not a question 
 with them as to how they can make it or what may 
 become of the men and women from whom they 
 make their profits. Such men are not builders of a 
 town nor of a State. They are leeches. They are 
 vampires. Equivalents never enter their heads. 
 To leave value received is not on their consciences. 
 They have no consciences. To be smarter than 
 their victims is what they call ability and shrewdness. 
 Such persons are a misfortune to their town. They 
 add nothing. They take everything away which 
 
 121 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 they can grasp by fair means or foul usually 
 foul. 
 
 Such characters appear in times of greatest stress, 
 like war or pestilence. They take advantage of the 
 people's necessities. With them it is simply a ques- 
 tion of what they can get. They are not content to 
 make a fair profit, if they can make more. The 
 principles that govern in their case are those of a 
 burglar or highway robber. They take what they 
 can get. They would disclaim theft, but theft with 
 them is barred only because it is not respectable to 
 be found out. It is the taking of another man's 
 money in either case. It must be made disreputable, 
 as much so as stealing, to take from the people more 
 than a living compensation for handling a com- 
 modity. As a wholesome rule, competition regu- 
 lates prices. But sometimes it goes back of this and 
 originates in a combination that controls supply and 
 demand and fixes by agreement what shall be the cost 
 and selling price of a given article. A mistake was 
 made in offering farmers a price far above the 
 market to induce them to raise wheat in time of war, 
 instead of making the appeal upon loyalty. The 
 men of military age were compelled to go to war. 
 The men who raised their food were bribed by an 
 offer of twice the market price for wheat. And this 
 was continued after the war closed to save them 
 from loss on the crop sown when the war was in 
 progress. Other men took their own losses; the 
 soldier came back to find that the boy whom he had 
 
 122 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S BAD EXAMPLE 
 
 left had grown two years older and taken his place 
 in the store or the shop. If it were sensible as it 
 was not to make good to the farmer why not make 
 good to everybody out of the people's taxes? 
 
 This the profiteer purposes to do. He has a high 
 example. Much of our patriotism took this form 
 during the war. It became scandalous. While 
 Great Britain and France were fighting alone, we 
 were making money. The whole country seemed 
 to have gone mad for money. The moral sense be- 
 came blunted. Other appeals of nobler motives 
 penetrated with difficulty this incrustation of avarice. 
 The love of money became, as never before, the root 
 of all evil, for the love of it set aside humanity and 
 patriotism with millions who clamored for more 
 wages, more profits, more dividends, when condi- 
 tions had not changed. And though it is true that 
 many millions poured out in free offerings to the 
 army through great charitable organizations, they 
 were a bagatelle in comparison with the imperious 
 demand for more profits and wage. The question 
 will force itself, Has the country become a den of 
 thieves? Has it abandoned all honor? Does it 
 take things because it can get them? Is its motto, 
 "Things are going; we may as well have our share 
 of them"? 
 
 It seems to have become a contagion. Is there to 
 be a rearrangement of the world, a new adjustment 
 of values, a new scale of wages, and a new income all 
 assured by rich and poor to meet the automobile, the 
 
 123 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 power launch, the flying machine, and the modern 
 home with its luxuries turned to necessities? Is it 
 going to cost more to live and too much to die? 
 What is the problem, what the new order of things? 
 Are the good old days of economy, of modest habits, 
 gone by? Is it discreditable to ask the price of an 
 article and to frankly say, "I cannot afford it" ? Can 
 the world yield the income honestly to an enor- 
 mously increasing population, with the great East 
 with its hundreds of millions, coming forward with 
 Occidental notions of living and with the ever-rest- 
 less passion for new things? Is there to be gold 
 and silver enough, wheat and corn enough, cattle 
 enough? Will there be labor enough to use the 
 products of mechanic arts? We may say that the 
 world has come on, meeting every new condition and 
 development. It has more wisdom locked up in the 
 earth than the wisest men have had in their phil- 
 osophies. As it has been in the past, so in the 
 future, to the end of the period, however far away, 
 things will come to pass as the race puts its demand 
 over the counter. But we cannot set aside the re- 
 sponsibility left with all men to meet the present-day 
 demands and to protect themselves from extremes 
 of careless and designing men. The world is not 
 rich enough to permit any of its treasures to be 
 pirated by profiteering, or by any forces that are in- 
 different to the common good and the ultimate high- 
 est estate among men. We all are involved and all 
 fear the burden of that unpopular old stewardship 
 
 124 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S BAD EXAMPLE 
 
 that has eternally been clamoring duty in our 
 ears. 
 
 The plain facts are and write them out we can- 
 not that we cannot all have the luxuries of life; 
 and it is equally true that if we could, many of them 
 would not be best for us. Plain living is the most 
 wholesome living. Luxury is more than expensive; 
 it brings its care and strangely does not satisfy. 
 One follows the other with the same tiring and 
 strangely unsatisfying results. This is not the 
 verdict of a misanthrope whom you may chance to 
 meet. The man who made the most ample experi- 
 ment of all men uses language strangely familiar, 
 whether the experience be boundless or measurable. 
 "Vanities of vanities, all is vanity!" It is a testi- 
 mony most convincing, but a lesson most difficult to 
 learn. Most of my neighbor's discontent and rest- 
 lessness with the rich is in this difficult lesson which 
 he somehow cannot master. The old lesson, "In 
 whatsoever state I am, therein to be content" is 
 susceptible of proof as to its practicability of appli- 
 cation and as to the wisdom of its philosophy. 
 
 It doubtless is not a correct statement that profi- 
 teers comprise a controlling percentage of the busi- 
 ness of any country. They do not dominate farms 
 altogether. There is much in the condition of 
 currency, its inflation frequently following war and 
 the disturbed operations of supply and demand when 
 millions of men and women, turned aside from their 
 normal pursuits, are made consumers. These mil- 
 
 125 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 lions who have been producers account for inflated 
 costs. Articles cost more in the market because it is 
 more difficult to secure them. There is a certain 
 increased cost of wheat and corn because labor is 
 scarce and insists upon a much greater wage. In 
 our cities of the East there is vigorous complaint 
 that milk has become almost prohibitive to the poor 
 and severe things are said of the farmer. But corn 
 and bran and middlings have doubled in price, and 
 the most of the last went into war bread and flour. 
 Cotton seed meal, a common dairy feed, is out of 
 reach. Common hay and alfalfa have doubled in 
 price, and farm hands who could be employed for 
 twenty dollars per month as competent help, now 
 demand and get forty and fifty dollars. Milk at 
 double the old price leaves no profit. Besides, 
 health authorities require keen inspection of dairy 
 stables and utensils the milk must be pasteurized 
 after great precaution of straining and cleansing. 
 There must be boilers and engines and other ex- 
 pensive machinery, and this all means more help to 
 be charged up to milk production. We give this as 
 one example only. The criticism, however, is 
 against those to whom no cost is added, but who take 
 advantage of high cost about them to force up what 
 they sell, including their own labor. 
 
 The Italian laborer, whose living expenses are not 
 appreciatively increased, insists upon more than 
 double his former wages. The man who feeds not 
 a spoonful of grain to his cows charges three times 
 
 126 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S BAD EXAMPLE 
 
 more for milk to the summer residents near him, 
 because he can get it and they cannot help them- 
 selves. Here is where profiteering comes in, not by 
 the man of money only but by men who can steal a 
 big price. A craze, as we have said, and would 
 emphasize, like some mysterious and strange epi- 
 demic, has seized the people who find their oppor- 
 tunity to get a dollar. The morality of it does not 
 weigh in the scales. Of course it is all a wrong 
 conception of life and duty. Those are too old- 
 fashioned questions to bother about. "Make hay 
 while the sun shines, " is their conclusive answer. 
 
 The real mistake which people make is in wrongly 
 estimating the real values of life. At the risk of 
 preaching a bit, I venture to quote the greatest 
 Teacher who has ever appeared among men, "The 
 life is more than meat, and the body is more than 
 raiment." That is the hardest lesson for men to 
 learn, yet there is none that is more constantly en- 
 forced upon us, or that ought to be more apparent. 
 He that has eyes to see should see it, and he that has 
 ears to hear should hear it. The procession of 
 those who choose the other way as they pass by and 
 leave nothing is appalling. Not that we would 
 deprecate acquisition. It is plainly the duty of men 
 to make the most of their talents, be they few or 
 many, or be it with money, professional skill, or 
 manual labor. There is nothing in the plan of this 
 old world providing for asceticism as a life calling. 
 Everything contemplates activities, service. In re- 
 
 127 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 ligion the Gospels say an hundred times more about 
 doing, working, than believing or grace. This being 
 so, there is the best of authority for a man to apply 
 his life to serviceful purposes. 
 
 To spend one's whole time upon sustaining the 
 physical life with the meats that are suited to it or 
 that are a luxury is one of the ways to lose it. To 
 overproportion his attention to the housing and 
 clothing of his body is one of the ways of starving 
 his mind. The rich cannot afford it, the working- 
 man, by the length of labor or meagerness of wage, 
 should not be compelled to it. The adjustment of 
 the age should not be gauged and timed to putting 
 everything into a rainy days." It is surprising how 
 few "rainy days" there are after all. Multitudes 
 of people place everything for rainy days and then 
 have none of them. Others inherit their savings and 
 use them in sunny days. I do not mean that there 
 shall be no prudence, but the whole life must not con- 
 sist in "rainy days." Many people overprepare to 
 die. They are no comfort to themselves, and the 
 only comfort they are to others is when they finally 
 go out and leave their friends to go on with the 
 happy use of this wonderful world. Some of the 
 old teachings left the impression upon people that 
 God cares for every other world but this one, but 
 that he had made such a mistake in creation here 
 that he wanted to close it up as soon as possible, and 
 set it on fire and take his people away by the light 
 of the flames. We have vast things to do here, and 
 
 128 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S BAD EXAMPLE 
 
 we must not blunder about what they are and lose 
 out of life its intrinsic values. The stature of a man 
 is worth too much to exchange it for millions of 
 wealth. Whatever a man does, he must do it so 
 that he will be left in the transaction. 
 
 It is not strange that the working element of the 
 nation should follow the example of the dollar men 
 whose successes are constantly appealing to them. 
 A journeyman mechanic became a foreman among 
 them. In a few months he takes a contract and 
 clears up several thousand dollars. He becomes the 
 remark of all of his old chums. He employs them. 
 "Getting along" is the current topic of conversation. 
 When he becomes a bank director it increases. 
 When an expensive automobile goes by with mem- 
 bers of his family it creates envy, not unnaturally. 
 What shall be done? Shall the successful mechanic 
 stay a mechanic? Shall he not take a contract? 
 Shall he not have an auto? That cannot be. Shall 
 the less successful be content to let opportunities pass 
 and leave conditions unimproved? Shall they add 
 nothing to their home comforts and always work for 
 day wage? Not if they have the mental endow- 
 ment and the training to be more and do more. 
 That is not what is meant by being content with 
 one's state. It all turns upon whether man can im- 
 prove his lot by applying his powers to his capacity. 
 If he cannot, he must not fret, for he merits ap- 
 proval of his own conscience and of his neighbors. 
 He is not to fret himself because of evil-doers, nor 
 
 129 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 because of well-doers. If he has done as well as he 
 can, he has done as well as anyone has done. The 
 approval was to the man of two talents as much as 
 to the man of five. The only one rebuked was the 
 man who had one and would not try to do anything 
 with that one. 
 
 Modern life presents exceedingly difficult prob- 
 lems. No philosopher has solved them yet. How 
 can the peculiarly successful man go on with his 
 successes and not harm the poor man with envy, 
 struggling with his unequal burdens? How is it 
 that a poor man, using all the health and strength he 
 has, and often no small measure of intelligence, can 
 go on, sober and industrious, and never get ahead of 
 the last year? Such a man must carry a ballast of 
 good sense and faith in a divine order of things not 
 to bend before the unequal head winds. Many are 
 not so ballasted, and they will seek explanations in 
 ways that do not accuse themselves, and that lead 
 them to accuse the prosperous. It must be that men 
 profit by adventitious ways, not by merit; they have 
 taken something that belongs to the poor. It mat- 
 ters not how many of the poor they have employed, 
 or how many lessons of thrift and economy they have 
 urged upon them; they are represented by Dives, and 
 the poor man is at their gates and the dogs are his 
 companions. This is unjust and unfortunate. It 
 works against the poor and interferes with sound 
 economy. It does not explain the poor man's mis- 
 fortune and failure, nor the rich man's riches. 
 
 130 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S BAD EXAMPLE 
 
 The rich and the poor dwell together. There is 
 divine wisdom in the plan. They always have so 
 lived. They always will so live. Noble characters 
 are in both. It must be the divine order. With 
 our finite wisdom we think we see that it would not 
 be fortunate for the world if all were rich, nor 
 would it be well if all were poor. Neither estate 
 establishes a monopoly of manhood. Some of the 
 choicest hearts that ever beat in human breasts have 
 known nothing of the luxuries of wealth nor 
 scarcely the privileges of home comforts. They be- 
 long to a class led by their Master who had not 
 where to lay his head. The birds flying above him 
 were better off than he. They could find nests in the 
 trees. Such persons have been great in the riches 
 of their thoughts and their deeds are recorded 
 among the famous. The rich also have left their 
 imprint along the paths of time. They have been 
 friends of struggling humanity. They have not for- 
 gotten the poor. Often their good is spoken evil of, 
 but equally high do their names stand among the 
 world's chief benefactors. From all classes the 
 man looking for good can get it and find inspiration 
 which will make life a joy, a joy that the rich never 
 found in riches only, a joy of which poverty cannot 
 deprive him. 
 
 It all turns back upon oneself honesty, frugality. 
 "The Cotter's Saturday Night" was enviable in its in- 
 terior to the Lord's castle. Thousands of them have 
 been scattered over the earth. You always rejoice 
 
 131 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 that you were born and raised in one. You saw 
 development of sturdy man and sweet, gentle woman 
 there. They did not complain. If their neighbor 
 had more, they had less taxes to pay, and their 
 charity, if less in dollars, came from hearts as 
 sacredly devoted to good. No neighbor appealed 
 in vain up to the measure of their power. The 
 country took their sons and left in the home no com- 
 plaint of hard luck. They did not all come back 
 from Southern battlefields. But they are located in 
 heaven. Sweet memories are around the old brick 
 walls, beneath the arching elms, among the holly- 
 hocks and lilacs, the sitting room within, with wide, 
 joyous-mouthed fireplace, the light stand and the 
 Bible on it, the very figure in the oilcloth carpet 
 where the sire knelt in morning prayer, whether the 
 boys were home or away, whether the day were 
 crowded with work or at leisure. Do you know any 
 place of riches that you covet in exchange for that 
 old place of moderate means, but infinitely rich in 
 virtue and love? You learned there not to despise 
 riches, for no unkind words of envy were spoken 
 there. You learned there the riches, the charm and 
 grace of what the world calls poverty. 
 
 I sat one day in my launch, a pretty thirty-foot 
 boat, the gift of a friend. It was at the Thousand 
 Islands. The great yachts went by, some of them 
 touring palaces, some swift Herreshoffs. They 
 were beautiful. It seemed that they must give great 
 happiness to their owners. They cost many thous- 
 
 132 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S BAD EXAMPLE 
 
 ands of dollars. They were manned by ample 
 crews on deck and in galley and saloon. They were 
 the steam yachts of the rich. If I had been rich, I 
 suppose I would have had one ! While I was watch- 
 ing them and musing, a several-times millionaire, an 
 acquaintance, came down the little dock and got into 
 my little boat. He owned one of the finest and fast- 
 est of those great steam yachts. 
 
 "Well, Mr. H.," I said, "this is rather a small 
 boat for you to board." 
 
 "Yes," he said, "I came to see it. Isn't it fine. 
 Do you know, Fd rather have it than mine. I 
 believe I will buy one like it." 
 
 "Well," I replied, "I would exchange with you, 
 but I could not run yours up to Kingston and back 
 once!" 
 
 Here was the secret illustrated. The burden of 
 life was upon the rich in his recreation. I knew 
 enough not to envy him the price of his riches. 
 
 It is folly to imagine that the rich are having the 
 best of it. He is not the man who sleeps the sound- 
 est. What he took on to make him independent has 
 made him a slave under a severe taskmaster. 
 
 And again we run against the conflicting and 
 mixed problem. We cannot make our choice, for 
 every man must bear his own burden and bear it 
 cheerfully. But happy is the man to whom a wise 
 and kind Providence makes the allotment. What is 
 best for me is the doctrine of contentment that will 
 harmonize this world. Get it adopted universally. 
 
 133 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 Let it be everybody's creed and it would be all the 
 millennium the world would need. Then every man 
 would use the most that is in him for the best that 
 he can do, for everybody he can serve. It is not 
 what we get out of this world, but what we can put 
 into it. It is a poor specimen of humanity who can 
 take pleasure in transferring by profiteering other 
 people's money to himself. And not much better 
 the man who envies another what he has got. Can 
 you imagine yourself changing your identity with 
 another? There is a certain serious responsibility 
 that goes with all that one has. There is a joy in it, 
 if it belongs to him, but not much comfort if it does 
 not. Manhood, not money, is the key to a prosper- 
 ous and contented life: what is needed, but not 
 enough. Enough a man never has, and with it 
 could be very miserable. What is needed is not 
 large, and it means a comfortable home for the man 
 and his wife and children; it means some books, not 
 many, but the right ones; it means the children 
 sheltered at home with clean thoughts and reverent 
 words, and dressed comfortably for school and not 
 neglected by church or synagogue, and watched 
 against disease. That is all of it. 
 
 We do not believe by any means that the plan 
 with American workingmen should be to scrimp 
 them to the last dime. That is not the way to make 
 Americans. And no American is under any moral 
 or religious obligation to be contented with what is 
 left after the owner takes his profits, and the con- 
 
 134 
 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S BAD EXAMPLE 
 
 tractor gets the lion's share, and they roll on in their 
 luxury. The business of this world has an obligation 
 in the matter. It is not to Hipponicus with calves, 
 but Hipponicus with sons. It is not builders with 
 automatic machines, but builders with men. And 
 the business is as much obligated to the men who 
 work as the workers are to the men who hire, and 
 more, for the man who hires has more to be obli- 
 gated with, and his obligation does not cease with 
 well-fed and clothed workingmen, as with well-fed, 
 blanketed and groomed horses. Men are units of 
 civilization. They are men. They are placed 
 under great and sacred responsibilities. There is 
 something more than feeding and clothing and hous- 
 ing with their problems. You go into their homes 
 and you hear the father saying to his sons : "I want 
 you to have a better chance than I had. If I had 
 had what I mean that you shall have, I wouldn't 
 have missed the foremanship that Tom Cronan got 
 because he knew how to figure." America has 
 widened the whole horizon of the workingman's sky, 
 and much more of his children's, and the business of 
 America must be constructed upon a plan that will 
 afford the mechanic and the day laborer a wage 
 that has a margin left over and that makes him 
 known at the savings bank. If it is unfortunate for 
 him to covet the rich man's automobile, he has a 
 right to his cottage home, healthfully located. If 
 it is not among broad acres of lawns on a fashion- 
 able street, it is where there are water and light and 
 
 135 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 clean and wholesome conditions of every kind free 
 from dirt and poisonous odors. And the inside of 
 the cottage home is as wholesome as the outside in 
 every way. Business must be planned to meet these 
 things and pay for them. It is an American citizen 
 and his wife and children and cottage that are being 
 hired, the mortgage and doctor's bills and taxes on 
 the cottage that must be reckoned into the wage, not 
 by the laborer only but by the employer as well. 
 
 If the workingman should not strike nor be per- 
 mitted to strike in the common interest, the employ- 
 ers ought to make it impossible for him to strike as a 
 just protest. He should have by common agree- 
 ment all that an American citizen has a right to 
 expect from the manner of life he has chosen. This 
 is something more than a market price. He is not 
 selling his labor as a grocer sells groceries. He is a 
 partner and draws his share in wages. It is beyond 
 question that the workingman has not been drawing 
 his full share from the business of the world, or the 
 employer has been drawing more than his share. 
 The employer, be he owner or contractor, prospers. 
 He chooses his home location. He lives usually in 
 conditions of elegance in comparison with the man 
 whom he hires by the day or the week. It is granted 
 that he invests more, and the employer's shares are 
 as an hundred to one. But should he take away the 
 shares of the workingman? He should not until 
 the workingman's shares are large enough to return 
 him self-respect and the clean and wholesome com- 
 
 136 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S BAD EXAMPLE 
 
 ist 
 th 
 
 forts of life. The laborers see it all, and the more 
 intelligent, the more they see. 
 
 "We were laborers together a few years ago, this 
 business man and I. He was as poor as I. The 
 difference has not all been in capacity, nor the in- 
 equality of luck. Some of that which he has got is 
 mine. I am not reasoning so because I am a social- 
 ist. I have no sympathy with the I. W. W. But 
 
 ere is something of that estate that is mine, and 
 when they open his will and read out his tens of 
 thousands to his boys, I know that some of it belongs 
 to my boys, and the difference would be a comfort- 
 able margin the way we live. I do not feel that it is 
 mine because the world owes me a living. I know 
 that it does not unless I earn it. But it is mine be- 
 cause that man did not pay me what I earned and 
 what I needed to take respectable care of my grow- 
 ing family, what the business more than earned. He 
 did not pay me what his business was paying him, 
 and it paid him what it did because I and Jake and 
 Bill and Bob and a lot more of us put into it some- 
 thing worth as much to the business as his money, 
 and something without which it never would have 
 returned him a dollar. When the work of the 
 factory was figured for the year, more of it belonged 
 to us boys. They say it made a hundred thousand 
 dollars above expenses for the year. Twenty thou- 
 sand of it belonged to us boys and our families. 
 
 "We make no claim on the factory or the ma- 
 chinery. Not a dime of it belongs to us. If the 
 
 137 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 business were to close out, we would have no right 
 to divide up the property. We have no right to 
 stop a machine or to hinder the business in any way 
 if we are not satisfied. Our appeal is to sound 
 public sentiment, and to the sense of fairness of our 
 employer. All we ask is that he give me and the 
 other boys what we put into the business to make it 
 succeed. He used his capital. We put in ours. 
 We feel that we have a right to a fair return on it. 
 We don't see how the men who hire us get out mil- 
 lions in a brief lifetime if the fellows in the shops get 
 what belongs to them." 
 
 And we confess that after hearing this man talk 
 this way, we have some explanation of the discon- 
 tent, and even some of the bitterness, that voices 
 itself in the subject of capital and labor in these 
 days. 
 
 But there is a side to the complaint which my 
 neighbor has not seen and which offers its answer 
 in the form of a fixed law which seems irrevocable. 
 It is that which we call demand and supply. That 
 regulates the market both for goods and for labor. 
 If goods are not demanded, labor is not wanted; and 
 if labor is a surplus supply, business will not pay 
 what the supply does not require it to pay. It is a 
 fine theory that the laborer is not obliged to sell his 
 labor in the market like chattel, but it is a plain fact 
 nevertheless that that is exactly what he does. That 
 is what he has to sell, and the market is made by 
 that which his labor produces. It is high or low as 
 
 138 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S BAD EXAMPLE 
 
 products are more or less and the demand for them 
 is great or small. These things are not forced up 
 by an agreement upon the part of manufacturers. 
 If there are good years, profits go up and so do 
 wages. Wages have shifted up much oftener than 
 profits. The workingmen in the unions have in- 
 sisted that they must go up without regard to pro- 
 duction, whatever happens to business. And busi- 
 ness could do much better by labor, and would do it 
 voluntarily, if it could depend upon fixed and reason- 
 able conditions in labor. 
 
 There are sometimes great profits in business far 
 beyond the expectation of the business and beyond 
 an equal division with labor, but it is equally true 
 that there are exceedingly bad years when the losses 
 threaten bankruptcy. Labor is paid those years, 
 however, and often the conditions are not mentioned, 
 as it would hurt credit, and labor does not appre- 
 ciate it. 
 
 139 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 MY NEIGHBOR'S PROPERTY 
 
 PROPERTY rights have been acknowledged ever 
 since man found it possible to secure property by 
 discovery, by toil, or by inheritance from those who 
 had a right to convey to others what they cannot 
 take away with them. Possession has sometimes 
 been secured by savage strength, unjustly and 
 cruelly; but as that was the only law, it established 
 a right of possession which could not be reversed 
 until some greater savage strength came along and 
 captured it. It was not a right acknowledged in 
 justice, but it had to be admitted and conceded in 
 fact. In civilized forms it has been established in 
 what we call law and property voices as laws are 
 interpreted, usually justly, sometimes unjustly. No 
 man can take it because another has it or has more 
 than he has. No man can assert a claim because he 
 thinks the world is wrong in dividing it. No man 
 can go out with nothing and establish a claim upon 
 anything. He must have something to start with to 
 get anything. "To him that hath shall be given." 
 A theory has recently been reasserted that the 
 wealth of the world shall be divided among all the 
 people. And only the other day, in Germany, the 
 land from which so much misery has come in five 
 
 HO 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S PROPERTY 
 
 years, the workingmen decided that men were under 
 no obligation to work and that they would not work. 
 And yet they asserted a right to property. But to 
 whose property? And where are they to find it not 
 claimed and occupied by an authority, at least by as 
 firm an authority as these men of Bremen can bring 
 with them? And what is the argument that is to 
 dispossess one man and give it to another? Because 
 he needs it? So does the man who has it. The law 
 of necessity works both ways. What proportion of 
 it shall be taken? Until the want is satisfied? And 
 shall it be surrendered by its owner until he is willing 
 to let some or all of it go? Then he would never 
 give up a dollar of it, for if there is anything inher- 
 ent in man, it is the right of property. It is his own. 
 It inheres in himself, as do his eyes, his hands, and 
 his feet. It is peculiarly, naturally, of himself, and 
 it is so deeply interwoven into the structure of his 
 being that man will defend it with his life. He will 
 fight for it. A man will give you five hundred dc'- 
 lars, but he will not permit you to take from him :'.Vv: 
 cents that belongs to him. This sense of prop rty 
 right is woven into the whole fabric of the civi) zed 
 structure. It is found among savage tribes as .yell. 
 The exigency of having all things in common and 
 dividing things among them according to their wants 
 was for a time only. It was not a foundation z' a 
 new religious community. It is a plan which never 
 has worked and never can be made to work until 
 man has been changed into another kind of being 
 
 141 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 and is translated to an existence where he is not 
 thrown upon his own resources and no longer has 
 personal obligations to meet with money. 
 
 If his property is to be taken away from him, it 
 must be done by some one who is stronger than he ; 
 and if it is sanctioned by a community, it must be 
 by those who can make that community stronger 
 than by those who resist this new doctrine of prop- 
 erty rights. And that will last only until the 
 strength is reversed or another assertion of right is 
 enforced. The same spirit that robbed to-day's 
 rich will rob to-morrow's robbers. You may change 
 the dollars, but you cannot change the nature of 
 man. It is the same nature in the robbers, so far as 
 acquisition is concerned, that you find in the robbed, 
 however they differ in their sense of the right of 
 possession. It is difficult to appreciate the difference 
 between a highwayman and a socialist or Bolshevik 
 who organizes to rob communities of their proper- 
 ties. In both cases it is an effort to get something 
 wi h nothing, and to get something in which there is 
 no nherent or acquired ownership. In one case it is 
 one robber, in the other it is a band of robbers. We 
 call them bandits. If a property is held unjustly, 
 the world has never recognized that it is safe for 
 men who claim that it belongs to them to go and 
 get it. It must be determined by processes of law. 
 Fundamental to this whole question is a very old 
 law, forbidding a man to covet even so humble an 
 object as his neighbor's ass or so high and sacred a 
 
 142 
 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S PROPERTY 
 
 | 
 
 j 
 
 person as his wife. Bolshevism, which is taking an- 
 other name in this country, insists upon the whole 
 list, from the ass to the wife. You say, "O no I 
 We admit no family right and claim nothing but un- 
 divided money." Why not? The man owns both 
 the ass and the wife. The law gives him both as it 
 gives her both. You abhor taking the wife, but 
 Bolshevism, from which this beautiful new division 
 is being enforced, makes no distinction. The logic is 
 inevitable. If your neighbor's wife suits you better, 
 take her. If your neighbor's horse suits you better, 
 take him. If your neighbor's house suits you better, 
 move into it. He has nothing that you want which 
 e has a right to keep. Property is indefinite. It is 
 in the land, in mines, in fields, in forests. No man 
 has a right to any more of it than you have ! If he 
 has got it, it is because he got there first and has no 
 right to hold it away from you because you were not 
 born first. Let there be a new deal all around and 
 let us all start new, and those who won't divide, 
 shoot them ! 
 
 In other words, there is no property, take it. 
 What is it after they take it, and what do they want 
 of it? It would divide very small if it were divided 
 among all the peoples of our country, and smaller if 
 the area were extended. What would be done with 
 it then? Would every man have the same? The 
 same enterprises? Perhaps there would not be any 
 enterprises! Same expense of families? Perhaps 
 they all will be the same number. Possibly they 
 
 143 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 would be assessed according to their number. The 
 same tastes and personal expenses? There should 
 be no different tastes. Perhaps what was left over 
 would be assessed and be taken around to the com- 
 mon storehouse. If anyone was overfed and over- 
 clothed, and was extravagant beyond what was left 
 for him, why, shoot him ! 
 
 What about public enterprises? Was there ever 
 common intelligence sufficient to invest the world's 
 capital? Perhaps a few socialists of extraordinary 
 capacity for finance could do it for the crowd. 
 What better would that be than the present arrange- 
 ment in which a few do it, and take any and all into 
 the company who have anything with which to buy? 
 Would the control be any easier if there were un- 
 satisfactory results? How is it working in Russia? 
 When you try to shoot the upper ten of the new deal 
 the shooting is not so easy. But where is the capital 
 coming from, when the distribution is all made on 
 the community plan according to the sustenance in 
 which all shall live with abundance ? There must be 
 an assessment, must there not, and a new redistribu- 
 tion? How long would it be, if all things were 
 made equal to-day, before some would have more 
 and some less and some most and some nothing? It 
 is a beautiful theory, but tested by the practical 
 affairs demanded by a real world and not by a 
 Utopia, it would fall to pieces and disappear like 
 the vapors that hang beautifully along the valleys 
 until Old Sol comes along and sets the world at 
 
 144 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S PROPERTY 
 
 work. The great enterprises of this earth are not 
 set in motion by need nor possibilities. They begin 
 to move as some one mind, some one energy moves 
 out ahead of his fellows with what he is and what he 
 has. He inspires others with as much or more than 
 he has to join him. Columbus started alone and 
 came near being thrown overboard by the crowd 
 that could not see with his courage and faith. They 
 did put Hendrick Hudson and his boy adrift in a 
 small boat to perish in the bay that afterward was 
 given his name by men great enough to appreciate 
 him and know him-. All the great discoveries and 
 inventions have been made by individuals working 
 on the plan of individualism, men with their heads 
 and shoulders above the common multitude. 
 
 There was one enterprise that is an exception. 
 Everybody seemed to join in it. That was the 
 tower of Babel. But before they got through one 
 man did not know what another was thinking about, 
 and they scattered before their tower reached 
 heaven, and the name of the enterprise became a 
 synonym for the confusion of tongues, because all 
 tried to give their opinions at the same time ! That 
 is to what we would revert and backward to 
 monkeys in the coconut palms and cave dwellers, and 
 start over again with one cave man in one cave and 
 one family. The supreme folly of such a theory is 
 too easy of demonstration for it seriously to threaten 
 the order of things by which all progress has been 
 made from the beginning of time. More than ever 
 
 145 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 in its history the world demands individuals for 
 leadership, backed by the confidence and support of 
 thousands who are not leaders but who are mighty 
 followers and whose following has always made 
 great and safe leadership possible. 
 
 When you start out to have all things in common, 
 you not only must take the uncommon things from 
 the uncommon men by force, which is robbery, or 
 by forced law, which is bandit robbery, but you run 
 against a natural law of the Almighty, written in 
 human nature as universally as any human trait you 
 can name. Acquisitiveness is natural to the baby 
 that reaches out its hands for a rubber ball or for its 
 father's gold watch. Ownership starts the first fight 
 between two boys for a marble. There is no 
 pleasure in having another own things for you. It 
 implies incapacity. Only a few days ago a man won 
 a fight which has been in the courts for years, over 
 his title to his property. It was his and it was well 
 invested, and he received his dividends from its 
 earnings regularly. He had no objection to the 
 trustee. But it was his, and for that reason he in- 
 sisted upon its possession, and would have died 
 fighting for it. And those who contended that he 
 was mentally incapacitated, and gave that as a 
 reason for withholding his property and managing it 
 for him and had the authority of the courts with 
 them for years, never presented his ceaseless contest 
 over his property as an evidence of his insanity. It 
 is not possible to imagine soundly developed men 
 
 146 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S PROPERTY 
 
 and women without this trait of character. The 
 conclusive evidence that they are not sound would be 
 that they lack it. We have developed it from the 
 elements of our creation. The vindication of our 
 source in an Infinite Wisdom is in what we find 
 within ourselves, and not the least of these is in our 
 capability to acquire our livelihood without being fed 
 by the quails or from a spontaneous manna, and the 
 intensity with which our possessions are held as our 
 own. It is of our personality. Great personalities 
 are never behind the Bolshevists' and socialists' plan 
 of robbery, nor the ignorance of their blind efforts 
 to reverse the order of human nature which has be- 
 come intense with the assertion of the larger man- 
 hood. How have these collective highwaymen got 
 along when they placed themselves in the place of 
 those whose property is to be divided? Are they in 
 the list of division upward? It would make a differ- 
 ence if they came in the scale of taking away half 
 they have for the common good. They answer 
 that by protesting their taxes. You run against the 
 law of human nature again. u The poor man's all 
 is as dear to him as the rich man's all is to him." 
 The poor man's little is as much a treasure to him 
 as the rich man's millions are to him. Put the 
 test of this idiotic scheme upon the man who has 
 fifteen thousand dollars in the bank, and show him 
 that the division will give each man five hundred 
 dollars, and I venture that he will not attend the 
 next communistic meeting. It will make a decided 
 
 147 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 difference, and in the experiment you will get a re- 
 liable test of the sincerity of the theory that spins 
 finely until you strike the man who scales down and 
 not up. Then there is a knot in the thread and it 
 tangles and breaks. The robber theory works out 
 so long as you work it upon those who have things 
 you covet. It violates God's law and man's own 
 nature as it came from God. 
 
 Perhaps it has not occurred to these new theorists 
 of the common good that the only value which prop- 
 erty has they propose to take from it, and that by 
 dividing it and assigning it to those who will not 
 work, but clamor to be supported by what other men 
 have earned by brain or muscle or both, they destroy 
 values utterly, and that the time would soon come 
 when there would be nothing to divide. The value 
 of property under the old plan is that it is a man's 
 own and that he can add to it and improve it, and 
 that he may use it to protect his family from future 
 want. They do not need to eat at a common crib, 
 apportionments made upon a scale from unproduc- 
 tive funds. They can use it to promote the public 
 interests in education, religion, and philanthropy, 
 and it is themselves who acquire it and enter into the 
 use of it. It is the only inspiration that comes from 
 property. Men never have been contented with it 
 in any other form, whether the Spartans or the early 
 disciples and followers of the Christian faith. They 
 have always reverted to the present plan and man- 
 aged its abuses in ways that intelligent construction 
 
 148 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S PROPERTY 
 
 of laws and practice have provided. They have re- 
 vised, but not destroyed. What is it expected to ac- 
 complish by any different plan? The restlessness 
 seems to come along the line of those who stand for 
 the least under the present plan in their community 
 in the activities of their fellow men. Has anyone 
 seen the possessor championing a new order of 
 things, or are they using what they have in oppor- 
 tunity or capital, be it muscle or money, to improve 
 their condition? The specimens of discontent and 
 malcontent are the strongest argument against the 
 plans of the thieves. Are they the men whom a 
 community seeks to manage its financial affairs, or 
 who are found in the great enterprises that want new 
 executive ability, more water, better and cheaper 
 lights, improved transits, and sanitation? For what 
 do these refuse of mankind propose to use the 
 wealth that is not theirs? What better things are 
 they to do? What more intelligent and efficient 
 things? Are they going to put in one day of fruit- 
 ful, uncomplaining work? Are they going to pay a 
 tax when they get other men's money? Will they 
 run the railroads and pay the deficits with other 
 men's money and their own brains that never earned 
 money of their own? Does it not make your blood 
 run hot to think of the preposterous insolence of this 
 proposed revolution? It does not, because you 
 treat it as a joke. It seems so, or it did a few weeks 
 ago, when a correspondent of one of the papers of 
 my town notified me that if I did not take care my 
 
 149 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 "elegant home would be taken away from me and 
 some poor man would be living in it!" Why one! 
 Why not a tenement full if you want to create the 
 tenement kind. Did the papers make no reply be- 
 cause they thought it a joke! It did seem so, but 
 when men begin to joke with God's laws, written or 
 incarnated in men, they become dangerous. 
 
 It seems to you incredible that such a state of 
 things can become possible. But what other prac- 
 tical results can follow the logic of such theories as 
 those of a Debs and his kith, well known to our 
 country at large, who have one or more outspoken 
 representatives in every considerable town and 
 secret sympathizers in some of our colleges? It is not 
 greater freedom of thought that is being advocated. 
 That is not lacking. It is a readjustment of incomes 
 by taking from those who have and giving it to those 
 who have not. No provision is to be made in the 
 plan for those who are impoverished by having what 
 they have taken away from them. Our I. W. W. is 
 Russian Bolshevism. It is the roots from which it 
 sprung. It is the logical conclusion of Bolshevism. 
 What is being done in Russia to-day the I. W. W. 
 agitators would do if they dared venture their in- 
 famous game here. As preparatory work their 
 propaganda is going forward all over the country. 
 Driven out of far Western cities by brave executives 
 and citizens, it invades others, or returns under 
 other forms and offers clandestinely to any and all 
 who are discontented with their lot and station the 
 
 150 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S PROPERTY 
 
 inequality of property as the cause of their oppres- 
 sive burdens. They heard it in the saloons. It is 
 an insidious doctrine taught in their unions. The 
 ranging discontent with good wages and short days 
 is the increasing spread and propaganda of our 
 Bolshevism and I. W. W. ism under prudent names 
 and by secret and concealed methods. Its blow is 
 aimed at property, all kinds of property private, 
 corporate, and public; in investments, manufacture, 
 and commerce, and public improvements and fran- 
 chises. And it promises no improvement in invest- 
 ment or manufacture. It proposes to divide with 
 the unsuccessful, who are not likely to succeed with 
 other men's money. It means a reign of ruin, trains 
 standing on rusted tracks, factories with smokeless 
 chimneys, stores with unhinged doors a world of 
 loafers : manhood gone, property gone, education 
 gone tramps everywhere. 
 
 If that condition cannot exist in our country, it 
 will be because we are too deeply rooted in the 
 blessings of American freedom, too firmly grounded 
 in nationalism, and are too universally prosperous, 
 from the workingman with his cottage home to 
 all conditions of property rights and privileges. 
 But we are not secure enough to pass off the 
 present insidious and fiendish propaganda against 
 individual ownership as worthy of our ridi- 
 cule. We cannot fortify against the threaten- 
 ing peril as an ostrich tries to escape his foes by 
 putting his head in the sand. It would take but a 
 
 151 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 short time for the work of the torch, the bomb, and 
 the silencer rifle. It would take much longer to re- 
 pair damages than to prevent them. The combined 
 I. W. W. Bolshevism and unions count upon the con- 
 fidence of the American public. We cry "Peace" 
 when there is no peace. We try to plan with safety 
 to ourselves peace for the world against war, when 
 in our midst to-day is the most dangerous foe that 
 has ever threatened the world. German militarism 
 is only a circumstance compared with it. 
 
 Of peculiar interest is this whole matter to my 
 neighbor the workingman. His patriotism is an 
 essential part of his religion, and the feeling of in- 
 dividual ownership his own by the right of his 
 intelligent and skilled labor is a fundamental ele- 
 ment in his civilized life. There is no promise in 
 communism even if upon sound principles, but a 
 general charity to the incompetent by age or poverty. 
 It is infinitely more honorable than stealing and 
 murdering, but it is not the way the world ever has 
 arranged successfully to promote the interests of a 
 people. The promise is in the dinner pail, the over- 
 alls, the white cottage, the children running along 
 the streets to the public school, the day one-third in 
 faithful labor, one-third in recreation, one-third in 
 sleep; a comfortable living with savings, if a small 
 margin, on the mortgage or in the savings bank. 
 The man owns himself and what he secures belongs 
 to him. A few dollars a year takes care of acci- 
 dents or sickness with lost time. The signs of thrift 
 
 152 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S PROPERTY 
 
 are all through the town. The property is not 
 evenly divided and the brain work and responsibility 
 are not either. But everywhere things are being 
 done, new enterprises are being started, every man 
 that wants work is employed. The workingman 
 is a partner in the business. For what he puts in he 
 is getting a good share from it. The capitalist is 
 his friend and the friend of his humble home, and 
 takes a business interest, if no other, in his health. 
 
 A man who is the head and chief manager of the 
 greatest monopoly in our country, as he came down 
 the gangplank of the ship which landed him from 
 months in Europe, uttered a Bolshevist malediction : 
 "The business magnates, the capitalists will learn 
 that they are not monarchs of all they survey." 
 Why are they not? Who are if they are not? The 
 workingman is monarch of all he surveys; so are the 
 lawyer and the doctor. It is the only monarchy we 
 have in this country. Every man is the monarch of 
 himself and what he has. So is the demag6gue who 
 utters such a cowardly threat against the men who are 
 projecting the mighty enterprise of the land and who 
 with their combined influence constitute infinitely less 
 of a monopoly than does this potentate who rules 
 over crowds of irresponsible men who threaten with 
 destruction the work which capital has builded and 
 who threaten the very Congress of the United States 
 if their demands are refused. 
 
 There appeared recently in Leslie's Weekly an 
 article by the Hon. John A. Embry, who has been 
 
 153 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 United States Consul in different parts of Russia. 
 It is so seldom that Americans see anything upon the 
 subject stated so authoritatively and so clearly and 
 circumstantially, that I have obtained the consent of 
 my friend, Dr. Sleicher, editor of Leslie's, to use it 
 here. It substantiates all I have said and more con- 
 cerning the diabolical purposes of destructive social- 
 ism: 
 
 By far the greatest surprise Americans returning 
 from Bolshevist Russia experience upon their ar- 
 rival in the United States is the hopelessly confused 
 state of public opinion on Bolshevism and the Bol- 
 sheviki. One sees it everywhere. My friends and 
 colleagues, who like myself have seen service in 
 Russia in the diplomatic or consular service or other 
 allied work, whom I have met in the United States 
 since my return have expressed to me the same sur- 
 prise and wonderment which almost overwhelmed 
 me upon my arrival. Barring two possible excep- 
 tions (Raymond Robins of the Red Cross and 
 Jerome Davis of the Y. M. C. A.) no American, 
 whose parents were Americans before him, and who 
 has held a place of honor or trust in the United 
 States government, or in anything else where 
 veracity and good character are requisites, ever has 
 returned from Russia without characterizing the 
 Bolsheviki as the greatest criminal organization the 
 world has ever seen. Even Colonel Raymond Rob- 
 ins found there was very little good he could say 
 for the Bolsheviki when testifying under oath before 
 the United States Senate, while Mr. Davis to-day 
 would doubtless deny with warmth that he ever felt 
 any admiration for the Bolsheviki. Yet despite all 
 
 154 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S PROPERTY 
 
 this the average man, if you ask him what he thinks 
 of the Bolsheviki, will say, "I hardly know what to 
 think about them, the reports from Russia are so 
 conflicting." 
 
 Why are reports from Russia so conflicting? 
 There is but one answer. The reports are conflict- 
 ing because there is a powerful and well-organized 
 campaign of Bolshevist propaganda being waged in 
 the United States. The papers constantly give evi- 
 dence of it, while formerly reputable magazines give 
 almost all of their pages to it. Both the parlor 
 Bolshevists and the other variety are cooperating in 
 the United States to confuse the American people on 
 the issues of Bolshevism. They know full well that 
 nothing could injure the success of the Bolshevist 
 propaganda in the United States like widespread 
 knowledge among the mass of the American people 
 of what Bolshevism really has done and is attempt- 
 ing to do in Russia. Every report coming from 
 Russia derogatory to the Bolsheviki (and no honest 
 report could be otherwise) has to be at once contra- 
 dicted or smoothed over by our parlor Bolsheviki in 
 the United States. From time to time American 
 Bolsheviki visit Russia and pretend to make an in- 
 vestigation of conditions there. They then lie in 
 wait for the American who, through no choice of his 
 own, has lived in Russia during her many revolu- 
 tions in the service of his country, and finally comes 
 back on furlough and tells his friends and tne press 
 what he has seen. They brand everything he says 
 as being malicious slander against such friends of the 
 people as Lenine and Trotsky. And since parlor 
 Bolsheviki happen to be far more numerous and 
 vociferous than honest Americans who occasionally 
 arrive from Russia, most of what the lone returning 
 
 155 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 American has to say is lost in the mass of lies and 
 denials that get into print about It. The same is 
 true of books that get written about Bolshevist 
 Russia. To one book which describes the Bolshe- 
 viki as they are, there are ten books which are writ- 
 ten for the express purpose of describing them as 
 they are not. 
 
 With such a barrage of misrepresentations, de- 
 nials and lies about soviet or Bolshevist Russia, : 
 not surprising that Bolshevist propaganda has been 
 able to make headway in America during the present 
 trying conditions incident to a world-wide industrial 
 readjustment. However, I will confess to being 
 shocked when I learned recently from an American 
 of national prominence that while on a tour of in- 
 vestigation in sixty American towns and cities, which 
 he had just completed, he found evidence of active 
 Bolshevist propaganda in every one of these towns, 
 and that in some of the large cities he discovered 
 secret Soviets, organized and holding regular meet- 
 ings. It is no longer correct to say that Bolshevism 
 is at our door ; it has crossed the threshold. 
 
 With such a condition facing us as a nation, it is 
 imperative that public opinion no longer remain con- 
 fused on the issues of Bolshevism. The man of 
 education knows just little enough about Bolshevism 
 to cause him to sneer about it and not see its danger ; 
 the man of no education, who lives a life of drudg- 
 ery, with little or no hope in what the future holds, 
 knows just enough about Bolshevism to feel inclined 
 to grasp at the hope of better things it holds out and 
 not see the pit that lies at his feet. 
 
 Defined briefly, a Bolshevist is a person who be- 
 lieves in the immediate overthrow by force of all 
 existing social, political, and economic institutions. 
 
 156 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S PROPERTY 
 
 If we ignore the writings of the parlor Bolshevik! 
 which only serve the purpose for which they were 
 written, i. e., to cloud the whole issue, and the writ- 
 ings and public statements of such men as Nikolai 
 Lenine, Leon Trotsky, and Eugene V. Debs, it is not 
 at all difficult to get at the substance of the Bol- 
 shevist platform. According to these leaders, the 
 tenets of Bolshevism are as follows: 
 
 (1) The immediate abolition of the institution 
 of private property by means of force. All private 
 ownership of house, land, and all means of produc- 
 tion must be immediately abolished. The owners 
 of these things, because of their exploitation of the 
 proletariat, shall receive no compensation for their 
 loss. 
 
 (2) There shall be no wages, in the sense of one 
 man working for another. The only wages will be 
 those paid by the state for productive labor. There 
 will be no rents, no profits, no interest. 
 
 (3) Nationalization of all industries. The 
 workingmen shall have full control of the industries 
 which shall by nationalization become the property 
 of the whole people. The distribution of the 
 products shall be attended to by the state. "From 
 every man according to his ability, to every man 
 according to his needs." 
 
 (4) The consumers' goods now in existence 
 houses, clothing, food, etc. shall be divided up 
 among the working class which produced them. 
 The former owners of these things shall receive a 
 proportionate share only in case they join in good 
 faith the cause of the social revolution. 
 
 (5) All who oppose Bolshevism or the social 
 revolution, whether members of the propertied class 
 or not, shall have no rights a Bolshevist is bound to 
 
 157 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 respect. Under no circumstances shall they be al- 
 lowed freedom of press or association. Those who 
 resist the new social order by force must be put down 
 by the most violent means possible in order to strike 
 terror to the hearts of others who otherwise might 
 be led to follow their example. 
 
 (6) The social revolution is at hand. It is 
 world-wide. To succeed for long anywhere it must 
 succeed everywhere. The revolution means war to 
 death with the property-holding classes. The slogan 
 of "Proletarians of all lands unite" must be changed 
 to the battle-cry of "Proletariats of all lands to 
 
 arms." 
 
 (7) Family life and family ties must be weak- 
 ened in every way possible, because the family is the 
 greatest bulwark of that iniquity of iniquities, the in- 
 stitution of private property. This is to be ac- 
 complished by extremely lax marriage and divorce 
 laws, public sanction of "free love," or, if the popu- 
 lation can be induced to stand for it, the "National- 
 ization of women." 
 
 When the Bolsheviki overthrew the Kerensky 
 government in November, 1917, and Lenine de- 
 clared the dictatorship of the proletariat, Russia 
 entered upon a social experiment, the aim of which 
 is embraced in the political, social, and economic 
 planks of the Bolshevist platform I have just out- 
 lined. Since that time many Americans have re- 
 turned from Russia and told of the utter economic 
 ruin that has overtaken the country, the orgy of 
 bloodshed and terror that the leaders of the revolu- 
 tion have instituted, and the indescribable sufferings 
 that have been inflicted upon all members of the 
 propertied class in Russia. 
 
 Ambassador David R. Francis, who was at Petro- 
 
 158 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S PROPERTY 
 
 grad when the Bolsheviki dispersed the Russian 
 Constituent Assembly, and who had ample oppor- 
 tunity of seeing the Soviets at work, while testifying 
 before the United States Senate about the Bolsheviki 
 said: "They are against all government. Their 
 decrees call for the disruption of family life. Their 
 policies are such as will lead us back into barbarism." 
 
 Colonel E. E. Teusler, American Red Cross Com- 
 missioner to Siberia, after making a trip to the 
 Siberian front last winter and witnessing the effect of 
 Bolshevist rule in Siberian villages near the Ural 
 Mountains, declared: "Not one good word can be 
 said for Bolshevism." 
 
 Roger C. Tredwell, American Consul at Tash- 
 kend, who returned from southern Russia via Mos- 
 cow and Petrograd in May, stated recently before 
 the Russian Economic League in New York city, 
 that in Bolshevist Russia the factories are closed, the 
 railways are in a hopeless condition, the people are 
 idle, hungry, ill-clothed and given over to all kinds 
 of lawlessness with little or no restraint over them. 
 
 The guard under which he traveled through 
 Russia in company with two British Red Cross 
 nurses instructed the two nurses not under any 
 circumstances to attempt to take walks outside their 
 railway carriage, as at the stations it would be im- 
 possible to protect them. Consul Tredwell also told 
 how a Bolshevist minister of commerce and industry 
 in a conversation with him one day pointed to the 
 smokeless factory chimneys and said: "These smoke- 
 less chimneys spell the doom of our social revolu- 
 tion. The people cannot be induced to work." 
 
 Immediately prior to my return to the United 
 States in June, I visited, in company with two Ameri- 
 can newspaper correspondents, several towns and 
 
 159 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 villages in that portion of eastern Russia which had 
 been recently taken from the Bolsheviki by the 
 anti-Bolshevist forces- of Admiral Kolchak. The 
 story of the conditions we found in these cities 
 has already been widely published in the news- 
 papers. I only wish to confirm here in a signed 
 article what has been already published. Bielebei 
 is a town of about ten thousand inhabitants, and is 
 a county seat of Bielebei County, Ufa Govern- 
 ment, eastern Russia. It had been Bolshevist terri- 
 tory twice, Bolshevism first reaching the town in the 
 spring of 1918. It was cleared of Bolsheviki by the 
 Czecho-Slovaks during the summer of that year and 
 fell again into Bolshevist hands in December, when 
 the Czechs withdrew from the Siberian front after 
 the signing of the European armistice. According 
 to the accounts given by three judges of the Bielebei 
 county court, who were all Socialists, and who had 
 felt safe to remain in the city, as well as a number of 
 other trustworthy eyewitnesses, the Bolshevist army 
 which entered Bielebei last December was nothing 
 more than an armed rabble of some fifteen hundred 
 men, criminals, adventurers, and the riffraff of the 
 lowest Russian classes. They looted the town as 
 they entered it. All the criminals in the county jail 
 were immediately released, while the members of 
 the local county government, who were believed to 
 be opposed to Bolshevism, were taken out and shot 
 without any form of trial. About fifteen hundred 
 of the more intelligent people of Bielebei fled at the 
 approach of the Bolsheviki, but many of them were 
 caught and killed. The evening following their 
 arrival in the city the Bolsheviki held a monster 
 meeting in the town hall, at which local criminals 
 released from prison attended. The more voluble 
 
 160 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S PROPERTY 
 
 leaders addressed their comrades after the manner 
 of I. W. W. agitators, and those who made the most 
 pleasing speeches were elected viva voce to the 
 various commissariats which were to be organized. 
 The county court and county government were de- 
 clared abolished, and the following committees were 
 formed: The Executive Committee, made up of the 
 most daring and unscrupulous, to which all other 
 committees were subordinate; the Revolutionary 
 Tribunal, with its so-called court for the punishment 
 of political crimes, i. e., counter revolution, specula- 
 tion, and sabotage; the Extraordinary Investigating 
 Committee, possessing the power of executing with- 
 out trial any person believed to be guilty of counter- 
 revolutionary sympathies; and the Council of 
 Domestic Economy, charged with the task of listing 
 and requisitioning all private property in the district, 
 for the purpose of dividing up the same among the 
 proletariat. The last-named commissariat was the 
 least efficient of all, as its commissar and his assist- 
 ants were too lazy and too dishonest to do more than 
 fill their own pockets and issue orders for this and 
 that piece of property desired by their friends. The 
 Revolutionary Tribunal and the Extraordinary In- 
 vestigating Committee vied with each other in exe- 
 cuting people charged with the crime of counter- 
 revolution, i. e., anti-Bolshevism. The president of 
 the Executive Committee shared in this orgy of 
 bloodshed. He had the president of the county 
 government, who was ill in the hospital, brought 
 before him in an invalid chair and shot him dead 
 with his own hand in the public square. He likewise 
 shot personally a number of other people against 
 whom he bore some grudge. One day sixteen host- 
 ages were brought to Bielebei from Ufa, a city near 
 
 161 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 by, and placed in the jail. Soon thereafter, the jail 
 being overcrowded, these sixteen unfortunate people 
 were taken out and shot in the public square, and 
 their bodies thrown into the little river which runs 
 through the town. The bodies were later recovered 
 by the townspeople and given proper burial. 
 Among the victims was a seventeen-year-old high 
 school girl of Ufa, whose parents came to Bielebei, 
 identified her body, and carried it away with them. 
 
 The girls of the Bielebei high school were made to 
 wash the barracks and filthy wearing apparel of the 
 Bolshevist soldiers, receiving for their labor only 
 blows and curses, or, if the girl happened to be 
 pretty, insults of worse nature. The boys of the 
 high school were made to work on the streets with- 
 out pay. Those among them who dared to protest 
 or were suspected of planning to escape and join 
 Admiral Kolchak's army were taken out and shot 
 without any ado. 
 
 So terrible and strange were the stories told us 
 that our minds were incapable of visualizing the 
 scenes that must have been enacted during the Bol- 
 sheviki occupation of this Russian town. My com- 
 panions were frankly skeptical. Before the day 
 closed all our skepticism had vanished. 
 
 We were returning to our train to partake of a 
 late luncheon when our attention was attracted by a 
 crowd of excited townspeople making their way to a 
 nearby wood. Upon inquiry we learned that a large 
 number of victims of the Bolsheviki had just been 
 discovered, supposed to have been murdered during 
 the very night that they evacuated the town, and 
 these anxious people were intent on learning the fate 
 of missing friends and relatives. Taking our 
 cameras with us we followed the wake of the crowd. 
 
 162 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S PROPERTY 
 
 In a few minutes we were standing with a grief- 
 stricken group of people on the edge of a slight ex- 
 cavation and with them gazing down on a score of 
 murdered men and women whose mutilated bodies 
 had suddenly been revealed by the melting snow. 
 The topmost figure on this heap of mangled dead 
 was the corpse of a young girl just blooming into 
 womanhood. Her left breast exposed was ter- 
 ribly torn by gunshot ; her left arm, with its graceful 
 curves, was bare and lay across her bosom, and we 
 noted that the third finger had been amputated at 
 the second joint, no doubt for the ring that had en- 
 circled it. 
 
 . Wishing to spare the feelings of the older and 
 more deeply affected persons present, I addressed 
 myself to an intelligent-looking boy about fifteen 
 years of age, and inquired what caused the murder 
 of these people. His reply was laconic, but illu- 
 minating, "Bolsheviki dieol," which translated liter- 
 ally means "Bolsheviki work." 
 
 163 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 MY NEIGHBOR'S ADVANTAGES 
 
 IF you listen with the ears which the demagogues 
 and the ignorant agitators want you to use, and if 
 you do your thinking with the ears which he is 
 anxious to fill, you will get the impression that our 
 working people are being ground down under the 
 merciless heel of the tyrant capitalist. Few students 
 of economics look at the other side of the question 
 and appreciate losses that capital has suffered and 
 the insurmountable difficulties it has had to face in 
 the last generation because of the unreasonable de- 
 mands which labor has increasingly made beyond the 
 income of the world's business to pay out of the 
 profits of the business. Labor has forced a reduc- 
 tion of the hours of the workingman, and to a 
 certain measure it was doubtless best for labor and 
 for business. But the laborer wanted at once more 
 for his short hours than he received for the long 
 ones. Somebody had to pay for those two lost 
 hours. Should business pay the whole bill? That 
 would depend upon whether business was yielding 
 as much in eight hours as it did in ten hours, and 
 that would depend upon whether the men did as 
 much in the eight hours. It was said that they 
 would. The evidences are, in many cases, that they 
 
 164 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S ADVANTAGES 
 
 did not. As we have shown in a preceding chapter, 
 at once there was an increase in the cost of articles 
 which receive only eight hours work, and the articles 
 were bought in the workingman's home, and paid 
 for by him. Then began the race between increase 
 of cost for manufactured articles and wages of eight- 
 hour workers, and the workers, up to date, seem to 
 have somewhat the better of the contest. In a 
 period of a dozen years the wages of the working- 
 man increased about twice as fast as the per cent 
 increase of the cost of articles of home living. In 
 some callings there has not been a year through a 
 period of fifteen years that the workingman's wages 
 have not been increased. It seems to have become 
 an infatuation with him, and he thinks that any year 
 which has not seen a threat or a strike and an in- 
 crease of wages is a poor year. The question will 
 force itself upon the public mind that somewhere 
 there must be a limit. Soon it ought to be the busi- 
 ness man's turn to have one year of uninterrupted 
 work for his factory. He should have at least time 
 enough in some year to adjust himself to those 
 swiftly changing cost conditions. It is about time 
 for the public mind to stop the foolish sympathy 
 with the workingman who for fifteen years has 
 shown that he is fully able to take care of himself, 
 and ask him if he will not help us to buy our shoes 
 for less than twenty dollars a pair. The prices have 
 shifted from the manufacturer's hands to the skilled 
 laborer's hands. The dictator of American busi- 
 
 165 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 ness is your neighbor and mine who every year says, 
 "Pay me more for less work." 
 
 One of the greatest economic blessings to the so- 
 called common people is the corporation, a body of 
 men organized and authorized by law to do busi- 
 ness and to act as one man. It has sometimes been 
 abused, but as now safeguarded it is the securest 
 form of savings with returns in dividends and the 
 safest transfer of property from one generation to 
 another that has ever been devised. It has con- 
 tributed enormously to the workingman by project- 
 ing vast enterprises like railways, the barge canal, 
 and the construction of immense water reservoirs 
 and manufacturing communities. Those who op- 
 pose them are ignorant or attempt to use their as- 
 saults to make capital with the ignorant and easily 
 prejudiced. 
 
 The corporation serves the workingman more 
 than any other class of men. It has done more to 
 improve his home and to create for him independ- 
 ence than any other form of human endeavor of a 
 strictly economic character. That it has been made 
 or used to rob the poor, to wreck railways, and 
 establish monopolies is absurd in the extreme. 
 There is nothing great and good that has not been 
 counterfeited and abused. But the progress of the 
 country dates its greatest developments from the 
 time men found a way of handling the greatest 
 enterprises by an association of individuals and in- 
 vestments as one man. It offers great advantages 
 
 166 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S ADVANTAGES 
 
 to the workingman by putting into his hand the 
 possibility of investment in the largest enterprises of 
 the country. 
 
 We hear much of what the coal employers, the 
 railway magnates, and what "pirates" of big busi- 
 ness are doing with the people's money. It is a 
 singular fact that tens of thousands of the owners 
 of the stock of great railways like the New York 
 Central and the Pennsylvania are men of small 
 means and women with modest savings and clerks in 
 the stores and banks. They own millions of dollars 
 of these properties, and they are safer, notwith- 
 standing the agitators of strikes and government 
 ownership, than any other forms of investment they 
 can make. Especially is this true of the bonds of 
 such corporations. 
 
 That laborer is deceived to his hurt who allows 
 himself to antagonize the great things of America. 
 They are conceived by great thoughts. They are 
 vindicated by the immense things they have done for 
 the land. Their by-products dwarf the world's old 
 time enterprises when all that the rich could do was 
 to pile their gold up in vaults and iron-bound chests. 
 The later life of the world received its great impulse 
 when capitalists combined to do things and took the 
 workingmen into partnership. The workingman is 
 not a serf any more. He is not a servant. He is 
 not a menial. He is a partner in the world's great- 
 est affairs. And if he has power of thought, of in- 
 ventive genius, if he is a discoverer, the world's open 
 
 167 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 gates are now swinging out before him. It all de- 
 pends upon himself. He can destroy business and 
 destroy himself with it. He has the large ad- 
 vantage as never before that invested business has 
 made for him. It was coming to him out of the 
 logic of events. He can hurry it and overhurry it. 
 The steel business is a case in hand. For fifteen 
 years every year but one has seen an increase of 
 wages. This has come principally to prevent strikes, 
 and the strike furor has doubtless been due in no 
 small degree to the immense fortunes being made by 
 investors in the business. But the effect upon busi- 
 ness and labor in general is harmful. One highly 
 favored manufacturer cannot act alone upon local 
 demands. The great industrial bodies are members 
 one of another, and the great practical question 
 which perhaps we cannot expect the average man to 
 put to the front is, "What of the general good?" 
 And that question is made up of particulars. The 
 highest advantage to the workingman is not always 
 when the greatest wage is ,paid. That is an easy 
 political economy. But a man's advantages and 
 personal interests involve far more. That is a small 
 measure of the man. 
 
 Were the principles of our fathers right? Were 
 they fundamental and eternal, or was it all a mis- 
 take? 'Is Bolshevism, or socialism, which is now 
 budding under the name of Unionism, better than 
 the Magna Charta or than the American Consti- 
 tution? Is the tribal life better than the national 
 
 168 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S ADVANTAGES 
 
 life? Is wild communism better than individual re- 
 sponsibility and privilege? Would the world be 
 better off to divide up its mass of property upon a 
 universal plan because the distribution is now un- 
 equal and unfair? How long would it stay so? 
 Does it not all go back upon creation? The plan 
 that is going to stand whether we like it or not is 
 one of inequality. The nearest we come to equality, 
 and that is far from complete, is equality of priv- 
 ilege. Men are born with unequal talents, one and 
 two and five. They inherit far differing capacities. 
 Some have great acquisitive powers and some have 
 none; some can and do add to their properties and 
 some cannot keep what they inherit. Our quarrel 
 is not with the economy of men, but with the 
 economy of God. We must make a careful analysis 
 of ourselves and see in just what our advantages lie 
 and in what our investments should be made, 
 whether in ourselves or in others for ourselves. It 
 may be that they are in a certain promising mentality 
 and we only require investment in intellectual ca- 
 pacity. It may be that the man is the contractor 
 and builder of fortunes in property. His talent is 
 five of acquisition. He must not bargain himself to 
 any organization and lose his identity. There are 
 men who overestimate themselves and fail that way. 
 There are others, and more of them, who under- 
 estimate themselves and their splendid personality to 
 become absorbed and their splendid genius to be 
 spoiled. One of the evils of the present form of 
 
 169 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 union which is threatened with the fatal disease of 
 Bolshevism, is that no account is taken of a man's 
 unusual capacity. It is the reverse of Burns, U A 
 man is a man for a' that." A man is a machine and 
 only that. When self-reliance goes out there is not 
 much left of a man. An arrangement by which a 
 man loses his identity and is merged into a place on 
 terms that take no account of what he is has only one 
 end, and that is the extinction of that man as a man. 
 The beauty of our government is that it associates 
 man in a mighty union and alliance and leaves him a 
 definite unit with a fixed value. He has a vote 
 which shifts from one party to another and from one 
 to another issue from time to time. He does not 
 act like a gear in a machine driven by some central 
 power. He is the central power. A man with one 
 issue only, and that the profound question of how 
 much wage he can get, is passing by some of the 
 greatest questions of life and destiny. The great 
 advantage within the grasp of the man who depends 
 upon nothing but his hands is the large citizenship 
 provided for him in a country that is the sum of all 
 the best in all countries and the original conception 
 of the mighty men who insisted upon their inherent 
 rights to offer the world a new pattern also. It will 
 be a sad day, not for the country only but for my 
 neighbor the workingman when certain destructive 
 elements that are beginning to see that they have no 
 hope of success under the name which they have re- 
 cently imported here, get an insidious and treacher- 
 
 170 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S ADVANTAGES 
 
 ous hold upon the workingman's union, which is 
 showing some alarming symptoms of sympathy and 
 degeneracy. It is said that sailors take warning and 
 leave a ship when rats leave it. It is a better time to 
 leave a ship when rats come into it and take charge 
 of it. "Be not deceived, God is not mocked." The 
 principles that have underlain the welfare of men 
 and accounted for their marvelous development for 
 hundreds of years have not been an accident. They 
 must not give place to the accident of a new form of 
 socialism, that has sadly experimented for a few 
 months on a soil that never knew of republican insti- 
 tutions, but is overrun with tares that have not per- 
 mitted the wheat of liberty to grow and flourish. 
 Our nation's workingmen have been too long and 
 too richly blessed by our freedom to throw these 
 blessings away for the new mess of pottage brought 
 over by the Bolsheviki and disguising itself with our 
 old rejected socialism and the labor union in the 
 dangerous form which it is now taking. 
 
 If I were to specify the great advantages of my 
 neighbor which he must not forget in the glamour of 
 any new and untried issue, I would call his attention 
 to what America votes him and not to an organiza- 
 tion. It puts a ballot into his hand, and as much of 
 a ballot as is in the hand of the multimillionaire. His 
 richest neighbor has no more. I am speaking of 
 law-abiding men. The comparison is not between 
 an honest and a dishonest man. The honest poor 
 man has as much of a vote as the honest rich man. 
 
 171 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 He votes and not an organization for him. He 
 votes and not a job for him, and here is where his 
 manhood takes root. And he votes not for a 
 schoolhouse only, but for the man who will stand in 
 his place in Congress and who will account to him 
 when the time comes about for a representative to 
 be chosen again. And who shall say that the voter 
 shall not represent himself? 
 
 This suggests a potent reason why he may. What 
 country ever offered its citizens such school priv- 
 ileges from elementary forms up through all grades 
 and all technical training to or beyond the colleges 
 and universities? The everyday laborer is proud of 
 his boys and girls in the public school, coming home 
 with increasing zest for books and knowledge. The 
 state has created hundreds of these schools for ele- 
 mentary instruction and also academies and normal 
 schools. In nearly every State there is one college, 
 and in some of the States private benevolence has 
 planted from one to a half dozen with doors open 
 upon most generous terms to all young people with- 
 out regard to race or sect. Here is where the 
 fortunes of the rich seek ways of helping the poor. 
 Hundreds of colleges in our country have been 
 founded by men and women who believe that in a 
 republic the safety of the nation is that the people 
 who are to do the thinking and voting shall be 
 educated. 
 
 In a monarchy princes and princesses are edu- 
 cated. In America the people are the princes and 
 
 172 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S ADVANTAGES 
 
 princesses. The moderate tuition fees of our 
 American colleges and universities do not pay one 
 half, if they do one third, of the expenses of the 
 students. The buildings stand as a free gift to them. 
 The same is true of college libraries, museums, 
 laboratories, and tens of thousands of dollars of 
 other equipment the whole indispensable to the 
 work of higher education in any considerable college 
 or a university. Besides millions of money are 
 given by rich and modest benefactors in endow- 
 ments. The poorest paid men in God's vineyard 
 have put millions of money collectively into the 
 colleges to make it possible for their neighbor the 
 workingman to secure a liberal education for his 
 sons and daughters. 
 
 Sometimes it is said that the motive which 
 prompts these wealthy men to found colleges is their 
 desire to use them for their selfish, economic pur- 
 poses. More than twenty-five years in one of these 
 institutions, whose benefactors represented the steel, 
 the typewriter, and Standard Oil interests, besides 
 great estates of the retired rich, constitute an irre- 
 futable authority on that matter. Never in any 
 case, in any instance of any kind, did I ever receive 
 such a suggestion in connection with any gift what- 
 ever. The utmost freedom of instruction was never 
 questioned. Such a charge is as groundless as nine- 
 teen twentieths of the slanders against the rich busi- 
 ness men of our country. They average with human 
 nature among the poor, to say the least. They were 
 
 173 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 poor once. The colleges are peculiarly gifts to the 
 poor, and it is to the credit of the poor that their 
 sons and daughters are in them in good majority. 
 The hope of our country is that the workingman 
 and woman send their children to the schools and 
 colleges. 
 
 One of the striking examples of the workingman's 
 advantages is in the public libraries, many of them so 
 richly endowed by Mr. Carnegie, himself from the 
 home of poverty, who, when a vigorous lad, worked 
 for one dollar a week. These libraries founded by 
 the community or some benefactor are in nearly all 
 the villages and in all the cities. A village would 
 almost as soon be without water or light or sanitation 
 or schools or churches as without the free library. 
 Educated men and women are the committees of 
 these libraries, insuring careful selections of books, 
 safe, entertaining, and instructive. Every week a 
 book may be in the humblest home, a book that will 
 tell the story of some epoch in the world's history. 
 One may have a plain treatise on some phase of 
 science. He may read the best of literature. He 
 may bring home the story of bees or beavers, of wild 
 birds or wild flowers. I know a woman who took 
 her maid and roamed about a few hours in the 
 Adirondacks and brought home over forty varieties 
 of blooming plants. That autumn I met a natural- 
 ist who told me that he had just compiled a list of 
 more than eighty wild birds which summered in the 
 Adirondacks. The boy or girl may take home from 
 
 174 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S ADVANTAGES 
 
 the library rare autobiographies that will tell the 
 story of Lincoln from the cabin to the highest posi- 
 tion in the world. He may bring away the mechanic 
 arts and develop that valuable gift. 
 
 I found a college janitor who was reading The 
 Scientific American, Power, Electrical Engineering, 
 etc., which he got Saturdays in the college library. 
 He pursued his reading nights and spare and free 
 hours until he became a master plumber and did the 
 work of the colleges. He kept on and constructed 
 the large power house of the institution, which has 
 been pronounced by well-known engineers a model 
 plant, and became superintendent of buildings and 
 grounds, directing in construction of steam, electric, 
 and heating apparatus, selecting and setting boilers 
 and engines. He is recognized as authority in all 
 those things, saving the university tens of thousands 
 of dollars. He passed on from a pay roll of fifty 
 dollars a month to a salary of three thousand dollars 
 a year, and would command more than twice that 
 salary in the commercial world, but for his loyalty 
 to the institution where he found himself by odd 
 hours with books from the college library. Not 
 every boy has the native ability to make so much of 
 himself out of a few books and spare hours, but hun- 
 dreds could were they awakened to their possi- 
 bilities. 
 
 Has the workingman stopped to think of the pos- 
 sibilities of his public library? Suppose he were to 
 read ten pages of history a day, or of science, or of 
 
 175 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 biography. That is three thousand six hundred and 
 fifty pages in a year. That is twelve volumes of 
 over three hundred pages in a year. In ten years he 
 would be the best-read and best-informed man in 
 the town except the professional men who make 
 their living by books. It would constitute him a 
 leader among his fellows. He would take control 
 of the thought in his lodge or his union. Ten of 
 him would make a new union. If those books had 
 included sound political science and industrial 
 economics, he would be a leader in realms where 
 sound thought is at a premium. But the estimate 
 which I have made is a moderate one. He could 
 and would read twice as many pages per day. 
 Would it not interfere with his day labor? It 
 might. He would be demanded perhaps to create 
 labor or to take charge of great enterprises. If it 
 made him restless, it would not be the restlessness of 
 jealousy and envy and discontent with conditions. 
 It would be the restlessness of a great and worthy 
 ambition. It would be "growing pains." The 
 restlessness of intelligence never has harmed the 
 world. It shames the foolish and ignorant agitator. 
 Use the free library. It is the gift of a fortune 
 which you can bring into your home every week and 
 take nothing away from the world. Your children 
 will invest in it also, and the more they have the 
 more they will want, and the more they have the 
 greater they will grow, and it is your home th^at 
 grows. 
 
 m 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S ADVANTAGES 
 
 Possibly my neighbor the workingman has not 
 reckoned the churches among his advantages. Per- 
 haps he has heard harangues against them and 
 sneers against the preacher, the priest, and the rabbi. 
 He leaves it to his friends to use them to say a decent 
 word when he dies and to bury him. But nearly 
 always the workingman has a church. It may not 
 be the best one. But it may be the best one for 
 him. In any event, if he uses it faithfully and gets 
 out of it the best it has for him, he will be far better 
 off than without any. It stands for the best morals. 
 It is a protest against that fool described in the Bible 
 as saying, "There is no God." Man's relation to 
 man is based upon morals, morals with a Golden 
 Rule in them, morals with justice and truth and 
 charity in them, morals that will not steal nor lie 
 nor covet another man's property, morals that are 
 packed away in Ten Commandments or "ten words" 
 as they are called, a collection from which you can- 
 not take one word without endangering the world 
 nor to which the world has ever been wise enough 
 to add another one. This marvelously perfect plan 
 of morals, wealth, and privilege no one has mo- 
 nopoly of. It is free to the poorest man as to the 
 richest. The fellowship of the church, its sympathy, 
 its prayers, its charity, its visiting nurses, its medi- 
 cine, its ministering priests and preachers, its coun- 
 sels in all kinds of difficulties and perplexities was 
 there ever a community without them, or in which 
 men and women would consent to live without them, 
 
 177 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 or, if without them, that men did not build them, 
 even if it was of logs or adobe earth and clay? Men 
 cannot get along without the morals taught in the 
 churches. Whatever they are or are not, good 
 morals they insist upon. Lamps may be orna- 
 mental, but they must have a receptacle for oil or be 
 wired for electricity. No church of any Christian 
 or Jewish faith would hold a place with civilized 
 people without putting first in the teaching of its 
 doctrines sound morals. They are an asset of the 
 community and an asset of the workingman. They 
 protect his home and give him a square deal among 
 his fellow men. His appeal for fair treatment is 
 based upon the morals taught by his church. It is 
 only when his passions go wild and he forgets, that 
 he neglects his church and becomes dangerous to 
 himself and to his community. 
 
 He is a dangerous sectary who would sever men 
 from their churches, from a system even with which 
 he may not agree. What are the morals taught? 
 Are men better without them or with them? My 
 neighbor should put his church, whatever it is, be- 
 fore his lodge or his union, or any industrial or 
 social fellowship whatever. The anchor does not 
 propel the ship, but it's a mighty handy thing to 
 have at the bow, and there are times when it is worth 
 more than the engine. Precepts are great with 
 faith. 
 
 Not the least of my neighbor's advantages is the 
 time in which he lives. If he is only wise enough 
 
 178 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S ADVANTAGES 
 
 to know it, many of the questions that make their 
 practical appeal to him and that have to do with 
 his daily life in all of its relations have been settled. 
 They have not come down through the ages passing 
 by all of the tests of time to be left to ranting agi- 
 tators to determine their values and their application 
 to human affairs. It is aside from the work to say 
 that the most of the inventions and discoveries have 
 been left by centuries which have drifted by until 
 they reached these modern times. Whatever may 
 have been the inspiring cause, it is, nevertheless, true 
 that the world, for thousands of years, along its 
 highest ranges of thought, was giving itself to moral 
 problems. Its mind was upon origin and destiny, 
 upon God and law and human obligations. Its most 
 marvelous system of hygiene which the world has 
 ever seen was religious and ceremonial. Tested by 
 the present experiences of men, the conclusions of 
 the mighty men of past ages stand firmly intrenched 
 in the lives of the most intelligent and progressive 
 peoples of the earth. It is not necessary to quibble 
 over these ancient revelations and philosophies 
 textually or doctrinally. Prove them in yourselves. 
 What are they to you, and what are you without 
 them with the so-called new thought ? Their origin 
 is like that of vitalism and gravitation. Don't wait 
 until you invent perpetual motion before you settle 
 down upon the old law that this universe pulls to its 
 centers and its centers are drawn to greater centers 
 involved in the mystery of that common center about 
 
 179 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 which great minds do not prattle much. The lesson 
 of an infinitely great past has one safe lesson, and 
 that is that men count for little until they fasten 
 upon greatness. That is why the Bible says that 
 man is a fool without God. The conception is ele- 
 vating, even if he falls infinitely short in his interpre- 
 tations. I do not ask you to go back to ancient 
 writings, Holy Scriptures, or prescient philosophy, 
 though that were an invaluable privilege ; but if you 
 cannot, look about yourself. The test is the fruits. 
 Grapes do not grow from thorns, nor figs from 
 thistles. You are your own commentary. This is 
 equally true of divine revelation and of civil and 
 political government. The greatest Teacher the 
 world has had said, "Prove me." Of this mighty 
 republic we may confidently say, "Prove it." 
 
 It is true that new times bring new adaptations. 
 But the fundamental things are the principles. 
 These have been secured and cannot be safely torn 
 away. That later politician, whatever his high 
 position, must have assuring temerity who proceeds 
 upon the theory that the things he proposes are new 
 discoveries. Great men lived and threw into the 
 culm piles and slag heaps his philosophies. Our 
 neighbors should compare their conditions, which 
 are the fruit of a free country, with those of a 
 century ago, as they may quickly, from the plain 
 short histories of the public library, to which refer- 
 ence has been made. Advances secured by the ap- 
 plication of creative principles that have been the 
 
 180 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S ADVANTAGES 
 
 productive roots so long that by their fruit you may 
 know them. 
 
 It is incredible that intelligent workingmen 
 charged with their country's franchises, many of 
 them in the churches and benevolent lodges which 
 sift men and know them, will hand over their part 
 in the world's things to nothing but the facile 
 tongues of sudden and volatile reformers who find it 
 easier to employ their tongues than their brain and 
 muscle. The principles of the ages gone have not 
 worn out. 
 
 There was a time when certain men accounted for 
 the motion of the stars with windlasses and chains. 
 And the old fable of Atlas bending his back under 
 the earth is familiar. You are asked to go back to 
 that mythology if you forget the origin of your 
 country and listen to croaking of the frogs in the 
 mud holes by the side of the roads, or try to see 
 through the fetid vapors distilled over the quag- 
 mires of alien socialism compounded with the black 
 ignorance of our little egomaniacs of the street 
 gutters. If my neighbor the workingman has any- 
 thing to thank God for, it is that he has a past to 
 look back upon, a past full of great men, great 
 enough for the ages in which they lived and with 
 prophetic vision to look along the ages and antici- 
 pate the multitudes who would be anxiously inquir- 
 ing for light. They were not men who lived for 
 themselves, nor did they die to themselves. What 
 a striking example was the Father of the American 
 
 181 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 republic ! How he seems to live in these years, and 
 to speak as one participating in our affairs. How 
 prescient his warning to hurried, preoccupied men 
 who must carry as intelligent citizens their business 
 and affairs of state lest they become entangled 
 in the politics of foreign countries. There was 
 nothing narrow or unsympathetic in Washington. 
 We were given in charge by Divine Providence of a 
 vast land and country, with the world's greatest ex- 
 periment of a free people. Our principles would 
 not mix. Enough of the alien element would come 
 to our shores which would have to be amalgamated 
 and made American. We must let other nations 
 work their problems. We cannot work both by 
 surrendering ours. 
 
 There is another advantage to the workingman of 
 this time which all of them do not yet appreciate. 
 It is not confined to my neighbor the workingman. 
 It is a universal blessing, but more marked in the 
 case of the laborer whose income is from day to 
 day and whose expenditures leave a narrow margin. 
 It is so hackneyed, and its story so trite and worn 
 that the mention of it sends some minds into their 
 shells like mud turtles. It has been a moth in the 
 workingman's wage. It has cost his wife a dress 
 and his children shoes and frocks and coats; and, 
 worst of all, it has cost the husband and father his 
 self-respect and turned his noble instincts into bestial 
 passions, dangerous to himself and his home. Some 
 of his friends in their opposition to this foe have not 
 
 182 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S ADVANTAGES 
 
 always been wise. Those who proposed that by law 
 they would search his home did not have their zeal 
 according to knowledge. The law had to deal with 
 the saloon. It was an institution. It made 
 merchandise of the poor man's home. It waylaid 
 him on his way home with his week's earnings and 
 took them away from his wife and children after 
 creating an appetitie that robbed him of his manly 
 power of resistance. That enemy of the town and 
 all in it had to be closed. Generations made other 
 experiments to save the men who frequented such 
 places, but no law must be permitted to touch any 
 man's home in search of his personal habits. 
 Paternalism that goes that far is itself an enemy of 
 manhood. It were better that a man be tempted to 
 get drunk at times, and that he have the means of 
 doing it, than that he be made a manikin to be pulled 
 by strings in the hands of personal meddlers. Some- 
 thing must be left to the man. It is a great boon 
 that the saloon has gone. It is a legacy to the 
 workingman peculiarly that has been secured to him 
 by the everlasting removal of the saloon. It is an 
 inheritance to his children, and no one is happier 
 than his wife if she is worthy of being the mother of 
 her children. It has been a hard fight, and many 
 thousands of the workingmen have helped to win it. 
 It could not have been won without them. It must 
 not be assumed that the workingmen as a class sup- 
 ported the saloon and contended for it. Many of 
 them did, but more of them did not, and they were 
 
 183 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 the great reenforcement of the forces which won for 
 temperance and sobriety. It was a fight against 
 millions of invested money. It was a fight against 
 politics. It was a fight against rents and employees. 
 It was a fight against mistaken ecclesiastics and 
 champions of liberty of individual choice, even 
 though the law in many other instances is constantly 
 denying such a choice. It was a fight against appe- 
 tite, not restrained but unrestrained, and often 
 demoniacal; an appetite that heard no argument 
 from scalding tears of wife nor shame of children. 
 One cannot pass these peculiar advantages that 
 have come to the workingmen and their families 
 without noticing what seems to be a strange Provi- 
 dence in point of time and substitution of a want 
 which made the removal of the saloon a more diffi- 
 cult task. Men demand social intercourse, a place 
 where they can meet with men of their way of think- 
 ing and especially where entertainment is to be 
 found. What was to be done with them when the 
 saloon was closed? Many plans had been proposed, 
 none of them altogether practical. They would 
 not be religious. They could not be irreligious. 
 The moving picture was invented. It came 
 along in time to fit the demand for harmless 
 entertainment, and more, an instructive entertain- 
 ment. The man had a place to spend his evening 
 with small cost if he took his wife and children. It 
 brought to him the lands heretofore in the stories of 
 travelers. It took him to the Far East. It showed 
 
 184 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S ADVANTAGES 
 
 him the unknown races of men and their manner of 
 life, objects of natural history in their habits, the 
 flora of the tropics, the boundless ice wastes of the 
 frigid zones, the industries of coal and iron mines, 
 the products of the prairies, manufactories, and the 
 exploits of men in all fields of heroic ventures from 
 fishing and hunting of great game to war. The 
 moving picture displaced the saloon and vulgar, 
 cheap theaters with a new world of knowledge in a 
 setting of wholesome amusement. That sometimes 
 it fell into the hands of vultures is not strange, but 
 the public taste would not tolerate it and suffer it to 
 spoil the instruction and recreation of the homes of 
 the people. 
 
 These are some of the advantages which can be 
 enumerated as peculiarly waiting for the elevation 
 and improvement of a great class of our most 
 worthy citizens who are represented by demagogues 
 and socialist pirates as oppressed, down-trodden and 
 abused by the capitalists and predatory rich. No 
 class in our great prosperous land is more fortu- 
 nately situated than these same people when they use 
 the gifts of Providence and the freedom of their 
 country intelligently, soberly, and industrially. If 
 they despise those things because they have not the 
 rich man's riches; if they listen to the insane rant- 
 ings that they should not labor because some men 
 have ten talents when other men have one only; if 
 they pass by the great things of their country which 
 are blessing others so freely, and spend their time in 
 
 185 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 foolishly attempting to mend the world, their lives 
 are to be miserable and the world will not be mended 
 by them, but it would be so much better off without 
 them, as they have influence to do it harm. No man 
 on our earth has such an opportunity just of himself 
 as the laborer, upon whom so light a tax of steward- 
 ship is put by the demands of his calling, so little 
 anxiety, so little of plans and the accident of 
 markets. He can increase himself and enlarge his 
 sphere of powers and happiness on the capital fur- 
 nished by others. 
 
 186 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 MY NEIGHBOR'S COUNTRY 
 
 NEXT to a man's religion is his country, and his 
 country is an essential part of his religion. A re- 
 ligion is not worth much that is an emotional mysti- 
 cism with no substantial attachments and duties to 
 this earth. "Render unto Caesar the things that are 
 Caesar's." That is one way to render unto God the 
 things that are God's. If one has an underde- 
 veloped country, poor in its resources, one has a duty 
 to it while he is a part of it. As far as possible he 
 is to improve it by all of the intelligent energy he can 
 put into it. It is his country. It may be his duty 
 to stay by it and to muster to it all the persons and 
 influences that may serve it and to defend it against 
 its foes with his life. It is because of this inmate 
 loyalty that there is so much sympathy in our country 
 with Ireland. Its beautiful land, the devout attach- 
 ment of its people, its great men who stand upon 
 such proud summits of history in the world's great 
 achievements, its persistent appeals for liberty and 
 autonomy deeply move us who so recently were 
 struggling against the same country for freedom. 
 But we are not unmindful nor indifferent to the 
 vexed problem of Great Britain if a land so near 
 were to become independent and form an alliance 
 
 187 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 with another nation that might be unfriendly to the 
 mother country. And we have to remember that 
 certain irreconcilable elements in business and indus- 
 tries, as well as religion, divide the beautiful green 
 island within itself. Much awaits the movements 
 of political science and social philosophy before a 
 consummation devoutly desired by not a few Eng- 
 lishmen and Americans shall be brought to pass. 
 Some of us have thought that a more desirable home 
 government for the British Isles would be the plan 
 of the United States or of Canada, in which there 
 are states or provinces of independent government 
 under a central Congress or Parliament and supreme 
 executive head and court. Ireland divided into two 
 states would remove the internal industrial and re- 
 ligious conflict: Wales a state, Scotland a state, 
 North England, Middle England, Southern Eng- 
 land and Western England states, all with their 
 governors, local Legislatures, courts and repre- 
 sentatives in the two houses of Parliament, with, for 
 the time being, the constitutional king for its 
 supreme head. Until some such plan is found the 
 world will continue to find itself in sympathy with 
 Ireland, unless it is to be in conflict with its own 
 loyalty to freedom. The world is to progress upon 
 the plans of a free republic like the United States, or 
 a democratic monarchy largely in name only, and it 
 will not take kindly to the subjection of any consider- 
 able people craving for autonomy. 
 
 I have strayed a little aside, but it may illustrate 
 188 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S COUNTRY 
 
 the problem of love of country which is not always a 
 simple one. It sometimes involves contention and 
 rebellion from what are considered oppression and 
 tyranny, but always by representative parties in con- 
 troversy, and never by murderous Bolshevism nor 
 bomb-throwing assassination of innocent and un- 
 offending women and children, nor the destruction 
 of shops and factories in which are peaceably labor- 
 ing men and girls, whose only offense is that they are 
 employed by some capitalists who have excited the 
 envy of the most cowardly and fiendish murderers 
 who ever disgraced even the name of murder. 
 
 Duty to country is always constructive if it is loyal 
 and wise. It begins by offering something better. 
 It displaces the less good with a greater good and it 
 gives the whole people the privilege of saying which 
 they will have. The first duty of a citizen is loyalty. 
 The first thing to be done is to defend what we have, 
 and never to part with it until we are shown that 
 which is better. The better representation of our 
 liberties is not an assassin with a suit case and a time 
 bomb. The duty to such indescribably loathsome 
 creatures is to imprison or deport them. If ever 
 the severest measures are justified, it is with such 
 fiends. Love of country will insist that no perilous 
 sentimentalism shall delay the processes of the 
 courts in such cases. Love of country justifies 
 destruction of the assassins of our citizens at their 
 employment or of their families sleeping innocently 
 in their homes when no discrimination is made be- 
 
 189 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 tween the assaulted judge or capitalist and the baby 
 upon its mother's breast. It is a serious question 
 as to whether we have much to boast of while 
 common moral sentiment leaves it possible for 
 such barbarous practices to pass with such easy pos- 
 sibility of escape from detection, and if detected, 
 from correction. The appeal of vigilance is to 
 every man of every station in the community. It 
 should begin with so great love and loyalty for our 
 country that the street corner orator who begins any 
 assault upon our institutions whatever shall end his 
 oration in the ditch, or the nearest jail, if there is 
 an officer to arrest him; if not, then the ditch. 
 
 Americans must be Americans, and they should 
 not allow anyone in this country to be anything but 
 Americans. No man has a right to live in this 
 country anything but an American. Ambassadorial 
 residents are under sacred obligation to be loyal to 
 our laws and usages. The most despicable creatures 
 of our experience have been the representatives of 
 the German Embassy, of whom Bernstorff shone as 
 the principal star in that low and murky firmament. 
 Often we hear men say that they have lived here 
 twenty or more years but have never been natural- 
 ized. There is some mistake somewhere, either 
 with our laws or with these men. They should have 
 been compelled to naturalize or account for them- 
 selves in positive terms every year. We have too 
 much at stake from the red socialist to permit any 
 such precedents. Honest men, changing their resi- 
 
 190 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S COUNTRY 
 
 dence from their old lands to the new, should cast 
 their lot into permanent citizenship and help bear its 
 burdens. Public sentiment, the sentiment of associ- 
 ates in business and labor, should emphasize the ob- 
 ligation. No man has a right to take out of this 
 country the benefits of citizenship and render no 
 return for them. 
 
 Should our working people bring to bear the pres- 
 sure of their sentiment upon all who come here who 
 are fit or promise fitness, that they must become 
 citizens, it would be a most efficient correction of 
 some of our dangers. Those who are not fit should 
 not be permitted to land here; and if by chance they 
 do land, they should be hunted out and sent back. 
 We stop the physically unfit. It is far more im- 
 portant to stop the mentally unfit, or the unsympa- 
 thetic and inimical. There are processes by which 
 this can easily be determined. A method is being 
 introduced into the examination of candidates for 
 admission to college by which their place may be 
 determined for the most successful pursuit of 
 studies. Mental aptitude may be graded. It is far 
 more important to apply some such practice to men 
 and women coming to this country to prey upon us 
 and to grow up with the odor of Mephitis Ameri- 
 cana, and the jaws of a combined wolf and a laugh- 
 ing hyena. Our location, our marvelous extent of 
 territory and resources, invite the world to our 
 shores. We have been able to receive them and 
 share with all people our opportunities. For gencr- 
 
 191 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 ations we were safe in this wide generosity. We 
 benefited by it. Men and women who became its 
 noblest citizens came to our shores. They speedily 
 became citizens themselves. They reached the 
 highest positions in our business life. Mr. Carnegie 
 was one of them. There could be no better Ameri- 
 cans. The disturbances of our land are not by 
 native nor by adopted men and women schooled in 
 Americanism, as a rule, but by people who come to 
 us raw. They have established no claim to an 
 opinion among us with regard to our institutions. 
 They know nothing. They have nothing to offer. 
 They want to destroy what they find. We are 
 under no obligation to such persons, and those who 
 join them are like them. Those who use them have 
 some demagogic purpose to serve and should equally 
 find no tolerance from us. 
 
 If we are Americans, we shall be Americans in 
 something besides fair weather. It does not cost 
 much to be Americans when the dollar is worth a 
 hundred cents and the cost of living is normal and 
 we all have well-paid employment. It ought not to 
 be a difficult task to be Americans when the tide is 
 running out and it is hard work to stem it. We are 
 not very worthy sons of our sires if a little high cost 
 of living and small pay throws us off our balance and 
 sends us out rioting against the government and 
 threatening all kinds of calamity to business and 
 trade. It is a test; are we equal to it? It is not the 
 blood of our fathers that plays us so falsely. Our 
 
 192 
 

 
 MY NEIGHBOR'S COUNTRY 
 
 fathers gave their lives and suffered worse than 
 death for their country. u They counted not their 
 lives dear unto themselves." They were tempted 
 by severest trials to forsake their country. But 
 to-day in Congress men stand up and threaten the 
 country with most dire consequences if our working- 
 men have to pay extra for a pair of shoes or of over- 
 alls. We are warned that we are upon the edge of 
 a revolution. The country saved at Valley Forge is 
 going to be thrown away, not because we are cold 
 and ragged and without money, as they were at 
 Valley Forge, but only because we have to pay more 
 and get less, and because we have a temporary in- 
 convenience with the cost of our living expenses. 
 Frankly and emphatically, I do not believe it. They 
 are not Americans. They are the riffraff that the 
 demagogues are jockeying with. They never had 
 living that they earned, and they know nothing of 
 whether living costs much or little. Genuine Ameri- 
 cans quietly adjust themselves to conditions. They 
 are too wise and too loyal to strike for impossible 
 wage, when there is nothing with which to pay it. 
 They wait patiently until they can change the times. 
 They do with less. They economize, and that is 
 what they will do now if they are let alone. It is a 
 good lesson. It is wholesome to the home. I used 
 to hear them singing when I was a boy, "Hard times 
 will come again no more." But they have come, 
 and they will keep on coming, and we should keep on 
 singing, while supply and demand changes the value 
 
 193 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 of a dollar. The cure-alls, the fools who expect to 
 legislate the millennium, will keep on, but "they can- 
 not fool all of the people all of the time." 
 
 We have too much faith in people of America to 
 believe that there is going to be a revolution because 
 we cannot get a living as cheaply as in former times, 
 and at the same time lay up as much money. The 
 preachers are not going to stop preaching because 
 a dollar of their too scant salary is worth only sixty 
 cents now and everything they buy costs twice as 
 much. They do not purpose to rebel and lead a 
 revolution because out of their income of a thousand 
 dollars the general government takes away an in- 
 come tax and the State comes along and taxes it also. 
 The teachers will keep on teaching. The doctors 
 will not forsake the poor. There will be hundreds 
 of thousands who will keep plodding on until "hard 
 times come again no more." It is not the true and 
 loyal Americans who will break up traffic and burst 
 in the doors of the stores and steal their goods. 
 Americans are made of a different metal. You can 
 arouse them by denying them their freedom until 
 they will unload your tea into the harbors and go 
 without tea, but you cannot starve them or freeze 
 them into rebellion against the government which is 
 doing the best it can under new and trying condi- 
 tions. We civilians are suffering our part of the 
 war now. The American workingman is not going 
 to be deceived by the demagogue into believing that 
 the rich are hoarding their money and making a 
 
 194 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S COUNTRY 
 
 stringent money market. They have no money. 
 They are borrowers. Their money is carrying the 
 railroads which the un-American are threatening to 
 tie up until a wheel cannot turn. They are carrying 
 the subways and elevated rapid transits. They are 
 making the capital for all of the great business out 
 of which they are getting far less per cent of profit 
 than they received in the normal times when prices 
 were easily within reach of the everyday people. 
 The intelligent American cannot be deceived by the 
 foolishness that the returns of business and the tariff 
 of railroads belong to him ; that whatever they earn 
 is his profit; and if they earn nothing, but accumulate 
 a debt, that debt does not touch his wage, which con- 
 tinues the same, but the debt the deficit must be 
 paid by the government in taxes of those who have 
 not and never did have anything to say about rail- 
 roads, or it may be lost by the capitalists who own 
 the stock. Americans are not thieves, nor social- 
 istic fools. They know what belongs to them, and 
 they know what does not belong to them. They 
 learned these lessons long generations before the 
 outbreak of Russian Bolshevism started out with its 
 doctrine of piracy upon property and the reversal of 
 the marriage bonds. We have nothing to unlearn 
 of these things until the Almighty reverses the moral 
 law. That will happen when water runs up hill and 
 heat makes ice on the ponds in summer, and gravita- 
 tion loses its grip on the universe. The un-Ameri- 
 can performances being played in this country to-day 
 
 195 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 for the edification of the world are by players who 
 have come here with mighty discordant notes. They 
 are alien tunes. We listen to them with curiosity as 
 something entertaining because novel. But it would 
 be a mistake to believe such doctrines have taken 
 root here except in that stony ground where the soil 
 is too shallow to bear them or among the riotous 
 thorns where they flourish for a little time, just long 
 enough to cause passing alarm among some of our 
 nervous and too easily excited people. Bearing 
 upon the thought that much of the agitation among 
 us is exotic is a very recent statement that an English 
 agitator lately subordinate in the British Cabinet is 
 coming over to this country to establish a labor 
 political party. It is confidently believed that he 
 will return a wiser if not a better man. He will find 
 that except by those who are deluding him into his 
 foolish errand, the workingmen of this country have 
 taken wiser counsel and are keeping their labor ques- 
 tions out of politics. It is the surest death to the 
 great labor interests to launch them into the political 
 arena. It would be American to split them between 
 two great political parties and in a short time there 
 would be nothing of the great and valuable questions 
 of labor but a cheap form of party politics alternat- 
 ing between success of a small kind and defeat of a 
 great kind, for a short time when only some idly 
 floating baubles in the quieting surface would tell 
 where it all went down. There would not be enough 
 of it to salvage! Our friend who plans to come 
 
 196 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S COUNTRY 
 
 from England with enlightenment ought by this time 
 to have learned something in his own country. In all 
 the mighty canvass only recently passed in that great 
 land, scarcely enough socialists are found in Parlia- 
 ment to count. The secret is in the fact that consti- 
 tutionally Great Britan is a land of freedom like 
 America, arid the people move upon the same prin- 
 ciples. Freedom does not make an issue around 
 some one interest among so many vast economic con- 
 cerns. The principles must touch all humanity. 
 And while labor does concern us all, it does so in 
 differing ways. Labor has been so badly misman- 
 aged and made so many opponents by its methods 
 that there could be no general concentration in its 
 behalf among American voters. Politics will be a 
 dead failure among the workingmen. There are 
 too many who are not affiliated with the organiza- 
 ions, and too many in the organizations are already 
 irrevocably classified politically. The organizations 
 are astonishingly in the minority among the vast 
 number of workingmen in this country. Such a man 
 best remain at home. America is not a congenial 
 soil for such an enterprise. It is true that our 
 country is prolific in experiments, and in that is 
 
 here so many people not acquainted with us make 
 serious mistakes about us. Before one of these en- 
 terprises is fairly launched, we have another on the 
 way, and are done with the first before it makes a 
 voyage. That is why so many fortunes are made 
 
 nd lost here. It does not do to take us too seri- 
 
 197 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 ously, and it is not wise to diagnose our symptoms 
 too impulsively. We move in great waves of en- 
 thusiasm of feeling and of protest. One day the 
 country is going to the dogs, and it is exalted to the 
 heavens the next day. It is a great land in which to 
 be "as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves." 
 
 The time comes and you get the impression that 
 the country is being split into pieces. One party is 
 announced as victorious at the polls. In twenty- 
 four hours it is all reversed. How can we escape a 
 revolution ? Twenty-four hours more and the shop 
 machinery is humming, the farmer is behind his 
 plow, the commercial traveler is out on the road 
 taking orders. He is selling goods as though no 
 controversy had warned the business world of 
 danger to trade a few hours before. We are hav- 
 ing a wild tumult in the cities to-day. Business is 
 being interrupted and there will be some loss of life. 
 An insane frenzy has seized a class of working 
 people. All know that it cannot be prolonged, for 
 those who are guilty of it in the immediate acts are 
 dependent themselves upon that which they are 
 denying to others, and soon will feel the sobering 
 pinch of their own mischievous blunders, and it will 
 sober them. There will be no revolution. There 
 will be only a spasm. These spasms are unpleasant 
 symptoms, but they are curable, and after a time the 
 devils of it go entirely out into the swine which go 
 tumbling down into the sea of oblivion. It is not 
 necessary to commiserate the devils which have dis- 
 
 198 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S COUNTRY 
 
 turbed this country for a time and then have only 
 succeeded in the herding of worthless swine, a sort 
 of razor-backs. They have not touched the great, 
 solid, far-thinking people of labor or commerce or 
 the professors in the schools. It is a matter of great 
 importance to our country that our people should all 
 learn as a lesson of great practical importance how 
 to interpret mere passing spasms, and to discriminate 
 between the spasms of the shallow agitators which 
 are evanescent and the symptoms of serious condi- 
 tions in the country to which sober and earnest 
 thought must be addressed; the difference between a 
 careless misuse of our constitutional privileges and 
 such a passing economic condition as that now upon 
 us, which will not be regulated by legislature but will 
 run its course until it strikes the unfailing currents 
 of demand and supply and the readjustments of 
 labor, disturbed and disordered by the inroads of the 
 war upon almost all of our callings. 
 
 It is not strange that in a conglomerate country it 
 should take time and patience to learn all of the les- 
 sons of its freedom and privileges, and at the same 
 time of its restraints and safeguards. How far can 
 we go without harm? and how far can we restrain 
 the harmful without reproducing the conditions of 
 some of the effete countries from which many of our 
 new citizens have come? We have to learn the 
 lesson that often our protests against others result 
 in more embarrassment and punishment to our- 
 selves. We cannot stop others from riding on the 
 
 199 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 elevated, the subway, and the trolleys and ride our- 
 selves. If we tie up the steam roads so that u a 
 wheel will never turn again," we who tie them up 
 must walk the ties or take to the prairie schooner 
 ourselves. If we destroy the property, who will 
 pay our wages? We do nothing to others that we 
 do not do to ourselves. We depreciate our cottages 
 and hurry the foreclosure of their mortgages. We 
 increase the cost of our living expenses. It is a 
 singular practical law in our domestic economy that 
 if we increase our wages beyond what the business 
 or corporation we serve with our labor will bear and 
 pay a return, we force up the price of our food and 
 our clothes. We visit the penalty upon ourselves, 
 and we carry up not only our expenses but those of 
 thousands who are in other callings about us and 
 disturb the economy of the whole country. There 
 is no end to the mischievous consequences of our 
 selfish course. The railroad man who complained 
 of the endless chain that carried increased wage and 
 also increased cost of living stood dazed with his 
 perplexing problem and hurried off to the govern- 
 ment to solve it for him. He became so angry over 
 it that he wanted to hurry up a firing squad and stop 
 the wheels turning, and the government gets excited 
 and starts in to put more buckets on the endless 
 chain. It proposes to legislate costs up and down, 
 and in the process it sees prices mount into the sky. 
 It might as well legislate against the tides of the sea 
 or the phases of the moon. It may catch a few 
 
 200 
 
ap 
 
 : 
 
 er 
 
 MY NEIGHBOR'S COUNTRY 
 
 profiteers and shut them up, and it should, and com- 
 pel them to disgorge their hoarded produce and 
 goods, but that does not go to the cause. It is only 
 an incident connected with the cause. The trouble 
 lies deeper. The profiteer does not make it. He 
 takes advantage of it and aggravates it within cer- 
 tain limits and narrow areas. It is a condition that 
 springs out of unusual causes. It is a shortage of 
 reduction by scarcity of labor and an overplus of 
 oney uninvested and unemployed in productive 
 nterprises. 
 
 The labor union, an artificial and unnaturally and 
 illogically attached institution in our country, work- 
 ing not for the common good but to create conditions 
 altogether possible and profitable to its own mem- 
 rs without regard to how its acts may bear upon 
 usiness of construction and manufacture, has much 
 to do with the disturbances of prices and the costs of 
 he common necessities of the life of a community, 
 t places an arbitrary demand upon business at a 
 time when business cannot carry it. The union is 
 ot capable of discriminating. If it always discrim- 
 nated justly and wisely, all fair-minded people 
 ould say that business should share with the la- 
 borers and mechanics represented by the union, that 
 e best interests of the town and of business itself 
 demanded the best wage that can be paid should 
 be paid. But often the union strikes business 
 when it is down. It may be a particular business 
 whose returns have been misrepresented and 
 
 201 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 it is impossible to carry a higher scale of wage 
 with the business as it is. The case is finally com- 
 promised and something not published is the result. 
 The commodity is pushed up, and when this becomes 
 general, from shoes to suits of clothes, from type- 
 writers to automobiles, from wheat to sugar, you 
 have the high cost of living. The labor goes be- 
 yond the production unless production takes on an 
 extra force and that the people must pay for, and 
 the workingman must pay back a part of his wages. 
 What better off is he, and what better off is busi- 
 ness? Nobody is better off but everybody is worse 
 off. 
 
 But that is not all. The union in the depths of its 
 foolish counsels decides that there are too many men 
 with first-class incomes as plumbers and tinsmiths, 
 as electricians and steam-fitters. It is best to limit 
 the number. That can be done by making the 
 services of the apprentices, the helpers, longer, and 
 the result is that young men seek other callings and 
 the trade is short-handed enough for every man to 
 have a job, but not for all the jobs to have the men 
 they want. The screws are turned down still harder, 
 for if the job seeks competent men out of the union 
 a strike is ordered in the business, even if it is a 
 hospital, that is secretly declared unfair. But this 
 is not the end. It is an unwritten law that members 
 of the union shall not overwork even their short 
 hours, and if they are demanded in emergency cases, 
 they shall have pay and a half or double pay. All 
 
 202 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S COUNTRY 
 
 of this has a direct bearing upon the high cost of 
 living. The two hours taken out of a day, the men 
 cut out of the profession or calling, all have to be 
 paid for, and the laboring man has to pay his share 
 in the high cost of living. 
 
 Our country has had to bear much and not the 
 least from its own citizens. But some day they will 
 learn the lesson. No class of men can organize 
 themselves exclusively for themselves and prosper. 
 No class can count the country out or give it a second 
 place without doing themselves equal, if not greater, 
 injury. Our roots are in the American soil. We 
 must cultivate the soil. No man can live to himself, 
 nor die to himself here, and no class of men can 
 reach the estate of another class by displacing that 
 class. They must be a class of their own. What 
 men in our country have become conspicuously great 
 by adopting other men's thinking and acting? Suc- 
 cessful men explore their own fields and make their 
 own discoveries. Those who hang on with them 
 hang upon their coat tails. It is the glory of Ameri- 
 cans that the men who count go out into the open. 
 They are not hibernates. They go from all manner 
 of homes, some of them the most humble and ob- 
 scure, from the farms of New England to the plan- 
 tations of the South, from the homes of laborers and 
 artisans to the homes of the tradesman and manu- 
 facturer. Some stay and succeed by putting new 
 discoveries into the old business. More carry their 
 genius to the ever-opening fields of a vast country 
 
 203 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 that always has and always will welcome every man 
 whose power is within himself. 
 
 There always will be room for every man. It is 
 not necessary to fence around any man to keep him 
 out of your lot. Such methods are unworthy of a 
 country like this. Its plan is more generous, its 
 highways are more open. It is a land of oppor- 
 tunities. Labor unions as now managed, but not as 
 they might be, are a wrong interpretation of 
 America. And if men cannot be permitted to 
 widen them out to the horizons of the country's 
 outer opportunities by increased proficiency, self- 
 respecting men with any appreciation of what their 
 country is ought to get out of them and leave them 
 to the narrow visions and selfish purposes that have 
 cursed them and blighted their grand possibilities. 
 We want nothing less than America for Americans. 
 We have no room in this country, except in their 
 own hibernating dens, for men without large sympa- 
 thies, without a hand for every man who is a true 
 American and who is making earnest effort to carry 
 his part of the apportioned burdens of his land. It 
 is a crime which we cannot afford to permit, that any 
 man in this country should be forced by any body of 
 men out of his own choice with his own labor. It is 
 an invaluable right fought out here in the beginning, 
 and it came as a legacy handed down with his 
 father's flintlock musket. The son made a rifle to 
 replace the flintlock because he had an opportunity. 
 It is un-American to tell a man, any man, what the 
 
 204 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S COUNTRY 
 
 limits of his opportunity are to be, within what as- 
 sociations and in what companionship. His very 
 thinking and aspirations, which may differ by far 
 distances, his sense of justice, his conception of citi- 
 zenship, all may travel on a different gauge. But 
 if he is to earn his living and support his young 
 family, he must abandon all of these and take with 
 his privilege the narrow, selfish, disloyal concepts of 
 life. There are thousands of men who will not sel 
 out at the price. It makes an American's blood run 
 hot to see the quality of men who assume the re- 
 sponsibility and privilege of determining what he 
 :haracter of industry is to be in a community, ; id 
 decide the life question of man's employmt it, 
 rhere he shall work or whether he shall wen 
 it all. In heaven's name, where did they get the 
 ight to dictate to men these questions? It did not 
 :ome from the Constitution of the United States. 
 r hat laws conveyed the privilege? Who are they? 
 r hence have they come that they shall walk into 
 rour office and order men out of your factory upon a 
 threat that if you disobey, they will stop every ma- 
 chine and shut the business down and make junk of 
 the machines? And what kind of men are they who 
 submit to it? Are they Americans? Do they care 
 more for a dollar than they do for their country's 
 freedom? What forces us to fight for freedom 
 across the sea and not for like causes at home? 
 How did these dictators come to the business office, 
 with authority, with a mandate, with an order? Yes, 
 
 205 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 they, the destroyers of your business, came with an 
 order. It was promulgated by a small body of men, 
 who did not make your business, who have not a 
 member of their organization that could create such 
 a business. If he could, he would have done it, and 
 would have claimed the right to manage it without 
 dictation, as you, under the laws of your country, 
 have a right to do. The order is sent out by a body 
 of men upon their own initiative, who have nothing 
 upon which to live but such a business as you have 
 made possible by your investment and the working- 
 men whom you choose to employ. They are men 
 who do not support their organization upon its 
 merits by rules that make its members the most 
 desirable men in the town for the shops to hire. 
 Such a club or union would not need any walking 
 delegates to place the members. If others did not 
 compete with them, they would seek such unions for 
 proficiency. The business man would need no per- 
 suasion to give first place to union men. It would 
 be determined by a law of quality which would make 
 its own way. The question of right could not be 
 raised. How it can help being raised now is puz- 
 zling in the extreme. No day is there of the present 
 practice that does not degrade us. It degrades the 
 men who are dictated to by it. It degrades the 
 manufacturers who yield their divine rights supinely 
 and cowardly to men so degraded that they will in- 
 sist upon such terms, that they will dare to threaten 
 property and business and life. 
 
 206 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S COUNTRY 
 
 The country's claim is a first claim upon every 
 man who makes his home within it, not only for the 
 unsurpassed institutions of freedom but because it 
 is the land of his home. It provides the first oppor- 
 tunity for his children as it has for himself. No 
 conditions which he does not make himself can sub- 
 ject him to an inferior station. He has a right, and 
 it becomes his duty to teach it to his children that 
 they have the right, that any man has in all the 
 broad land. The poor may hope to be rich, for 
 nearly all of the rich have been poor. We have 
 no aristocracy of wealth here. It has been 
 truthfully remarked that "it is only one gen- 
 eration from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves." u We 
 are too near to leather aprons to paint coats- 
 of-arms upon our coach doors." The men who 
 are cursing the rich are cursing their own kind 
 who have succeeded. They are the only men who 
 are trying to make a caste among us by making 
 it impossible for their own kind to improve their 
 condition. 
 
 The doors swing inward into the halls of highest 
 legislature and men, great men, great at the top are 
 needed there. And in no country does so large a 
 proportion of men equipped intellectually come 
 from the homes of the workingmen. They make 
 up the bulk of the college boys. There is scarcely a 
 rich man's college in America. If there is one so 
 called, its doors are open to poor boys upon the same 
 terms. Every profession from the ministry through 
 
 207 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 is manned almost entirely with the sons and daugh- 
 ters of homes of humble circumstances. America 
 has open doors for all people. Opportunity is upon 
 the archway of every avenue that leads the way in 
 front of all aspirations from the lowest state to the 
 highest renown. The processions are from every 
 station and walk in our glorious country. Every 
 man is free for everything, for every calling and am- 
 bition except the choice of where he shall perform 
 his day's labor. He can join any church. He can 
 attend any college or technical school. He can 
 choose any business. But he cannot say where he 
 shall work without a card from a company of aristo- 
 crats who have stolen out of our freedom, our in- 
 alienable liberties of what they claim is their right 
 in the case. It is the one diseased spot in our 
 economy, and the sooner the surgeon's knife goes to 
 the last fiber and root of it, the easier will it be 
 eradicated, and the safer will be our national 
 economy. It is the only thing which adds to the em- 
 barrassments of business in manufacture, husbandry, 
 and commerce, and imposes a greater burden rela- 
 tively upon the poor man's home and reduces his 
 children nearer to serfdom. The only thing that 
 stands in the way of the poor man is the poor man's 
 poor judgment in the plain things that concern him- 
 self. When he finds himself differing from the 
 common economy, things exacted of him which in- 
 fringe upon his freedom, and which classify him by 
 himself under the pretense of benefit, he should 
 
 208 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S COUNTRY 
 
 answer, "My country is good enough for me upon 
 the plan of liberty for all men." 
 
 No man has so much at stake in his country as the 
 workingman. It is from it that springs his hope 
 of existence, to say nothing of the happiness of his 
 family and the promise of future good. His in- 
 vestments are more literally in it than are those of 
 the capitalist whom he is taught by fools to hate. 
 The rich have a measure of independence. He is 
 not limited to one country nor to one class of associ- 
 ates. The poor man's home and habits of liveli- 
 hood, his employment is a fixed condition. Values 
 must be brought to him. He must make it of inter- 
 est for investments to be made in his community. 
 Whatever his calling and trade or labor, it is linked 
 up to every useful pursuit in the country, and when 
 he goes out in the morning with his dinner pail he 
 should go with the feeling and a proud one too 
 that he is going out that day to serve his country. 
 The men he saw a few months ago marching away 
 to stirring music, with martial tread, excited the 
 shouts of their neighbors because they were going to 
 serve their country, and nothing should be detracted 
 from that applause. Gloriously they served their 
 country, and they are worthy of all praise. 
 
 But did they serve their country more than the 
 thousands of workingmen, mechanics, and laborers 
 who go out of their homes every morning to produce 
 those things indispensable to a country's develop- 
 ment and sustenance? But the soldier went to death 
 
 209 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 and severed limbs. So, too often, the workingman. 
 It is said, and we believe truthfully, that twice more 
 men lose a leg or an arm in the labor callings, man 
 for man, than in warfare, besides thousands injured 
 in other ways. It is a mistake for the workingman 
 not to feel that his work is patriotic, and it is a 
 mistake for him not to feel his responsibility of it on 
 that side. Can it be that such universal strikes as 
 we are having in nearly every trade can affect only 
 the investor and contractor and men chiefly of 
 money known as capitalists? It is a condition which 
 lacerates every nerve of the whole land and must be 
 paid for in the final analysis by the workingman 
 whose fate rises and falls as the tide of his country's 
 business is flowing in or out. This is a case where 
 man makes the tides. Foolish is the man who does 
 not see that what he does must be done earnestly for 
 his country. The soldier sacrificed everything for 
 the common cause. It was the earnest objective, 
 and it was only indirectly his country. It was di- 
 rectly another man's country, also it was a common 
 freedom. Strange if the man with a home, with a 
 wife and little ones, should not feel a more intense 
 patriotism. His country cannot be sacrificed to 
 wages. There must be enough resources in my 
 country to give every man a living, but my country is 
 before my living. My country first, good or bad. 
 If good, I will rejoice in it. If bad, I will give my- 
 self to improve it. I will not hinder it and obstruct 
 it. I will help it. 
 
 210 
 
 

 CHAPTER X 
 MY NEIGHBOR'S PATRIOTISM 
 
 WE have seen the workingman's country, the op- 
 portunities and peculiar advantages which it offers 
 to the toilers, the artisans, and even to the poor. 
 We see its men who begin with no investment but 
 their wits and their hands passing into positions of 
 emolument and honor, and leaving their families 
 possessed of great estates, in many cases. What do 
 they give their country in exchange for it all? A 
 patriot puts his country before all others and all else. 
 His sacrifices go to the extent of his life and his 
 fortune, great or small. If he finds himself in any 
 organization, be it church or charity or economics, 
 which puts anything before his country, or any flag, 
 red or black, above Old Glory, it is time for him to 
 inquire earnestly as to the place his citizenship is 
 occupying. Is it where it should be? Can he place 
 anything before his loyalty to the institutions of 
 human freedom? Can he allow any authority or 
 compact to become a superior obligation? Can he 
 subscribe to any constitution that will displace the 
 constitution of his country, for any purpose what- 
 ever? Is he in any club or union which by any 
 dictatorship can issue orders which supersede and 
 assert an overruling control over the laws of his 
 
 211 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 land? A man who enlists in such a governing body 
 and places himself in defiance of his country's laws 
 will find himself in an ugly list where loyal men are 
 not catalogued. 
 
 There are certain very apparent reasons which 
 make labor unions, as they have come to be managed, 
 camps of questionable loyalty. First, Do their leaders 
 openly declare themselves against the control and 
 interference of the government? Second, Do they 
 order strikes at the business of the country without 
 regard to the effect upon the common peace and the 
 common interests of the community or the state? 
 Third, Do they, as reported, ever harbor men of 
 boasted principles opposed to the institutions of our 
 land? Fourth, Are the bomb-thrower and incen- 
 diary traced to a union or federation of unions, as 
 was shown in the San Francisco and Los Angeles 
 cases? Fifth, Do they insist that all things shall yield 
 to incessant and inconsiderate demands for greater 
 wage without regard or concern for the disturbance 
 of economic demands of their fellow men and the 
 rights of their neighbors for fair prices and a just 
 cost of living? Sixth, Are they not reckless of the 
 destruction of human life in their controversies and 
 strikes? At no time have they given such evidence 
 of these things as now. Is it only a coincidence that 
 three of the great interests directly related to our 
 national prosperity and to the safety of the people 
 should have been selected as objects of the arbitrary 
 and inhuman strike? The railroads were assailed 
 
 212 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S PATRIOTISM 
 
 in harvest time and are menaced again when carry- 
 ing coal and distributing food. The steel industry 
 was attacked when the country was trying to re- 
 cover from the paralysis of war which arrested, 
 by government order, all building operations. The 
 coal mines were closed at the opening of winter, 
 which meant not only the stopping of locomotives 
 on their tracks but the closing down of manufacture 
 and throwing upon the streets in winter of hun- 
 dreds of thousands of workingmen from contented 
 employments, and the suffering of whole communi- 
 ties for fuel and the starvation of thousands of the 
 poor. Was this loyal? Was this common human- 
 ity? No unjust wage could possibly excuse this in- 
 humanity. 
 
 There is not in it an instinct of loyalty to which an 
 appeal can be made, nor is there an instinct of hu- 
 manity for which an argument can be presented. We 
 have had nothing in the application of union prin- 
 ciples in this country which has reached such a degree 
 of indifference to the common safety and that is posi- 
 tively so lacking in moral sense as the coal strike. It 
 is easily explained by the fact that the workers at the 
 mines are men of the lower type, the foreigners, but 
 it is amazing that men of supposed intelligence and 
 loyalty should lead ignorant men into defiance of our 
 courts. It is not a case of underpaid and protesting 
 men threatened with cold and hunger. It is an 
 effort to force their higher wage by imperiling 
 the innocent. It is a demand for increased pay 
 
 213 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 which is reckless of consequences. A great utility 
 concerns all of the people and takes on the nature of 
 a patriotic service. It cannot be decided on grounds 
 of wage merely. 
 
 The railroad employees have received increased 
 wages which have cost the government millions of 
 money beyond traffic receipts. The steel laborers 
 are receiving astonishing wages, surpassing the in- 
 come of many of the professions. We have vivid 
 illustrations of what certain men, whom we will not 
 characterize, will do if they get into their hands the 
 instruments of destruction with which to work their 
 purposes and passions. 
 
 The most serious thing about it is that there are 
 enough respectable men of American birth or of un- 
 doubted loyalty to give a certain respectability to the 
 efforts of the coarse and riotous elements. If our 
 respected neighbors and fellow citizens would with- 
 draw entirely from organizations which wear the 
 brand of treason against their country until such time 
 as a reform may displace the disloyal practices that 
 now threaten the land with bloody revolution, they 
 would carry a weight of tranquillity and order which 
 nothing could resist. The ignorant foreign menace 
 in our mills and shops would disappear if the lead- 
 ers were to receive notice that the thinking men of 
 the unions insist upon first consideration for the 
 interests of the whole people. There are problems 
 wider than mines, longer than railroads, that 
 vastly overtop the twenty-four hours a week or ten 
 
 214 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S PATRIOTISM 
 
 dollars a day of men whose whole concept of citizen- 
 ship consists of pay beyond the dreams of fiction. 
 The country has no right and no duty so great as its 
 duty to put forth the claims of the whole people. 
 The entire people deserve consideration which re- 
 duces the workingman's hours and wage to a mini- 
 mum. He should receive all that his labor is worth. 
 He receives more than the school teacher, the 
 store clerk. It is high time that he were halted 
 at the threshold of interests as great as he 
 represents which are toiling on under the burden 
 which his excessive wage imposes. One might 
 think that all that this country has in hand and its 
 only obligation is to stop all business, all manufac- 
 ture, all transportation, all mines, annually until it 
 adjusts the wages satisfactorily to the demand of 
 hordes of immigrants, or those of immigrant extrac- 
 tion, that have become crazed by the fabulous pay 
 envelope that would have been in one year "unim- 
 agined riches in the land from which they came. 
 There are others in this country besides union wage 
 earners. There are others besides Poles, Italians, 
 Greeks, and Slovaks, who have a claim that must 
 be heard. There are small tradesmen and manu- 
 facturers; there are farmers and builders of homes; 
 there are steam and electric plants; there are car- 
 riers of all kinds; and there are teachers and preach- 
 ers and lawyers and doctors of the villages and small 
 cities of small salaries and fees, thousands of them. 
 The enumeration could be extended. They do not 
 
 215 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 strike. They are too intelligent and loyal for 
 demagogues to attempt to lead them into any conflict 
 against the common good to secure selfish interests. 
 But they have a right to insist that the perpetual 
 agitation by persons of less claim than they, which 
 is pushing the cost of living beyond their reach, shall 
 cease, and that the conspirators who are assailing 
 our government and the agitators who are constantly 
 stirring up strife among the dangerous elements of 
 the laboring class shall go behind secure bars or 
 across the seas whence they came. 
 
 Duty to our country never was plainer. Our time 
 is not too long to stop a revolution beside which the 
 much quoted and orated French Revolution will be a 
 passing spasm. With the insidious attack upon the 
 police and the bold claim that the army shall be 
 unionized, and with the completion of the ultimate 
 plans of the vast conspiracy, where is the hope of 
 our country? With one element working through 
 the unions to overthrow the government and dictat- 
 ing the social order, with millions organizing for 
 selfish ends without regard to consequences to the 
 country and to their neighbors, how long will it be 
 before the most terrible civil and social war the 
 world has ever known will be upon us? Already 
 the forces have reached preparations which seriously 
 threaten the country. Since the war closed a thou- 
 sand strikes have developed all over the land and in 
 every form of business. They cannot be for higher 
 pay. The workingman has shown a modicum of 
 
 216 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S PATRIOTISM 
 
 modesty in urging a higher wage and is now coached 
 to say that he is contending for his right to organize 
 and bargain and strike. But that is only prelimi- 
 nary. His leaders are giving the real contention 
 when they charge the trouble not to the capitalist or 
 contractor, but to the government. The whole 
 order of things is wrong. The purpose is to over- 
 throw every opposing force and to control legisla- 
 ture, courts, and officers of the law. Nothing could 
 be more shrewd. The outward appeal is for the 
 poor. The charge is cruelty and brutality to the 
 oppressed workingman. He is excited by having 
 his home contrasted with that of the rich who a few 
 years ago worked at the same forge or with the 
 trowel beside him. He is not allowed to think that 
 there may be an explanation in himself. It is all an 
 oppressive system under which he lives. He is told 
 that he and his fellows made the business and the 
 plants, and that the profits belong to them. The 
 government contests that claim and defines property 
 rights and protects those who hold manufacturing 
 plants and the profits from them in the hands of 
 their owners. Before he can break in upon them 
 and secure them, the government must be broken 
 down. That is the doctrine taught for years by 
 the gutter orators. We have laughed at it, but it 
 has spread to the union. It has been talked in the 
 saloon. It has been revolved in the brain of the 
 discontented laborer and his wife and their neighbor, 
 and to-day millions of men are being urged to con- 
 
 217 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 test the question as one of personal liberty, and the 
 very doctrines of America are being used as a screen 
 to cover the secret plans and propaganda of the most 
 dangerous foes who have ever imperiled our land. 
 
 If the red socialism has so far got control of our 
 labor organizations in so short a time as to threaten 
 the government with cool impunity and to defy its 
 highest lawmaking bodies, what would there be but 
 blood and fierce revolution if these insidious forces 
 could capture the greatest industries of the country 
 the railroads, the steel plants, and the coal mines? 
 And if they added to these, as is being planned and 
 urged, the federating of the farmer, death would 
 have to strike but a short hand blow to capture the 
 republic. 
 
 There is not a more promising country in the 
 world in which to plant the standard of a universal 
 Bolshevism. What blind folly for any to warn us 
 from newspaper columns not to talk of Bolshevism 
 and the I. W. W. as imprudent and irritating! We 
 have had enough of that idiocy. It is time to cry 
 aloud and spare not. It is time to warn our neighbor 
 that treason is federated against his land and coun- 
 try by the alien, and that it means his cottage, his 
 savings bank, his wife, and his liberty in the fall of 
 human law and human rights in organic government. 
 It is time to urge him to abandon an organization, 
 however good may have been its original plans, 
 which seems to be falling into the hands of the foes 
 of our country. The union is fast becoming the 
 
 218 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S PATRIOTISM 
 
 property of the leaders of the poor dupes who fall 
 to their schemes. 
 
 To-day the men who are prospering by strikes 
 and the general agitation among the men are the lead- 
 ers who live in first-class hotels and travel through 
 the country in parlor cars and sport a green bay tree 
 fame before legislative committees and arbitrative 
 councils. They lose no wage. Their homes are 
 on no short allowance. They are not shot in street 
 riots. And when the revolution comes they will 
 order out the firing squads, and they will run away 
 from their desolation when the smoldering embers 
 of the most just and the fairest government that 
 ever blessed mankind cries to heaven against them. 
 Who will be the ruined in that hour, who the dead? 
 The only friends the workingman ever had, the men 
 who built the factory where he worked, the men who 
 financied the business which shared the profits in his 
 wage, the men who built his dispensaries and his 
 hospitals and orphan homes and asylums, the men 
 who created the sanitary conditions which provided 
 health to his home and conducted savings banks to 
 keep safer his earnings and pay him an income on 
 them that soon added substantially to his wages, the 
 men who founded his colleges. Who will build up 
 the ruin again and start the fires in the boilers of the 
 factories and set the foolish dupes, who destroyed 
 themselves, to work again? Not the traitors who 
 ran away, but men just like those who died fighting 
 the murderers of their country. The same plans 
 
 219 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 must come back. The same old order must be re- 
 established. For six thousand years the world has 
 found nothing better, not anything which can be 
 possibly substituted. 
 
 If I am an alarmist, I am not alone. In the 
 Adirondacks, in the clear, balsamic air and the 
 transparent light there, these thoughts pressed upon 
 me and compelled utterance. But I have discovered 
 that the clash and roar of the city was sounding the 
 alarm in the ears of philosophers and profound 
 thinkers there. In Harvey's Weekly have appeared 
 the following warnings, to which we all will do well 
 to take heed: 
 
 With over five hundred newspapers, magazines, 
 and pamphlets in every language, even including 
 English, openly preaching the revolutionary over- 
 throw of our government, and anarchist orators 
 howling it to mobs all over the country for a year 
 or more, the federal authorities have found out that 
 there is a propaganda of this sort going on ! They 
 have found out what every man, woman, and child 
 in the country, of ordinary intelligence, has known 
 for months and years! 
 
 They have found out also, let us hope, that back 
 of this outbreak of strikes from one end of the coun- 
 try to the other over one thousand six hundred in 
 the last eight months there looms this same sinister 
 Bolshevist menace. They have found out that 
 strikes have been instigated and precipitated by this 
 same gang of brazen traitors who, once the strike is 
 under way, make it the vehicle for the inculcation of 
 their creed of wreck and ruin for our American form 
 
 220 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S PATRIOTISM 
 
 of government : of property seizure by mob violence ; 
 the substitution of mob government for government 
 by law. 
 
 The federal authorities, we are informed, have at 
 last found out the notorious, and are "in possession 
 of evidence" of it. Possibly the shrewd suspicions 
 of the federal sleuths were aroused by some such 
 utterances as these, taken from an I. W. W. pam- 
 phlet scattered by thousands over the country and 
 particularly in the innumerable strike centers. We 
 quote from the quotation in the Times : 
 
 "When the proletariat shall have overthrown 
 capitalism, the I. W. W. will stand, ready made, the 
 preestablished government of the new order. It 
 will not be necessary to call constituent conventions. 
 It will not be necessary to create Soviets. It will not 
 be necessary to lavish the precious energies of the 
 proletariat in the desperate experiment of politics, 
 for the I. W. W., which will have fought the revolu- 
 tion, will also pass over the framework of the new 
 communism. The existing parliamentary govern- 
 ment will crumble into uselessness. The industrial 
 unions will become the supreme national power. 
 Each industrial union will expropriate the capitalists 
 from its industry. The functions of industrial man- 
 agement will be taken over by the union." 
 
 This is the sort of stuff that has been spread 
 broadcast in print and howled from anarchist 
 rostrums for months, until, as Senator Poindexter 
 put it, "the country is seething with violations of 
 the law so far as revolutionary utterances are con- 
 cerned." And the federal authorities having the 
 evidence of all this, why in the name of heaven do 
 not the federal authorities act? Why are these an- 
 archistic agitators allowed to run at large? There 
 
 221 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 are laws in abundance under which they may be 
 jailed, deported, hanged if need be. Why are not 
 these laws enforced? 
 
 Senator Poindexter has offered a resolution call- 
 ing upon the attorney-general for an explanation of 
 the Department of Justice's strange laxity in this 
 grave matter. It is a timely resolution. If it re- 
 sults in stirring the federal authorities to action, it 
 will be a service to the country of which the country 
 is sorely in need. There is but one remedy for the 
 anarchistic vermin, foreign or native, now swarming 
 with impunity all over the country, and that remedy 
 is extermination. 
 
 "Nationalization of industries" is the glib shibbo- 
 leth of the day. It is demanded by the revolution- 
 ists, advocated by the trades unionists, and wor- 
 shiped as the Beauty of Holiness by the Parlor 
 Bolshevists. "The nationalization of mines," says 
 the London Daily Herald, the British labor organ, 
 "is the question immediately at issue, but is, of 
 course, a precursor to a complete policy of national- 
 ization of industry. Here is the battle joined." 
 As in Great Britain, so in the United States. The 
 nationalization demands of the railroad brother- 
 hoods, made only a few weeks ago, are still remem- 
 bered, and are being echoed and repeated by in- 
 numerable strikers and agitators to-day. On that 
 issue "is the battle joined." 
 
 Now, there would be ample reason for opposing 
 and rejecting this demand on the simple and obvious 
 ground of ultra vires. It is a demand which the 
 
 222 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S PATRIOTISM 
 
 trades unions as such have no business to make. It 
 is political, not economical. It is radically and es- 
 sentially different from a demand for higher wages, 
 shorter hours, profit-sharing, right of organization, 
 collective bargaining, or anything of that sort. 
 These are economic demands which workmen as 
 workmen have a right to make. They concern di- 
 rectly, primarily, perhaps exclusively, the employees 
 and their employers. But the demand for govern- 
 ment ownership of industries does not concern them 
 any more than it does every other citizen of the 
 nation. It is a political policy, of universal interest, 
 and is to be determined not by the wishes of any one 
 class, however numerous or respectable, but by the 
 deliberate will and judgment of the entire nation. 
 For labor unions to demand government ownership 
 and to go on strike to compel its adoption is as un- 
 reasonable as it would be for them thus to demand 
 and to strike for election of the President by popular 
 vote instead of by the electoral college, or for aboli- 
 tion of the federal income tax system. 
 
 There is, however, a still more serious objection 
 to this demand. It is suggested by the fact, made 
 more and more obtrusive day by day, that these very 
 men who most vociferously demand government 
 ownership are foremost in flouting and defying gov- 
 ernment authority after it has been extended over 
 industries. That has been and is to-day the case in 
 this country. It has been while the railroads were 
 under government control and operation that the 
 
 223 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 most formidable strikes on them have been planned. 
 It is under government participation in the admin- 
 istration of the mines that coal miners have threat- 
 ened the worst strike in history. It was in direct 
 defiance of government counsel and intervention 
 that the dock workers went on strike and strove to 
 starve the great cities. Government control and 
 operation of industries command no more respect 
 and give no more satisfaction than private control 
 and operation; and it is therefore obvious that if 
 government ownership should be put into effect there 
 would be no abatement of agitation and strikes. 
 The only change would be that then these would be 
 directed not against individual or corporate em- 
 ployers, but against the national government it- 
 self. 
 
 And that, we must conclude, is what the advocates 
 of government ownership have in mind. That is 
 the purpose of their demand. They want to strike 
 against the government. They want to be in a 
 position to coerce the government to their will, by 
 the menace of a universal strike of its employees and 
 the consequent paralysis of its functions. That is to 
 say, they want to place the government of the nation 
 under the control of the labor unions ; so that a walk- 
 ing delegate can go to Washington and dictate to 
 Congress what laws it shall and shall not enact, and 
 to the President what policy he shall or shall not 
 pursue in either domestic or foreign affairs. That 
 is what government ownership would mean. It 
 
 224 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S PATRIOTISM 
 
 would mean not only ownership and control of in- 
 dustries by the government, but also, and equally, 
 ownership and control of the government by the 
 trades unions. It would be government of the na- 
 tion by a minority class. It would be, in a word, 
 sovietism. 
 
 We do not believe that the American people are 
 willing to accept such a system. We have faith to 
 believe that, at no matter what cost of strife or 
 struggle, they will insist upon maintaining what 
 Theodore Parker once well described as u the Ameri- 
 can idea, ... a democracy that is, a government 
 of all the people, by all the people, for all the 
 people." But we warn them to-day that "eternal 
 vigilance is the price at which such government is to 
 be maintained." 
 
 The only trouble with the American people is that 
 they will awaken too late. When once aroused it 
 will be as stormy a day for our internal enemies as it 
 would be for an invading army. But our foe is 
 insidious, plausible, and insinuating, and we are still 
 questioning as to his real purpose. 
 
 The United States attorney-general said of 
 the coal strike : "It would be a more deadly 
 attack on the life of the nation than an invading 
 army. The facts present a situation that chal- 
 lenges the supremacy of the law." And this attack 
 is led by leaders who, while defying the government, 
 are busy at their infamous work undisturbed by 
 officers of the law. And the government officials 
 
 225 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 publish their intentions not to indict these men on 
 charges of conspiracy to reduce (in war time) the 
 production of a necessary product, a product indis- 
 pensable to life in our winter climate, and to the 
 distribution of food. 
 
 General Leonard Wood, whose words are never 
 ill-considered, has recently said: "Roosevelt stated 
 openly there was no room in this country for the red 
 flag, and let me repeat there is no room in this coun- 
 try for the red flag. It is against everything which 
 this country stands for the home, the town, the 
 nation, public morality, private well-being, the 
 security of our institutions, everything that we hold 
 most dear. Kill it as you would kill a rattle- 
 snake, and smack those who follow it, speak for it, 
 or support it. They are dangerous enemies of the 
 state." 
 
 It may be said that it is unfair to compare the 
 workingman's organization with the open or secret 
 enemies of our country, but our citizens are respon- 
 sible for the acts of the ignorant foreign element of 
 the country if they teach or practice the right of dis- 
 loyal attacks, by strikes or otherwise, upon the peace 
 of the community. The fact that they resort to 
 practices that no other Americans under any other 
 banner use to enforce their claims, and that these 
 things have encouraged bombs and incendiarism, 
 and that the authors of violence are often 
 traced to the unions, is ground for serious thought 
 on the part of federated labor and for reform in 
 
 226 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S PATRIOTISM 
 
 every union of the land. It is a direct and emphatic 
 claim for loyalty. Men may and do have a right to 
 quit a job, but not so as to injure the plant or to 
 abridge the rights of their fellow workmen, nor have 
 they a right to enter a conspiracy that will imperil 
 the life and health or business of their neighbors. 
 
 It is a poor loyalty which reckons equivalents. 
 One day that question, "What shall we have there- 
 fore?" entered the minds of the followers of the 
 world's greatest Teacher and Guide. It always is 
 in the world. "Will it pay?" 'What is there in it? 
 It is a proper question in a business transaction. 
 There a man has a right to ask it. There is Bible 
 authority for counting the cost if one is to build a 
 castle. But there are things in which such a calcula- 
 tion is impossible. Love gives and does not ask 
 what it is to get in exchange. A parent does not ask 
 whether it will pay to raise a child. The less likely 
 it is to pay, the more affection and care are bestowed 
 upon it. Children who have come to the responsi- 
 bilities of the old homestead do not ask whether 
 it will pay to keep father and mother who are wait- 
 ing beside the hearthstone after the active years 
 have passed by. 
 
 There was an old-fashioned love of country of 
 which we heard much when we were boys. And it 
 was love of country which faced death and endured 
 all things for the love of country. The new doc- 
 trine of getting as much, for as little as possible, 
 from our country, is not indigenous to our land. It 
 
 227 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 is imported and enforced by those who never knew 
 the love of any country and who strangely hate ours. 
 He is a poor American who is receptive to these doc- 
 trines. A true American will place love of country 
 above love of all things else. 
 
 225 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 MY NEIGHBOR AND THE CAPITALIST 
 
 IT is well known that all these things which the 
 public charges to the labor union its injustice and 
 coarse epithets applied to the nonunion working- 
 man, the poor quality of work, the often-repeated 
 and unreasonable strikes, the damage to business 
 and to trade in the community, and the destruction 
 of property are all laid at the door of capital, as 
 though capital were a tyrant without mercy to the 
 poor man forced to earn his living in the tyrant's 
 employment. The anarchist workingman is drilled 
 in the school of hate. He is taught that the 
 capitalist has stolen his property from the working- 
 man, that his factory belongs to the workingmen 
 who built it, and should be owned and run by them; 
 that the profits of the business should be divided 
 among those who manufacture the goods, and that 
 they are only asserting a just claim for what they 
 get, and that much more belongs to them. It 
 always is a hopeless task to argue with those who 
 reason upon the surface of things and whose vision 
 is bounded by their own selfish aims and desires. 
 They cannot see that their conceptions of human 
 
 229 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 life would have kept mankind cave dwellers. They, 
 in fact, talk as though that would be a better condi- 
 tion if they cannot control the present order of 
 things. 
 
 Intelligent and thoughtful men know that there 
 is very little difference between the labor capitalist 
 and the labor workingman. They both are labor- 
 ers. The labor professional man and the hand 
 workingman are both workingmen. 
 
 In a construction the laborer puts in his labor, but 
 it cannot be called capital. He takes out daily or 
 weekly or monthly an equivalent of it, and carries it 
 away. He leaves nothing to work on the next day. 
 It must be new work the next day, left for him by 
 some one who did not carry away all that belon^ 
 to him. If he took a profit, he could not carry it all 
 away and use it upon himself. He had to deny h 
 self. It was necessary for him to bring back most 
 of the profits and build another factory, that we 
 ingmen might be employed, or buy new stock, m 
 steel, more leather, or other material for these men 
 to work up into products. What he brings back and 
 puts into the business is capital. It may have been 
 money which he saved while other men spent tru 
 in careless or intemperate living. Possibly it was 
 inherited from industrious and frugal pare 
 whose lands cleared by their own hands had gre 
 increased in value, or it came from one or. more TV 
 that have furnished opportunities for the ac- 
 tion of wealth in all lands. It was saved and put 
 
 230 
 
MY NEIGHBOR AND THE CAPITALIST 
 
 into more accumulation and that is capital. I ven- 
 ture that there is as much self-denial and personal 
 sacrifice in the accumulations of capital as can be 
 found in any of the activities of men, those accumu- 
 lations which are put at the service of the world, 
 which are turned over for other men to use. 
 
 It is a peculiarity of the capitalists of our times 
 that they do not take their profits and hide them 
 away in vaults or deposit them in banks. During 
 the years of their vigor they employ them in ways 
 which furnish the workingman opportunity to earn 
 his living. In what other ways could it be done if it 
 were not done by the capitalist? Certainly, it could 
 lot be done by any soviet plan of the workingmen 
 rho carry away what they get and use it in the day's 
 iccessities or in small savings. Where the exped- 
 ient has been made, it has failed and been aban- 
 loned. Keep in mind the fact that capital is what 
 the hated capitalist leaves in the factory and stock, 
 that the laborer may go to work again to-morrow. 
 He is not the man to be hated by the workingmen. 
 He should be esteemed and prized as a philan- 
 thropist. The man who is a burden upon the body 
 politic and in the way of the workingman is the man 
 who is loafing on the workingman's savings. He is 
 the walking delegate. He is a leech on the work- 
 ingmen's toils. And equally an enemy is any 
 one who thrusts himself into the counsels of the 
 unions and by self-assertion, through fluency of 
 speech and assumption of superior wisdom, through 
 
 231 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 uncontroverted, nonsensical theories on labor and 
 capital, reaches the position of a leader. 
 
 For hundreds of years the world has been ascend- 
 ing the summits where trade and manufacture are 
 in a safe economic system, where the workingman 
 can safely offer his labor with a sure reward of his 
 toils. You see it in the capitalist's corporation. 
 For a time it was in a questionable relation to the 
 public, for we had watered the stock, and it was 
 bartered about in the markets which came to be 
 known as the stock market. But at last it found its 
 level, and the pirates upon it found their level behind 
 prison bars. To-day it safeguards the working- 
 man as does nothing else in the protection of his 
 wages and in a secure form for his savings, if 
 he counsels with conservative employers and bank 
 managers. 
 
 Capital is not a man to run away and leave unpaid 
 debts, or to fail with preferred creditors and a bank- 
 ruptcy of fifty per cent without securities. The 
 corporation has a habitation and must answer to the 
 law for what it is and what it has. With all its 
 old-time faults and present mistakes, it stands under 
 our great financial institutions and manufacturing 
 plants. It accounts for our railroads, every one of 
 them throughout the whole country. Far from be- 
 ing the covered bridge to the rich man's stealings, it 
 is another form of savings bank for widows and 
 orphans and for the workingman's weekly earnings. 
 The corporation is not the exclusive property of the 
 
 232 
 
MY NEIGHBOR AND THE CAPITALIST 
 
 rich, but in its lists are hundreds of small holders 
 who receive four times a year, in most cases, but 
 always with precise regularity, their dividends. In 
 the great railroads and steel companies and auto- 
 mobile concerns and steamship lines the workingman 
 is often an owner and is a capitalist, for he is leaving 
 something of his earnings to go on and do the 
 world's business. If he hates capital, he hates his 
 own savings whether they be in a bank or invested 
 in a few stocks of a corporation. 
 
 Mr. A. H. Smith, president of the New York 
 Central Lines, writes me in reply to an inquiry: "I 
 beg to advise that our stock records show that the 
 tockholders of the New York Central Railroad 
 'ompany numbered 29,325 on September 22, 1919, 
 >f which 18,176, about 62 per cent, were registered 
 >wners of less than 100 shares each." That is, 
 msiderably over one half of the owners of one of 
 ie greatest railroads in the world are presumably 
 >eople of moderate circumstances, certainly of small 
 id not market-controlling shares. 
 Two days later I received the following from Mr. 
 >amuel Rea, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad 
 Company: "Replying to your letter of the I9th in- 
 :ant: On August 31, 1919, there was outstanding a 
 ill amount of full-paid capital stock of $499,265,- 
 roo, and there were 112,917 stockholders in the 
 'ennsylvania Railroad Company, their average 
 loldings being 88.4 shares (par value $50 each). 
 Of this number only 992 were corporations, so that 
 
 233 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 our stock, to a very large extent, is held by in- 
 dividuals. Of the total number of stockholders 
 55,201, or 48.89 per cent, are women, and their 
 average holdings are 54 shares. Altogether, women 
 own 30.07 per cent of our total stock outstanding. 
 The State of Pennsylvania leads in the number of 
 our stockholders with 51,940. New York is next 
 with 19,950. New England has 16,342. Foreign 
 1,728, and scattering 23,317." 
 
 A letter of inquiry addressed to Judge Gary, head 
 of the United States Steel Corporation, brought the 
 following from Mr. Thomas Murray, assistant sec- 
 retary: "Referring to your favor of the I9th instant 
 to Judge Gary: At the present time, we have 
 152,584 stockholders, which, divided into our total 
 number of shares, would represent an average of 
 fifty-seven shares for each stockholder. Of the 
 I 5 2 >5^4 stockholders, 45,963 are women, and 
 45,000 are employees who hold stock. There were 
 59,864 employees who subscribed in January, 1919, 
 to the 1919 Stock Subscription Plan. These were 
 old as well as new subscribers. When their accounts 
 are paid up, it is estimated that it will largely in- 
 crease the number of our employees who are stock- 
 holders. We regret to say that we have no later 
 figures than those made up the latter part of the 
 year 1911 in regard to the actual number of shares 
 held by the small investor. You will note that our 
 present stockholders number 152,584. In 1911, 
 the number of stockholders amounted to 102,343. 
 
 234 
 
MY NEIGHBOR AND THE CAPITALIST 
 
 1 share 10,864 
 
 2 shares 7>i4 
 
 3 shares 4*692 
 
 4 shares 2,902 
 
 5 shares 7*855 
 
 6 to 10 shares 20,305 
 
 ii to 25 shares 18,236 
 
 26 to 50 shares 12,434 
 
 51 to 100 shares 8,834 
 
 101 to 500 shares -6,635 
 
 501 to 1000 shares 896 
 
 Over 1000 shares I 55 
 
 102,343 
 "THOMAS MURRAY, 
 
 "Assistant Secretary." 
 
 I had chosen four of the great corporations, that 
 I might learn the facts concerning the holders of 
 their stocks. The fourth one was the Crucible 
 Steel Company, of which my neighbor, Mr. H. S. 
 Wilkinson, is the president. Mr. Wilkinson gives 
 me the same report that I received from the other 
 heads of the great corporations. The majority of 
 the stockholders are people of moderate means, 
 widely distributed. It is the policy of the Crucible 
 Steel Company to make it possible for a large constit- 
 uency to hold the stock of that great corporation, 
 which is managed in the interest of all the stock- 
 holders. 
 
 These great concerns are not managed for specu- 
 lative purposes. Their managers have their for- 
 
 235 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 tunes invested in them. The American capital be- 
 hind the workingman is exceedingly interesting, and 
 he who talks about capitalists oppressing the poor 
 gives a glaring exhibition of his ignorance. He 
 who is deceived is without excuse. The capitalists 
 are not what were once known as "bloated bond 
 holders." They are men and women of all thrifty 
 classes. Capital is not something with which men 
 are gambling at the expense of the poor man, but it 
 is what is left over to go into business which helps 
 directly the workingman. It keeps the railroads 
 running, the factory wheels turning, and the great 
 steel forges glowing with industry. If it were all 
 owned by the rich, it is not hoarded. If you destroy 
 it, or distribute it to the communists, you stop every 
 wheel in the country. This would be the most 
 effective way to stop the wheels so they would never 
 start again, as was threatened by an agitator a few 
 weeks ago. 
 
 One of the happiest phases of American industrial 
 life is that our working people can and do invest in 
 the same enterprises as those from which the rich 
 receive their dividends. The same mail carries 
 them out the same day to the same post offices. And 
 the small holdings of to-day become the larger ones 
 to-morrow. 
 
 The wealth of our country is not held by primo- 
 geniture entailed through long generations in vast 
 landed estates in which the majority of the rural 
 population lives by leaseholds, and it does not cor- 
 
 236 
 
MY NEIGHBOR AND THE CAPITALIST 
 
 respond to the old definitions of values which cannot 
 be exchanged except for labor. We* are in a time 
 when labor has an exchange value and its returns 
 exceed the simple hunger and clothes and shelter 
 uses. The laboring man who is frugal and temper- 
 ate as a rule has a margin, if small, which can be 
 invested and pays him a return value, and to that 
 extent is wealth. And this is not to be despised, 
 because in this country some of the greatest for- 
 tunes and some of the largest capitalists have sprung 
 from homes and conditions of poverty. The Rocke- 
 fellers and Carnegies were poor boys. Mr. Car- 
 negie when a boy, as has been previously stated, 
 worked for a dollar a week and vainly tried to die a 
 >oor man. Mr. John Dustin Archbold was the son 
 f a Methodist minister and recalled the days when, 
 is they moved from one circuit to another, he, a 
 Barefooted boy, led the cow behind the wagon which 
 :arried the few pieces of their rude furniture. 
 
 One evening, walking through I25th Street, New 
 'ork, with my intimate friend John S. Huyler, the 
 :andy manufacturer, I found myself suddenly pulled 
 iround facing a plate glass window of a store and 
 ;aw before me a man pulling candy from a hook, 
 [r. Huyler said to me: "There I am. That is 
 'here Jack Huyler began to make his fortune." 
 "Tell me what you mean," I said. 
 "I mean," he answered, "that that is the way I 
 >egan my factories, and out of that have come my 
 stores scattered over the country." 
 
 237 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 Our land is full of such instances. Nearly all of 
 the capitalists who are cursed as plutocrats by labor 
 agitators have come to their wealth in that way, and 
 the paths are still open if they are not blocked and 
 destroyed by blind fools who are undertaking to 
 lead the blind. Left to themselves and saving from 
 their earnings and using their wits, they cannot fail. 
 Paying away their money in dues, losing their time 
 in strikes, wasting the margins of shortened days, 
 they will remain poor and discontented, the victims 
 of their enemies, and the enemies of their country. 
 There never was a scheme that promised so much 
 to the workingman as that one which enables him to 
 invest his earnings in the business where he works 
 and where in hundreds of cases he is soon the fore- 
 man, the general superintendent, and in due time is 
 found in the directors' board room. 
 
 The wise plan is to join himself to the strong man, 
 to become in any small way a partner of the larger 
 capitalist, to use the lifting power of his strength, 
 and to see through the eyes of his business sagacity. 
 It ought to require only ordinary intelligence for our 
 workingmen to see that that is the side on which 
 their bread is buttered. It has worked immense 
 advantages to the laborers of the past. What has 
 the gutter orator done for them? What has the red 
 socialist done? With shorter hours and higher pay 
 will more of these men become capitalists such as I 
 have described, or will they shift their entire horizon 
 to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? Have 
 
 238 
 
MY NEIGHBOR AND THE CAPITALIST 
 
 they abandoned the old plan, which is vindicated in 
 thousands of instances of success, to a plan of some- 
 thing for nothing? Is the plan of overthrowing the 
 capitalist more fascinating? That is to overthrow 
 their fellow workingman, for the great majority of 
 capitalists are men who were workingmen who car- 
 ried their dinner pail to the shop and their pay 
 envelope home Saturday night. This is capable of 
 the plainest demonstration. Set down and reckon 
 up what crowds your memory, and put in what you 
 see around you. If you find exceptions, then what 
 of that man's father? Where did his inherited 
 millions come from if not from a workingman who 
 invested his savings, not in speculative wild oats, but 
 in properties? And what is that heir to millions 
 doing? He is using them and they make employ- 
 ment for the man whose present capital is his hands 
 and whose few investments are his savings. 
 
 There seems to be a thought abroad and it is 
 urged by the blind leaders of the blind that the 
 capitalist is a man who only pours investments into 
 the hopper and the workingman turns out the grist. 
 Life to the capitalist is a luxury! I have lived 
 among these men long enough and have known 
 enough of them to know that they are the hardest- 
 working men of the community. They are on their 
 job all the time. The laborer quits at five o'clock 
 and leaves his responsibility beside the lathe until 
 eight o'clock the next morning. When the em- 
 ployer goes home often it is to plan the to-morrows, 
 
 239 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 and to figure himself through changing markets, and 
 keep abreast of unexpected and sudden new demands 
 of trade and fancies, or to meet a threatened strike 
 with the uncertain profits of a business already 
 crippled by shortened hours and increased pay 
 forced a dozen times by the same old threat. It is 
 only the passion for doing things that keeps thou- 
 sands of these men at the task of urging on their 
 business at a killing pace. It is time to change the 
 wail of pity for the workingman and give a little 
 sympathy to the man who opens the factory door 
 for him after a restless night of anxious plans and 
 schemes for increasing the business. It is about 
 time that the world changed ends of this proposition 
 for a while. 
 
 Let us inquire what would be the condition if 
 to-morrow the capitalists were to withdraw all the 
 enterprises that furnish employment. Who would 
 be the loser? He would have his hands. The 
 workingman would not have his business. Let him 
 try to take it. Do you think you could reverse a 
 lifetime of the order of things? The capitalist 
 would have the better of it. Labor would have 
 some smokeless factory chimneys, and that would 
 be all, and he could not carry on in them. When 
 men curse the capitalist they talk about some dis- 
 tant imaginary thing. But he is here. He started 
 the factory and keeps it going. 
 
 There is no conspiracy against labor except by 
 labor itself. The economy of this world recognizes 
 
 240 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR AND THE CAPITALIST 
 
 the place of the workingman, and capital is con- 
 stantly studying how it can secure to him the greatest 
 efficiency, intelligence, and contentment. What ad- 
 vantage can be imagined to accrue to the capitalist 
 from a discontented, half-fed, and half-clothed 
 workingman, tortured by a sick wife, crying children, 
 without proper food or medicine? These are 
 primary questions, too elementary and simple for 
 him to neglect. To promote this workingman's 
 conditions is an important part of the capitalist's in- 
 vestments. When has the world ever seen such 
 great sums of money put into betterments for the 
 workingmen, like baths, reading rooms, music, 
 movies, and lectures? When were the books opened 
 dder and the profits ever shown as they are now? 
 r hat does the workingman have to say about the 
 listribution of the profits of a business besides his 
 )wn wage? Is nothing to come to those who have 
 >ut the capital into it? We have seen that over one 
 lundred thousand people of the Pennsylvania Rail- 
 *oad have claims on the receipts of that road, who 
 ire its stockholders, and there are over one hundred 
 ind fifty thousand persons of the United States Steel 
 Company who must be paid quarterly their invest- 
 ient dues, and nearly a third of them are women. 
 These are rather awakening facts in the face of 
 ic constantly repeated charge of agitators that cap- 
 ralists are grinding the poor workingmen between 
 ie upper and lower millstones ! 
 The tyranny of capital is the stock in trade of the 
 241 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 union demagogue and agitator, who finds ready 
 listeners in the foreign element which so largely is in 
 control of the organization. The injustice and fool- 
 ishness of the charge is apparent at once to those 
 who know the wide distribution of capital and how 
 large a per cent of it is in the hands of people of 
 moderate circumstances. Thousands buy broken 
 shares of stocks for permanent holdings. When 
 the Standard Oil Company was unwisely dissolved 
 a few years ago and the expense of its management 
 was increased, forcing the people to pay higher 
 prices for its products, it was found that its stocks 
 were held not only by millionaires but by poor men, 
 by women, and by preachers of the different churches. 
 Capital is money from all these sources invested 
 in labor-making business, and is peculiarly the hope, 
 and the main hope, of the workingman's wage. The 
 more capital there is, the more work there is. Even 
 the rich man's luxuries must pay their toll to the 
 workingman. The poor man's savings are con- 
 tributing to employment. We have a wonderful 
 plan in our provision and scheme of capital. Would 
 it be better if hidden in a hole in the ground or a 
 hollow tree or in a stocking? If it is put into a 
 savings bank, it is loaned out to some industry. 
 Capital is money moving and transmuted into lathes 
 and drill presses and looms and mills and factories 
 wherever you see men and women busy earning 
 bread for the home. Will any one tell how this 
 could be done without money which has been saved 
 
 242 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR AND THE CAPITALIST 
 
 by both the rich and the poor? The miserly hoard- 
 ing of money is the evil against which we are 
 warned. Then it is not capital. It is capital only 
 when it becomes an exchange for labor and labor 
 >es into the progress of the world. The dema- 
 >gues' hatred of wealth is idiocy which should not 
 leceive anyone. 
 
 The chief federation leaders control vast sums of 
 loney, and lack for nothing. What better is it 
 whether a man controls capital in a corporation or in 
 the management of the activities and destinies of 
 corporate bodies of workingmen? Is capital an 
 ibuse of human freedom when providing men with 
 iployment, and a blessing and a defense of free- 
 lorn when used to antagonize labor and to create 
 iotous strikes and to destroy property? Is the cap- 
 italist to be condemned and cursed as a plutocrat for 
 cutting his money into factories and the credit to run 
 icm, by the employment of thousands of men who 
 lave no other way of earning their living? But the 
 ipitalist is a benefactor when he creates a great fund 
 for no purpose of business, but holds it as a menace 
 to business and arbitrarily to dictate how business 
 shall be conducted. The one capitalist is creating 
 business, the other is obstructing business. The one 
 is widening the markets of the world, the other is 
 threatening them, if he does not destroy them. 
 There has been money enough shut up in a genera- 
 tion, by the blind leaders of labor, and used waste- 
 fully and destructively in our mighty fields of in- 
 
 243 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 dustry, to capitalize Europe in, these days of its dire 
 distress. If there is any ground for the criticism of 
 capital, it is of the capital which has been used only 
 to wage war against the men who have dared to risk 
 their fortunes in investments which promote the 
 thrift and happiness of thousands of families who 
 are the units of our national life and civilization. 
 The obnoxious and intolerable capitalist is that mil- 
 lionaire who never created a business, but has 
 wriggled himself into the management of the dues 
 and fees of the unions of hard-working men whom 
 he strangely deceives. He is to all intents and pur- 
 poses a millionaire, the plutocrat capitalist of dema- 
 gogy and destruction. 
 
 It is no credit to the intelligence of the working- 
 man that he should be so dull and slow in discovering 
 his great and indispensable friend, the business cap- 
 italist who provides him employment, and that he 
 should assess himself year after year to pay men to 
 discredit capital in the realm of labor, men who 
 notoriously were never in anything producers, but 
 have been destroyers of both labor and capital. 
 
 244 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 MY NEIGHBOR'S WALKING DELEGATE 
 
 A GREAT business requires a promoter. It is a 
 feature of the modern way of extending legitimate 
 enterprises, and as every good thing has its counter- 
 feit, some bad things have promoters. That labor 
 should have promoters is right and without suspicion 
 or just criticism. It was natural and to be expected 
 that so large a part of the activities of men would 
 require an organized force, and that men should be 
 chosen to give their time to the promotion of its 
 interests. No one could complain of that. But it 
 carried a great responsibility. The men chosen 
 must be men with remarkably sound judgment and 
 with the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness 
 of the dove. They could promote or they could 
 destroy. They could make the workingmen a power 
 for good, serving their country, or they could make 
 them a menace. They would have to deal with many 
 men, some of them ignorant, impulsive, passionate, 
 and suspicious among them some recently from for- 
 eign countries where they had been trained to feel- 
 ings of antagonism to their country. The whole work 
 to be highly successful must be constructive. It must 
 amalgamate within the organization, and affiliate 
 and coordinate outside of it. The labor union must 
 
 245 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 work not only to promote itself but to make itself a 
 promoter of all that is best for the community. It 
 can be seen, therefore, that men in the unions, who 
 are its representatives outside, must be men of a 
 high character. The fact that a man represented a 
 union in any capacity should be the best recommen- 
 dation he can have. That that has not been true is 
 too patent and obvious to be denied by even its best 
 friends, and the most serious mistake has been with 
 the walking delegate. He may be a good carpenter 
 or mason, but too often he has been far from an im- 
 pressive man. It is not necessary for him to be a 
 Chesterfield or Beau Brummel, although gentle- 
 manly instincts and cordial address would not harm 
 him. The menacing manner upon the part of the 
 walking delegate has been accountable for many a 
 strike. The man should be capable of interpreting 
 the man he addresses, and diplomat enough to 
 secure an amicable understanding of questions in- 
 volving interests intensely personal and often 
 equally exciting. But usually the walking dele- 
 gate appears to be chosen because he is a 
 vote-getter within the union, by qualities which in 
 no way fit him for his delicate work. He is 
 a mixer among his fellows, but not with men to 
 whom he must bring his organization on strictly its 
 merits. Espionage is always oppression, and if it 
 comes to the front, the man who practices it goes 
 to the rear. It blunders. Its conceits are blinding 
 to the spy. It has a meddling appearance which is 
 
 246 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S WALKING DELEGATE 
 
 resented. This is one of the most fruitful sources 
 of unpopularity. The plan of a business is sensitive 
 to inquisitiveness. Any obtruded management from 
 outside is resented. The intermediary between 
 labor unions and a business of any kind should be of 
 distinct endowment. The union has no more critical 
 office within itself than the wise choice of a walking 
 delegate. 
 
 The walking delegate is under a great pressure to 
 make good. He feels that he has to make a good 
 report, one of real, constant progress, to justify his 
 employment. That is one of the embarrassments 
 to the business agent in anything, whether it is a 
 special prosecuting attorney or a walking delegate. 
 A few years ago a large number of prosecuting at- 
 torneys were employed by the government in its 
 attack upon big business. These men seemed to 
 feel that they must prosecute everything in sight and 
 scores of men were prosecuted who could not be 
 convicted. The result was the failure of the good 
 in the plan to eradicate the evil and it entrenched 
 men in practices that merited severe penalties. This 
 overdoing of the office brought it into contempt 
 among sober-thinking people, and some years have 
 passed with small attention to evils which it was 
 sought to correct by special attorneys. The 
 walking delegate is an evil of the labor union 
 which has been not only carelessly done but over- 
 done. It has created too many who must find some- 
 thing to account for themselves, and who ought 
 
 247 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 to be employed in the world's work. The things 
 they try to do would work themselves out far better 
 if left to the laws of business and labor which are 
 always operative to bring about contracts and the 
 workingman's employment. Contractors do not 
 require walking delegates, nor the typewriter works, 
 nor the automobile manufacturers. Competition is 
 not overcome by attacking the other man's business, 
 interfering with his contracts, breaking the machines 
 in shops of typewriters and automobiles. In so far 
 as these are promoted by agents, they go out upon 
 the principle that the world is large and there is 
 room for every man who is doing things which other 
 men want done. There must be an inherent weak- 
 ness and fatal defect in a business which must 
 destroy or embarrass another business to live. All 
 of the worst things possible seem to be embodied in 
 the walking delegate. He appears on a job to see 
 who is there who ought not to be there, or who is not 
 there who ought to be there according to his judg- 
 ment. And after a controversy with the representa- 
 tives of the firm, interlarded with threats and 
 profanity, he makes his way back to the union to 
 advise that the business be declared unfair. A 
 sound, self-contained man ought to have seen that 
 it was not unfair, and if it were, there was a better 
 way to secure a fair adjustment. To the layman 
 who is a full-blooded American and has in his veins 
 the freedom which came from the old musket which 
 he found in his father's attic, the question will come 
 
 248 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S WALKING DELEGATE 
 
 forcibly as to what right any unchartered and self- 
 constituted body of men has to send out a repre- 
 sentative to call their fellow citizens in question for 
 the pursuit of their business, so long as it meets the 
 requirements of the laws. These delegates should 
 be in the Legislature, making sound laws, and not on 
 the building or in the factory, quarreling with the 
 proprietor. Upon what authority, or by what right 
 did this body of men send out this meddler to inter- 
 fere with the business of the world and to do it over 
 and over and constantly menace business until it is 
 impossible to conduct business or to employ work- 
 ingmen upon any certain basis? The plan works 
 against not only the business but is a most harmful 
 agency to the man who depends upon some fixed 
 and stable price for his own labors. Untold mil- 
 lions are lost foolishly by the folly of walking 
 delegates. 
 
 That it may not be truthfully said that these stric- 
 tures upon the walking delegate are by men who 
 have no practical knowledge of the institution or the 
 work of the men, I will give some personal observa- 
 tions, for the only purpose of these chapters is to 
 serve the country by a better condition in the work- 
 ing world. A young janitor at the institution where 
 I am located developed an unusual ability in the 
 practical mechanic arts. He attempted to apply it 
 in some plumbing work about the laboratories and 
 was threatened with arrest for working without 
 license. He applied for a plumber's license. He 
 
 249 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 passed the examinations, but, to use the trade term, 
 was turned down. He passed again with the same 
 result. A third effort met with no better result, 
 and a fourth examination was taken. I then insisted 
 that the questions and answers of the city board, 
 made up of union men or their sympathizers, should 
 be published in the city papers. I notified the con- 
 trolling political influence of the city of my purpose 
 and was requested to wait a few days. Within the 
 few days the license came and the character of the 
 work done under it has never been questioned. But 
 when our licensed plumber attempted to buy goods, 
 he was not permitted to buy at wholesale houses, but 
 was restricted to the retail trade. Other plumbers 
 had the discount which he was refused. The whole- 
 salers apologized, but they were told, they said, that 
 if they sold to our plumber, their trade would suffer. 
 The walking delegate was on his job. The case 
 was reported to me by the trade. I told our 
 plumber that I wanted him to go to Boston and 
 buy, at best wholesale rates to wholesalers, a carload 
 of plumber's materials. If he could not get it there, 
 to go to New York; and if he could not buy there, go 
 to Philadelphia; and if he found himself blocked 
 there, to come home and I would send him to Liver- 
 pool and London. He bought in Boston. The 
 material was hauled through the streets to the 
 University. Instantly the telephones began to ring, 
 and we were told with regrets that that need never 
 happen again. We should have all the goods we 
 
 250 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S WALKING DELEGATE 
 
 wanted at the best price given to anyone in the town. 
 We have had no trouble of that kind since. 
 
 We have had buildings posted as unfair, and have 
 been notified that the placard would be taken down 
 for a certain penalty. The amount dwindled to the 
 cost of printing the circulars. Not a nickel was 
 paid. Our latest experience, one of many, was a few 
 weeks ago. We always have employed union men, 
 and when desired and we could do so without extra 
 expense, have put them on separate buildings. But 
 our superintendent found it imperative to dismiss a 
 union painter who had worked for us for months. 
 At once the walking delegate appeared and told our 
 superintendent that he must discharge all nonunion 
 men or work would be stopped everywhere in the 
 institution. Union men would not be permitted to 
 work in separate buildings if nonunion men worked 
 anywhere about the premises. A large hospital and 
 a dispensary are owned by the university. The 
 hospital sheltered hundreds of young soldiers in the 
 terrible influenza epidemic then raging, with great 
 difficulty. The nurses' lecture rooms, the chapel, 
 the corridors were crowded. Several of our nurses 
 gave up their lives in the work. Our superintendent 
 has been in a sanitarium for weeks as a result. We 
 received the gift of a great research laboratory de- 
 manded by our increasing patients. Lives were to 
 depend upon its practical work. Every union man 
 was taken off it. A few days' work of electricians 
 could finish it. No concession to the sick and dying 
 
 251 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 would be made. Other parts of the hospital were 
 in special need of help. There was but one condi- 
 tion force out our old and tried help in all depart- 
 ments or no men of any trade would be permitted to 
 work anywhere about the university. The walking 
 delegate came into our buildings. I saw him stand- 
 ing where he could watch men coming and going. 
 A break in a water main must be mended. We were 
 notified that nothing would be permitted until we 
 came to terms. We are not anxious. These are 
 sample cases. They show the character of the usur- 
 pation, the tyranny of the organization that has no 
 regard for our hospitals, that purposes to coerce our 
 educational institutions, when at that very moment 
 sons and daughters of some of these men are re- 
 ceiving remittances of tuition expenses in the uni- 
 versity and men themselves, or their wives, are oc- 
 cupying free beds in the hospital. 
 
 To what lengths of degradation will men go as 
 organizations, to what barbarism will they be 
 aroused by excited and passionate speeches of their 
 walking delegates in their meetings where no man 
 is present to state the side of humanity? It is not a 
 contest of starving men for a place to work. There 
 is work enough for every union and non-union man 
 in that city. It is not a question of whether they shall 
 get wage enough to buy food and clothes. There 
 is no division on that subject. It is simply and only 
 a determination upon the part of a band of men 
 that other men shall not work. And the offense of 
 
 252 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S WALKING DELEGATE 
 
 these men is that they do not choose to belong to 
 their union and work with their card. They are 
 competent and satisfactory to their employers, but 
 they insist upon being free men, and, having the 
 spirit of '76 they insist the more where their free- 
 dom is put to the test and denied them. They see 
 foreigners and foreign-born men, who would be 
 fought in battle to the death if they landed here 
 armed to enforce the same rules, permitted to dic- 
 tate the terms of our human liberty in matters that 
 relate to our common business interests. We are 
 plainly notified, by an agent sent out, whom we shall 
 not employ and whom we must employ. We are 
 told when we can work and when we cannot work, 
 however degrading the tyranny may be. The na- 
 tional government never assumed such paternalism. 
 They could not put it into the Constitution. It has 
 never gone into any amendment. We look for it in 
 vain in our Declaration of Independence, when we 
 were revolting from foreign oppression and tyranny. 
 It remains for men claiming the protection of our 
 law to oppress their fellow men. 
 
 There are men of excellent character among walk- 
 ing delegates. They have their place with our best 
 citizens, and are capable of looking at all sides of the 
 problem of labor. You do not find impulsive strikes 
 where these men have a controlling influence. But 
 from the experiences of those who have much to 
 do with labor and judging from correspondents in 
 our conservative and most reliable great daily 
 
 253 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 papers and other periodicals, the majority of walk- 
 ing delegates are men whom contractors and manu- 
 facturers do not wish to take into their councils. 
 An instance is in the recent case of the president of 
 the United States Steel Corporation. He will not 
 consent to personal interviews. He prefers to re- 
 ceive written communications. And that has been 
 the common verdict of men at the head of the great 
 businesses of the country. As a rule, the walking 
 delegate is ignorant. He is uninformed in every- 
 thing except where men of his order are working, 
 their pay, and whether firms employ any men outside 
 of the union. The narrowness of his horizon is 
 astonishing. How can he discuss a contract of hun- 
 dreds of thousands of dollars, with all of its com- 
 plications, of which labor is only a small part? 
 What argument can appeal to him? It was a relief 
 when he, a disturbing element, left the job of the 
 contractor to whom he now becomes an ignorant 
 dictator, for he was more active with the tongue in 
 his vacuum caput than with his hammer or trowel. 
 He was the most unsatisfactory workingman among 
 his fellows. That tongue gave him a most fortunate 
 position in the union or associated unions to which he 
 belonged. 
 
 The labor unions will never have the place which 
 they might have, a place of confidence, respect and 
 power in the community, until they show an appre- 
 ciation of the dignity and intelligence that should 
 characterize them by carefully selecting representa- 
 
 254 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S WALKING DELEGATE 
 
 tives from their most respected members. If we 
 are to believe the signed and circumstantial accounts 
 in leading papers, the men now acting as walking 
 delegates are instigators of most of the trouble be- 
 tween labor and manufacturing business. If they 
 do not throw the first brickbat and fire the first shot, 
 it is often at their word that such violence begins. 
 And having begun, it needs no one to lead. It is 
 unheard of that the walking delegate is on the side 
 of the police restraining violence, protecting lives 
 and property. 
 
 The labor union should be made to feel that it 
 is responsible for the acts of its agents, measured by 
 loss of life or property traced to their instigator. 
 A few lessons like that of the Danbury hatters case 
 would be most wholesome. It never should have 
 been nullified by any modifying law. Something ex- 
 traneous and unimagined by our fathers, and that 
 has received too little attention from our legislators, 
 has been thrust in upon us and claims not an equal 
 place but the controlling authority over us. It 
 threatens votes to the opposite party and brickbats, 
 pistols, revolvers, and the incendiary torch all mixed 
 into one bill of fare to all who disregard or oppose 
 them. 
 
 What would be thought of an association of 
 merchants or manufacturers who were to start out 
 with the claim of monopolizing the business of their 
 kind in the town, and if anyone not of the association 
 were to come into the place and start a business, the 
 
 255 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 association were to send out its walking delegates 
 and threaten the new association with violence if he 
 did not join the association or move out? We have 
 just had a case similar in a thriving city of New 
 York State. An Italian of another town was 
 murdered because he did not heed the threat that 
 this would happen to him if he came there to com- 
 pete with men in the same business. But why have 
 not our dry-goods merchants the right to associate 
 themselves together to protect their prices against 
 all comers by closing the privilege to trade against 
 them, if a number of laborers can combine to stop 
 all work in a town when anyone is hired who does 
 not belong to their union? What more would the 
 association of dry-goods merchants do if it sent out 
 hired agents to go over to the new store opened 
 yesterday and say, u We mean to stop your interfer- 
 ing with trade here unless you pay a thousand dol- 
 lars to belong to our association. We judge that 
 that would be about right from the prospects of your 
 trade, as an annual due"? And if the head man 
 kicked that delegate out into the gutter, his business 
 would be posted as unfair! And if that did not do, 
 customers would be intercepted on their way to the 
 new store; and if that did not accomplish it, a brick- 
 bat would go through the plate-glass front of the 
 new store, and it would be made personally danger- 
 ous for the customers in that store. And some 
 morning the town's people would read at breakfast 
 that the new store had been struck by lightning! 
 
 256 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S WALKING DELEGATE 
 
 Would that be any worse than the Los Angeles 
 Times case? 
 
 Why would it, and why should anyone complain ? 
 Is not that what is being done by walking delegates 
 and their associates all over this country? If the 
 union workingmen can do that and we consent to it, 
 why not the merchants ? O, but it is inconceivable ! 
 Ought not the other to be equally so ? Why should 
 workingmen have a monopoly of this high privilege? 
 Why should they force the price of labor up when- 
 ever the notion takes them and the merchant must 
 take his chances of supply and demand and compete 
 with every newcomer who may bring into the town 
 his new and taking notions? Is it fair? Is it just? 
 The merchant pays for his privilege in increasing 
 taxes. What does the workingman pay for hi's 
 privilege? In what does his right inhere over his 
 neighbor, the merchant? Why not the manufac- 
 turers? Why not let our city or town be made a 
 close corporation against everybody who cannot be 
 mulcted for the privilege he seeks among us? 
 American freedom is barred at our city limits. Take 
 down the auto speed sign and put in its place that no 
 man of any trade or labor, calling or manufacture 
 can stop here without the consent of the particular 
 trade or calling to which he seeks to belong. Indi- 
 vidual freedom that came with our common liberty 
 has been revoked here. 
 
 If you cannot see that there is no difference, can 
 you tell us what the difference is? Upon what prin- 
 
 257 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 ciple is the action based in the one case that it could 
 not be upon the other? Suppose the whole matter 
 of the workingman's arbitrary demands were re- 
 vised, and that unions were formed of contractors 
 and owners and capitalists, and that the banks as 
 is not impossible soon were to decide that they will 
 do no business nor loan any money except upon 
 certain fixed prices for labor and for material, would 
 they exceed their right in the case if the workingmen 
 do not exceed theirs now? But it would be con- 
 spiracy against the public. And the public is a 
 fiction. It has not had personality nor identity 
 enough to protest against the labor oppression and 
 protect itself. And is not the union strike a con- 
 spiracy? Why is one not as much a conspiracy as 
 the other? And if one is permitted, why not the 
 other? We know and feel the absurdity of per- 
 mitting any body of men privilege beyond the law, 
 and especially if it denies other men their privileges. 
 The workingman's walking delegate, or any other 
 agent who interferes with the privilege of men to 
 work where they please, or spies upon any business 
 and interferes with it, should be arrested and put 
 before the courts and sharply fined or sent to prison. 
 He should be treated as any other lawless character 
 is treated. Until that is done, we shall be kept in a 
 state of turmoil and no man can predict any certainty 
 in business or labor. 
 
 How does it seem to native-born Americans that 
 these self-constituted dictators should be able to set 
 
 258 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S WALKING DELEGATE 
 
 up their authority among us? We have a Consti- 
 tution, but more than that for generations we were 
 able to appeal to public sentiment and it was about 
 as effective administrative law as we had. But who 
 thinks of making such an appeal now? It is no 
 longer what is the great concentrated and common, 
 the universal moral sense? but what of votes and 
 what of trade? The acts of some of our senators, 
 with symptoms of the old-time obedience to the de- 
 mands of their country, are throwing a scare into 
 the so-called public by ignoring all questions of po- 
 litical expediency and submitting the higher ques- 
 tions: "What is the demand of our country? How 
 can we save it from a blind sentimentalism to which 
 it is attempted to sacrifice it?'* Until there is a like 
 return to what was our glorious heritage of public 
 sentiment, men in key positions will not feel the call 
 to rescue their country by the force of the public 
 appeal, the force that quickens by a common consent, 
 that strangely and suddenly awakens in many places 
 at once, as by an inspiration, to a united action, when 
 questions carry their own answers and when all men 
 who violate law are criminals, and when the people 
 who keep the laws are the best custodians of the 
 common welfare. It is the spirit that seizes men in 
 war when personal sacrifices are reckoned as small 
 things, and the end for which the battle is on is the 
 only worthy thing. It is high time that we all united 
 in a vigorous question: "What is the right of this 
 thing, why is it here?" Demand its credentials. 
 
 259 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 Let the employer inquire, "Who gave you authority 
 to order me about, to close my business, to forbid my 
 work?" 
 
 We insist that nothing can be more destructive to 
 our great republic than to permit any practice by any 
 man, be he the President or an organization of men 
 of any character or influence whatever, that becomes 
 a purposed and planned violation of law, or even 
 the long-practiced and recognized rights of the 
 citizens of our country. One of the startling fea- 
 tures of the claims of labor unions is that excep- 
 tions must be made in their case which do not 
 obtain with other people. If every concession is not 
 made to workingmen, then the state is unfriendly 
 and the party is discriminating against labor. Pick- 
 eting, posting, striking, meddling with business that 
 would not be tolerated must be legislated! When a 
 body of men comes into any governing economy and 
 sets up an opposition or begins to rule in defiance of 
 law, and the people tamely submit to it, the fate of 
 that government is sealed. The only hope is that 
 the abuses will become so glaring that a reaction will 
 set in and a revolution against a revolution will take 
 place. There are some wholesome intimations that 
 such a fear is coming upon the chief men of the labor 
 unions. The king of labor unions, previously re- 
 ferred to, who strode down the gang plank of the 
 incoming steamer with a defiance to our great busi- 
 ness leaders, whom he notified were shorn of their 
 crowns and were u no longer monarchs of all they 
 
 260 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S WALKING DELEGATE 
 
 survey," is found hurrying to warn his subjects that 
 they must call off their threatened strikes and firing 
 lines. He hastens into a New York daily with a dis- 
 cussion of the great things accomplished in his reign 
 and to counsel the conservation of the things gained. 
 It is wise advice, if forced by the handwriting on the 
 wall. 
 
 The people are beginning to ask some uncomfort- 
 able questions. Strikes are not submitted to so 
 tamely. When the workingman is underpaid, the 
 public will listen to the plea for an increase, but 
 when it is a common burden, the question will be- 
 come very practical: Why should not the working 
 man bear his share of the common burden of the 
 times? Why should everything be adjusted to him? 
 What about the salaried man whose salary has been 
 decreased by over one half by the sixty per cent 
 dollar at which he is paid, and when the cost of 
 living pinches him more severely? Fortunate he is 
 if he receives an increase of twenty-five per cent with 
 pay of the same dollar. The laboring man is not 
 the only man who feels the sharp pinch of these 
 times. The tradesman, the teacher, the preacher, 
 the thousands of small farmers and village folk, and 
 tens of thousands more not necessary to mention, are 
 in the vise of these hard times, and suffer far more 
 than the day laborers. The farm hand is boarded. 
 His clothes are always inexpensive. There is no 
 reason why his wage should be more than doubled 
 except that he can force it. The day laborer whose 
 
 261 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 pay was one dollar fifty cents per day, as we have 
 shown and which we repeat to emphasize, has four 
 dollars a day because while the boys were away at 
 war he could get it. It seems as though the whole 
 country turned itself over into the hands of thieves, 
 led on by the labor unions which were organized to 
 strike if their commands were not obeyed. The 
 correction of our troubles is not in legislation 
 against cold storage and high prices so much as it 
 is in sending men back to work and making it a 
 penalty to forbid any man to work. 
 
 The walking delegates, hundreds of them through 
 the country, are doing more to keep prices beyond 
 the reach of people of moderate circumstances 
 than any other influence. They go out to demand 
 that the workingman, not of the country but of the 
 unions comprising a minority of laborers, shall have 
 what they set as their price, whoever is paid less 
 than his needs. The government has been a party 
 to this partiality until it has bred nests of arrogant 
 vipers all over the country and now appeals to Con- 
 gress to legislate us back into prewar prices. You 
 might as well legislate the stars in their courses. Let 
 all men who desire to work be treated alike. Put 
 down the arrogance of a minority of labor that pro- 
 fesses to be the whole body of workingmen, and give 
 every man a chance to go to work and add to the 
 world's production. Nothing else will reinstate 
 normal conditions. The curse of this time is 
 paternal meddling with the labor calling of the 
 
 262 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S WALKING DELEGATE 
 
 country. The vote-getting places everything into 
 the dictation of one man, who boasts that he con- 
 trols the President, the secretary of war, the secre- 
 tary of the navy, and the secretary of labor. 
 
 When we look for the secret of the startling 
 prices of food and clothes and attempt to locate the 
 causes, we have not far to go. The way of thou- 
 sands of producers is barred; and if they are not 
 always successfully prevented from offering their 
 services to the country, they are enrolled in the 
 lists of extortioners by the artificial conditions 
 forced by strikes. But to-day the men who are most 
 reasonable in their wage, and at the same time who 
 offer more hours and do more efficient work are the 
 nonunion mechanics. Yet we face the astounding 
 statement that these men shall not be permitted to 
 work without incurring the enmity of the unions. 
 The country needs them, and in many instances the 
 people prefer them, but their employment will inter- 
 fere with the union, which insists upon forcing men 
 into its ranks whether they wish to enlist or not; and 
 if they will not consent, they must stop work or take 
 the perilous chances of being maimed, have their 
 wives and children insulted, and their homes burned. 
 If there is any change in that program, it is new and 
 because the raw and barbarous Bolshevism, which is 
 now insidiously seeking control of the unions, must 
 be restrained. But nearly as bad things have been 
 done in this country, except judicial executions, as 
 have been done in Russia and the difficulty of bring- 
 
 263 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 ing the murderers and incendiaries to justice is 
 notorious. 
 
 Standing one day in a house just being completed, 
 a walking delegate appeared and brusquely asked: 
 "Who is going to paint this house?" 
 
 "I am going to paint it I" To the next question 
 the same answer was given, "I am going to paint 
 
 it." 
 
 The delegate walked away sullenly, with an im- 
 plied threat which he did not dare enforce. Now 
 the courage is not lacking. Though it does not take 
 a violent form at present, what it will do in the 
 future remains to be seen. One of the worst evils 
 of the walking delegate plan is that it turns your 
 neighbor into your enemy, leads peaceable citizens 
 to justify their violence. Suspicion is awakened, 
 resentment is aroused, and there is an irritating body 
 influencing the social conditions of those who ought 
 to be the best of neighbors. 
 
 The principles on which unions move and have 
 their being, and the methods they apply to accom- 
 plish their ends unfit men to act as judicious and 
 wise representatives. Such a thing as equality of 
 rights, of concessions to others is not known among 
 them. They start out with the assumption that 
 what they claim is an indisputable authority. No 
 court gives it to them, and it has not been voted as a 
 concession by their neighbors. They start out their 
 representative to announce their plans and assert 
 their claims. He issues a threat. He invites 
 
 264 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S WALKING DELEGATE 
 
 destructive riots. He is in no sense a delegate. He 
 is a dictator 
 
 The teachings he has heard inside, the narrowness 
 of the principles, the absurd claims of rights by the 
 destruction of the rights of others, make up the 
 walking delegate to the mind of the community. He 
 becomes a nuisance and a menace. 
 
 Take the chief functionary. He never has 
 thought of anything but the enforcement of union 
 claims which are his own creation. Horizons so 
 narrow and upon such low levels, purposes so selfish, 
 interests of one class and kind, which permit no con- 
 sideration of those whose interests differ, make it 
 impossible for their author and champion to grasp 
 statesman conceptions and to lead safely men in a 
 land of such broad and at the same time complex 
 interest. It is unfortunate that interests so im- 
 portant should be narrowed down to increase of 
 wage, length of working hours, and the dictation of 
 the terms upon which all men shall work. What 
 can you expect of the reaction upon such a leader but 
 what you see reflected in the walking delegate? 
 Have you ever known the community to select such 
 men for high representative positions? Do they 
 find their way into legislative bodies? Are they on 
 the bench? Are they our mayors, aldermen, and 
 assemblymen? They are discredited by the com- 
 munity. They have no thought in common with 
 their fellow men. They are a type of men unfitted 
 for leadership by the doctrine of the organization 
 
 265 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 which sends them out. Their narrowness and in- 
 solence and ignorance create resentment and re- 
 sistance wherever they come. They are not the 
 friends of the manufacturer or the builder, and fail- 
 ing to secure the end they seek by a diplomacy which 
 they do not know how to use, what more natural 
 than that they should incite the strike as the last 
 resort? That is the only vindication of their claim 
 to the coveted positions they hold. It is not strange 
 that they are what they are because they are what 
 the organizations are which send them out to disturb 
 business and not to tranquillize it. 
 
 Men are the representatives of the company the] 
 keep. The man of the church, whether genuine 01 
 counterfeit, takes on the likeness of the church. 
 Forms of business put their trademark upon then 
 travelers and agents. The walking delegate is 
 feathered in the nest where he was hatched an< 
 where he grew. He does not need to announa 
 himself. 
 
 He would not be needed by the Masonic order, 
 nor by the Odd Fellows, nor by a church or syna- 
 gogue. He is required by a cause which does not 
 commend itself, which purposes to oppress and arbi- 
 trarily compel an unwilling constituency. It is 
 cause which if left to its own principles and th< 
 merits of its cause would tumble into pieces. On< 
 of the best things labor unions could do for them- 
 selves would be to test their inherent merits by get 
 ting rid of their walking delegates. That they cai 
 
 266 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S WALKING DELEGATE 
 
 not force much longer their obnoxious demands upon 
 the people is becoming every day more apparent. 
 The resistance is rapidly increasing. Nothing so 
 un-American can live on American soil. 
 
 267 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 MY NEIGHBOR A FREE MAN 
 
 I HAVE gone far enough to show the un-American 
 character of the labor union as it now stands. It is 
 in violation of every principle upon which our coun- 
 try was founded, and it never can harmonize and 
 have a forceful relation to the country until it 
 changes radically its principles and leaders. It is an 
 attempt to set up a government and dictate the rights 
 and liberties of men within a government which 
 covers all of our rights by legislation, courts and ex- 
 ecutives chosen by all the people. 
 
 The American people never will consent to such 
 arrogant and insolent dictation. It is not strange 
 that this poisonous exotic has flourished and got its 
 roots so deeply planted. It is the American trait to 
 tolerate every new thing and often perilously. Tol- 
 eration is mistaken for liberty. We tolerate a 
 seditious press and listen to traitorous public speech. 
 Men and women always have organized themselves 
 secretly for any purpose, even for the destruction of 
 life and property. The labor union has come in 
 under the general laxity and indifference, and has 
 grown up among us until it has passed from control 
 of labor to defiance and dictation of courts an< 
 
 268 
 
MY NEIGHBOR A FREE MAN 
 
 federal offices and even served notice on the Presi- 
 dent of the United States that his word "will not 
 go" ! Appeals of suffering, of cold and hunger and 
 sickness, are fairly trampled under foot by selfish- 
 ness that has become heartless and brutal. The 
 blind assertion of this selfish power has led men to 
 violate contracts and to disregard their oaths of 
 office. It has robbed them of every gentlemanly 
 instinct, and made them cowardly and brutal in their 
 conduct toward those neighbors who insist upon 
 their rights as free men. They call them scabs for 
 being and doing what the Constitution of their 
 country guarantees to them. They teach their chil- 
 dren in their homes to use this vile language and 
 carry it out upon the streets and into the school 
 yards. It works against religion and the church and 
 alienates the best of friends and gets into the politics 
 of the community and its trade, and perverts the 
 whole social order. 
 
 How long do rational people imagine that such a 
 condition can go on without becoming more than a 
 passing menace to the country? It has been depre- 
 cated by self-respecting men and women who have 
 cherished the hope that its own intolerant and coarse 
 spirit would react as correction. But we are now 
 awakening to the fact that wrong does not correct 
 itself by evolution of more wrong, as we face a revo- 
 lution broadly hinted by prominent leaders and 
 openly preached by its bolder agitators. The latter 
 promises the workingmen, but only the union work- 
 
 269 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 ingman, that his case in court will be adjudicated 
 without regard to facts or evidence, and that private 
 property will be confiscated by the workingmen 
 "who have created it." Homes, land, stocks and 
 bonds, wives and cattle will pass into the hands of 
 the laboring people. This is the secret goal. How 
 the property will be any less private when it is robbed 
 and stolen and handed over to individuals of the rob- 
 ber gang, they do not tell us. It is high time for 
 this great land to awake to the mischief which is 
 being wrought by these pirates upon private rights 
 j;nd property, emboldened by their numbers, and 
 boasted as reaching into millions of members, with 
 the courage and energy of a Hansen of Seattle and 
 a Coolidge of Massachusetts. We must serve 
 notice that the limit has been passed and that any 
 further aggression will be treated as crime, and 
 crime with severest penalties attaching. There are 
 some things in the earth which should not be for- 
 gotten nor forgiven. We do not forgive a Benedict 
 Arnold, who sought to betray our land, young and 
 defenseless, into the hands of a foreign invader, 
 We will not forgive men among us, enjoying our 
 liberties, earning their livelihood from our oppor- 
 tunities, having their security and safety in our 
 laws, who foster in any organization to which 
 they belong any destructive doctrine or men who 
 covertly or in any way seek to overthrow the 
 institutions of our country and substitute the 
 lawlessness which is a brigandage of robbery and 
 
 270 
 
MY NEIGHBOR A FREE MAN 
 
 a reign of terror. Ignorance of consequences 
 is no excuse for such men, for there is no 
 excuse for ignorance in this country. How can any 
 man fail to see the present tendencies of the hour? 
 What plainer source of unrest, what clearer cause of 
 the high cost of living is there than the failure of 
 production by shortened hours and by increase of 
 pay granted to constantly increasing inefficiency of 
 labor? The whole system is a curse to our country, 
 and in it one evil breeds another until it is swarming 
 with parasites of infection and destruction. 
 
 I warn the workingman who was my neighbor 
 that he is already late. The day is far spent. He 
 should have wakened long ago. Millions of dollars 
 in wage, in property, and ruined business, and tens 
 of thousands of lives, are traced to his door. 
 History will write a black chapter of this whole 
 matter. Happy the men who take the warning of 
 their friends and escape from the responsibility of 
 destructive forces into which they innocently have 
 been beguiled by the vicious leaders to whom they 
 intrusted themselves. These men were not Ameri- 
 cans. They have never had a constructive thought. 
 They have joined themselves to the unions to use 
 them. They live 'from the fees and fines. They 
 have every motive to keep up a condition of unrest. 
 They are frightened by any possible overthrow of 
 organized labor and the kind of it which secures 
 their purpose. They stop at nothing which will fix 
 their hold more firmly upon the greatest following 
 
 271 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 in the country, a following which gives them a grip 
 upon the President of these United States and upon 
 the congressmen, the courts and the legislators; and 
 giving them that grip for themselves, senators stand 
 aside for them at the White House. Attorney-gen- 
 erals are notified as to the unwisdom of the laws they 
 administer, and senatorial committees are notified 
 that laws which they prefer to recommend will not 
 be obeyed if they are passed. And labor leaders 
 are supported, obeyed, and championed by citizens 
 in my town and in hundreds of towns throughout this 
 broad commonwealth. And what comes out of it 
 all to my town or to the country? Who is the 
 better off? Their lies are believed when they say 
 that they opposed strikes which they secretly insti- 
 gated and encouraged, and which they promote by 
 attacks upon government injunctions which seek only 
 to save the people from the peril of winter without 
 bread and fuel. How can our neighbors be re- 
 motely joined to any such infamous procedure? 
 The owners of the soft coal mines brand Mr. Gom- 
 pers's description of conditions in the mines as false 
 in every sentence of his statement sent out to the 
 unions through the press, and offer to prove their 
 charge against him by any tribunal sent by the gov- 
 ernment for the facts. Every informed man knows 
 that the leaders did all that they could do through all 
 the land to create prejudice against capital which em- 
 ploys labor and against any effort of the government 
 to restrain oppressive and destructive action of 
 
 272 
 
MY NEIGHBOR A FREE MAN 
 
 unions and preserve to nonunion men their liberties 
 as citizens. 
 
 How long is it going to take men, to whom God 
 has given eyes, to see the true situation and rise up 
 and shake off the leeches who have destroyed their 
 unions and brought them into disrepute throughout 
 their country? Do they think that there would 
 have been any objection to the Boston police joining 
 a union if unions had not become notorious in their 
 inimical attitude toward the country and too dis- 
 tinctly partisan in a community for officers of the law 
 to be trusted in them? 
 
 Were the union what it ought to be, there would 
 e no objection to police officers joining it. They 
 oin the Masons and the Odd Fellows. They join 
 
 e churches and Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A. and 
 nights of Columbus. The country says it is not 
 safe for them to join labor unions or form unions 
 under control of union leaders, or obey union 
 rules. 
 
 It is astounding that intelligent men will join 
 themselves to force their will against the majority 
 of their fellow citizens in a country where govern- 
 ment is by the consent of the majority. The labor 
 union is, and always has been, a minority of the 
 workingmen of our country. Not one workingman 
 in fifty in the country belong to a union or has any 
 use for it. And yet it dictates terms of labor, forces 
 up cost of buildings and manufacture and the prices 
 of living, and attempts with violence to say where 
 
 273 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 men who are not associated with them shall or shall 
 not be employed. Any man with red blood in his 
 veins will resist such insolent assumption. No man 
 worthy of the blood of the founders of this land will 
 permit any man to invade his rights and liberties as a 
 free citizen. It lacks only a little further awaken- 
 ing, the ripening of the time for free Americans to 
 arise and exterminate such institutions and sweep 
 out of the country the leaders who dare to set up an 
 authority in this republic to control communities 
 without law and without justice to serve their selfish 
 ends. Selfishness never has won among intelligent 
 peoples. There is not a monument in the land 
 reared to selfishness, lawlessness, and piracy upon 
 human rights. 
 
 What can be done with the union which pirates 
 men's rights? Withdraw from it; leave it to its 
 own kind only. It lives by having on its rolls re- 
 spected men who acquiesce in its principles while 
 refusing active part in its violences. But they count 
 with it. Their money supports it, and their names 
 give it standing and influence. Left to those who give 
 it its characters and who represent its treasonable 
 and inhuman purposes, it would fall to pieces by the 
 light which falls upon it. Light causes a living tree 
 to grow; it destroys a dead one and rots it down to 
 its roots. 
 
 The problem of what to do with the destructive 
 leaders who are the authors of counsels which have 
 destroyed the labor unions is most puzzling. 
 
 274 
 
MY NEIGHBOR A FREE MAN 
 
 Certain poisonous characters of a community are 
 difficult to remove, because when sent out of one 
 place they go to another or scatter more widely. It 
 is often said that they should be deported, and that 
 would be the easy way if it could be done. A ship 
 named Deportation should be put into commission 
 at once. But there is no port to which it could be 
 cleared. There is no place on earth where they 
 would not be a greater curse than they are here, for 
 there is no place which could take care of them and 
 restrain them as we can. It is a pity that we do not 
 own some great island, a St. Helena, a Perrim, a 
 Devil's Island, where we might export these 
 creatures, as they do the dogs out of Constantinople, 
 to prey on each other, and guard them there that no 
 one might come near them and no one escape from 
 among them. And let them build up a government 
 there to suit themselves. That is not what they 
 want. They do not purpose to build up anything. 
 They want to destroy, and there would be nothing to 
 destroy in such a place. They would need no 
 schools they thrive on ignorance; no churches 
 they are damned already; no property they hate 
 capitalists; no law they recognize no restraint and 
 they are a law to themselves. No one would miss 
 them, for they add nothing to any country's peace or 
 prosperity or safety. They have done nothing but 
 curse every land where they have lived. What a 
 shout would go up from millions on the shore the 
 day they sailed away ! and nobody would want them 
 
 275 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 ever to come back again. What a wail would they 
 hear where they landed, if any one lived there ! 
 
 Alas ! we have no such island to which to 
 send these restless, infectious invaders who 
 have come like an Egyptian plague among us, 
 though not sent by God as a judgment, but by 
 the devil, whose sons they are. And having no 
 island for banishment, and carelessly having per- 
 mitted them to gain citizenship, we cannot return 
 them to their ancestral lands. We can only lament 
 that we have no place where we can plant such a 
 colony. We cannot find a state which will tolerate 
 them. We cannot purchase any territory from the 
 borders of which there would not come up an outcry 
 of protest against the possibilities of such neighbors 
 on its state line. But we have some laws left yet. 
 They have not all been turned over to this and other 
 forms of socialism. There are even some signs 
 that they all have not been forgotten. The grand 
 old injunction against rioters has at last been put 
 into commission. If decent, self-respecting men all 
 over the land will come out and leave these leaders 
 to their own kind, the laws of our country will make 
 short work of them. They will be without voters 
 to threaten our Legislature and without power to 
 menace our courts and congressmen. They will be 
 forced to seek an honest living. The walking dele- 
 gates will have to get a job, the orators and pro- 
 moters of discontent will find a lathe or forge or 
 miner's pick or brick-mason's trowel. The members 
 
 276 
 
MY NEIGHBOR A FREE MAN 
 
 of the unions purged of the curse that blighted them, 
 will organize on a new basis and adopt principles 
 that will harmonize with the institutions of their 
 country and put a conscience into their labor and 
 render an equivalent for the wage they get, and the 
 world will be at peace once more. 
 
 If they do not do these things voluntarily and 
 peaceably, they must take consequences of the other 
 method, for the country is fast coming to the asser- 
 tion of majority rule. Those who have long been 
 obliged to hunt labor secretly and borne the odium 
 of the application of degrading epithets to them- 
 selves and their families and the peril of bombs 
 beneath their homes, will arise in force and ex- 
 terminate the reptiles from their towns and neigh- 
 borhoods. It cannot come too soon. The sooner 
 it comes, the less will have to be done. The evil 
 has increased marvelously since the war drew to 
 a close. The boldness of the violent leaders has ap- 
 peared in every strike condition of which they have 
 been the conspirators. Let the issue be drawn at 
 once. Many men will find themselves enlisted in a 
 campaign for their country as patriotic as any the 
 world has known. They will pay the price of their 
 devotion, their courage, their conscience, with their 
 blood. But it will be a small price, for law will 
 stand erect and justice will continue to hold the 
 scales. The sanctity of the home will remain, 
 men of sound mind and industry will be free, 
 and the business of men can be conducted and reck- 
 
 277 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 oned upon a basis of values without the hazard and 
 uncertainty of a meddlesome element cutting down 
 production. 
 
 The chief gain will be in law. There can be no 
 stability without law. Men without law are ani- 
 mals, carnivorous animals which destroy each other. 
 We may flatter ourselves that things could not hap- 
 pen here which have devastated Russia. We are in 
 closer communication. We could more quickly 
 reach distant ports and reenforce them. We are 
 better policed. But we do not take into the account 
 the slumbering elements in the most of our cities, 
 the secretly organized bodies of men and women 
 who wait their chance, or what they think would be 
 their chance. We have not taken the measure of 
 the depths of deception into which the minds of our 
 citizens have fallen, who have been taught to charge 
 life's failures to the successful. There is a measure 
 of conceit about that which is mistaken for principle 
 and conscience, and which fights with the blindness of 
 fanaticism. A propaganda has been going on for 
 years, trifling in its proportions, but gaining tre- 
 mendous momentum by importations and socially re- 
 enforced by an appeal to our prosperity. In a land 
 of such exceptional opportunities, and where the few 
 become rich beyond imagination, there must be 
 something wrong with the distribution, is the clamor 
 of the socialist. His logic, that all men, if things 
 were right, would be alike in all things, is wonder- 
 fully taking to crowds who have not succeeded, if 
 
 278 
 
MY NEIGHBOR A FREE MAN 
 
 success is only to be reckoned in money. We are 
 unfortunate in that there is so much in America for 
 men to covet. Our greatness is our peril. Because 
 we have much is no reason why we should guard less 
 what we have. We should not be deceived. Hu- 
 man nature unrestrained by patriotism or religion is 
 the same dangerous stuff the world over, and we have 
 not been any too patriotic, nor any too religious. 
 There are signs that the whole body of the people 
 has a serious infection of money-getting. There is 
 a wild passion which does not spend itself in stock 
 markets and which is not too safely centered in the 
 protection of the country nor too alert against the 
 peril of its foes. 
 
 Much is said by the agitators about the money- 
 making passion of moneyed people. But the evi- 
 dences are clear that money is the passion of the 
 poor as well. More things have entered the life 
 of the world that are coveted. More luxuries have 
 been turned into what the average man believes to 
 be necessities. More things have been placed almost 
 within his reach and he reaches out beyond his ability 
 to pay the price, and he demands the price. The 
 larger question of how it is to come is set aside by 
 an insatiable want. It is not true that working 
 people are being goaded on by the legitimate and 
 normal expenses which have arisen far above wage. 
 A comparison of a number of the different forms of 
 employment shows that wages have increased beyond 
 the cost of living and some of them startlingly so. 
 
 279 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 The unrest of laboring men has its roots in some- 
 thing besides necessity. It is to this spirit of avarice 
 that the agitator makes his successful appeal. We 
 must come back to the old-fashioned and good- 
 fashioned ways of honest, frugal, and temperate liv- 
 ing. They were safest for the country and happiest 
 for those who lived them. Men thrived not on 
 making much, but in carefully seeing that nothing 
 was lost and by saving the little things. They ad- 
 justed themselves to production and lived within 
 their income and their wage, and had a genuine 
 manhood to make them contented. They magnified 
 law and the rights of men. They were philosophers 
 in the shops and behind the plows. Whether that 
 time can ever be brought back is a question, for in- 
 ventions, mechanical art, trade in current prices 
 come into the humblest home and start inquiry and 
 ambition in the opening mind of the boy and girl an< 
 make demands which call for increased income. Bui 
 it all leaves the same old moral law which protects 
 every man in his own and gives no man a greatei 
 right than his neighbor. 
 
 The first question is justice and truth and right- 
 eousness. Any remove from these principles boj 
 with us in the homes of our fathers is out on slipper] 
 paths which end at precipices. When we forget th< 
 old home lessons, we begin to trade with our safel 
 and the safety of our country. We do not meai 
 that men may never extend beyond the home life. 
 No country has ever shown that possibility to 
 
 280 
 
MY NEIGHBOR A FREE MAN 
 
 greater degree than ours. But no more startling 
 and appalling lessons are found in any land of the 
 disaster of forgetting the primitive principles of 
 justice, honesty, and the square deal than we have 
 in these United States. All men, the man who 
 works with money and the man who works with his 
 hands, should heed those object lessons which have 
 been strewn along all our pathways. Happy if we 
 are never used for such object lessons. 
 
 The course upon which the organized working- 
 man is being launched has shown plainly its fruits. 
 They are dead sea apples. They are mock oranges. 
 Nothing can be so appalling as a land without law. 
 Read the true and exact stories of villages in Russia 
 where law has been repealed. Those are places, 
 the same places, where lives have been snuffed out. 
 They are places where women have learned to 
 murder and where charity has been bartered and 
 indescribable horrors have reigned with the terrors 
 of hell. 
 
 No man ever was wise enough to live without civil 
 law, and no man ever was great enough to govern 
 other men, nor lead them, without civil law. A ship 
 were safer at sea without a compass than are men 
 among themselves without moral law. The best 
 remedy for the present rapidly increasing tendencies 
 which threaten the poor man's cottage as they do 
 the rich man's mansion for the destroyers seek all 
 from both the rich or poor is to apply the Golden 
 Rule outside of the union and in all things and to 
 
 281 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 live loyally as freemen the laws of their country 
 living, letting live, working and letting work, anc 
 compelling a place and a success according to the 
 talents which have been given to them. 
 
 Freedom is worth a contest. No man shoulc 
 yield it if with it must go manhood. It is something 
 that can take no account of prosecutions or scoffs 
 and jeers. Having its basis in the liberties of his 
 country, he need not ask who beside denies it to him 
 An American will not transfer his loyalty to any man 
 nor association of men at the price of their influence 
 That is treason to himself and no man can afford 
 at any cost or loss, to betray himself. One of the 
 greatest things which this age needs is that men put 
 a price upon themselves. They reckon all things as 
 assets but the greatest of all. That they leave out 
 It is not what a man has, but what he is. He is not 
 to live his country's freedom, that is its laws, its 
 privileges, its opportunities, provided in its institu 
 tions. That is objective. The greatest is the con 
 sciousness of what he is within himself. The great 
 apostle was sublime when he faced his accusers with 
 the boast, "I am a citizen of no mean city." It 
 went with him where he went. It was what he was 
 "You may take me out of my job, but you cannot 
 take me out of myself. You may spurn me, but my 
 name is in the keeping of a higher custodian." Such 
 a man cannot be craven. No argument can appea 
 to him that does not go to conscience and honor anc 
 the centers of manhood. It was that type of man 
 
 282 
 
MY NEIGHBOR A FREE MAN 
 
 who laid deep and firm the foundations of our land. 
 They would brave the Atlantic Ocean's storms and 
 take the peril of death on a new and untried shore, 
 but they would not surrender their convictions of 
 right and duty. Every New Englander is proud 
 of his sturdy ancestors, the New Yorkers of their 
 Dutch progenitors. The Virginian boasts his Cava- 
 liers: great lines of descent for a land of free men. 
 It is ours to be worthy of it. We are to know no 
 dictators. The workingman is a free man. 
 
 283 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 MY NEIGHBOR HAS A JUST REMEDY 
 
 WHEN the -workingman of the unions finds him- 
 self in violation of law and morals it ought not to 
 take him long to turn around and go the other way. 
 He may say that he has his own opinion of his rights. 
 It does not matter what his opinions may be, he is 
 related to the rights of other men, and this becomes 
 an obligation and he has a duty to the country in 
 which he lives, and must consider these larger claim; 
 The President charges immorality upon an organiza- 
 tion of coal miners who choose approaching wintei 
 to force their claims for higher wage with th< 
 threat of closing the mines against transportatioi 
 upon which food depends and the comfort of hoj 
 pitals and homes also. No one who is not crazei 
 by the strike infection will say that the President 
 uses too strong language. The threat cited is im- 
 moral. The Golden Rule is a prime element ii 
 morality. The great question is not what is 
 man's rights until what is right for all men has firs! 
 been settled. Nothing can make my right whicl 
 wrongs my neighbor. The circumstances may s< 
 far surpass my right that he would have a claim 
 upon my life, and the law and the highest public 
 sentiment would say that I did my duty in going t< 
 
 284 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR HAS A JUST REMEDY 
 
 his rescue at the peril of my life. It becomes plain, 
 then, that neither my business nor my wage can en- 
 danger his life nor the life of his family. If the 
 coal miners have a just grievance, they must make 
 their appeal for redress in a way that will not starve 
 nor freeze the homes of the people, that will not 
 stop milk trains nor coal trains on the way to infants 
 or the sick in families or in hospitals. And to be 
 indifferent to such consequences is immoral in the 
 extreme. The leaders who encourage it represent 
 a cruel tyranny that is suggestive of distant ages and 
 that is not possible in an age of common morality, 
 and that has for one of its tenets mercy even to 
 dumb animals. We are having only a striking illus- 
 tration of the immoral principles which have been ap- 
 plied to the treatment of all nonunion men in labor 
 union controversies. The Golden Rule is ignored, 
 it is not so much as mentioned by union men when 
 they seek to force the demands of their organization 
 upon a community, or when they attempt to prevent 
 nonunion men from enjoying the privileges which 
 they claim for themselves. Their whole conduct is 
 immoral. There is not a structure of morality that 
 could stand upon such foundations an hour. It is 
 the Nietzschean morals, which know no self-denial 
 but are founded upon the primitive instincts of the 
 savage. It launched the world into a war against 
 the Christian principles which apply to business, to 
 labor, to individuals, and to nations. It went down 
 in an appalling wreck before the aroused conscience 
 
 285 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 of mankind. Not a remnant of it should be left in 
 our country, and anything which stands for it should 
 be brought to judgment. It is immoral in that it 
 has not a thread of morality woven into it. The 
 Golden Rule in at least the negative form has had a 
 place among men since the day that Cain killed his 
 brother Abel. Without it there can be no brother- 
 hood. What is the difference whether you slay 
 Abel or leave him to starve and freeze to death? 
 What different is the spirit which would forbid a 
 man to work for his bread for his family unless he 
 works in a way that is against his conscience, his 
 sense of freedom and liberty, by an authority arbi- 
 trary, self-assertive, and unrecognized by the Con- 
 stitution of his country? It is immoral if there 
 any such thing as morality in the world. It violates 
 and tramples upon all of those principles upon whicl 
 our land was founded and which brought the Pil- 
 grims to our shores. 
 
 But it is not only immoral, it is criminal as w< 
 A man can defy morals often and remain beyon< 
 control. Many men are immoral, and known to be 
 so, and unblushingly proclaim their immorality, am 
 remain beyond reach. They ignore the moral 
 and keep beyond reach of civil or criminal law. Bui 
 there is a violation of moral and civil law which 
 amounts to a conspiracy. It is a combination oi 
 persons to do an evil act, or to do anything against 
 anyone which is punishable by law. Can anything 
 be more evil than to forbid anyone to earn food for 
 
 286 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR HAS A JUST REMEDY 
 
 his family by honest labor in a free country? Should 
 anything be more punishable under the law than a 
 combination against business, with threats of vio- 
 lence, with incendiarism and sabotage? And must 
 the state leave unrestrained organizations which are 
 known to foster such things until they commit the 
 act and the damage is done beyond repair? 
 
 It is high time that the country pronounced with 
 unmistakable law against strikes of all kinds. 
 There should be no doubt left that strikes are crimes. 
 The moral features can be applied by the individual. 
 The conspiracy can be used by the state against all 
 mspirators. It should have been done long ago. 
 [ad it been done, we would not now be standing 
 telpless, notwithstanding our injunctions, obeyed by 
 ie leaders of an indifferent rank and file of strikers. 
 "he conspirator would not be left to roam about 
 lefying the government and breeding contempt for 
 LW, but would be placed where he would have time 
 read the Constitution and learn the majesty of the 
 iw. Law founded upon morals, and morals mak- 
 ig effective law, is the crying need of our country 
 -day. The Ten Commandments and the Beati- 
 ides, harmonizing in all business and all labor, 
 d constitute a platform upon which both could 
 icet with few difficulties to settle, and none which 
 r ould not yield without violence to either great in- 
 :rest nor harm to the innocent and to our country, 
 'his leads us to arbitration. If men cannot stand 
 ipon that platform, there is something wrong, some- 
 
 287 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 thing dangerous to the country. Where men will 
 not arbitrate, there is distrust of one's cause, or a 
 determination to have the whole. This is why it 
 becomes necessary for arbitration to fix contro- 
 versies by law. Men should be compelled to accept 
 the verdict of arbitration, as they are to submit to 
 the decisions of the courts, notwithstanding that 
 often one or both sides are dissatisfied. This has 
 been proved by centuries of experience to be the only 
 way for the affairs of men to be safely adjudicated. 
 It means law or force, and force means riot and 
 murder. There is no reason why arbitration may 
 not be arranged upon a basis as secure as the Su- 
 preme Court of the State or the Supreme Court of 
 the United States. It should be kept out of politics, 
 and separated from anything like either interest in- 
 volved. It should be a Court of Arbitration, con- 
 stituted like the Supreme Court. Its members 
 should be nominated by the President of the United 
 States and approved by the Senate, with a member 
 each from the North, the South, the East, and the 
 West, and an eminent lawyer from the country at 
 large. It ought to be sufficiently representative of 
 the whole country to command the confidence of all 
 concerned. They should be men of eminent char- 
 acter, rather than with special acquaintance with 
 business or labor, for men of common intelligence 
 can weigh evidence, and men of large views have 
 safe horizons. The Court of Arbitration should 
 be like other great courts. Such a court would com- 
 
 288 
 
MY NEIGHBOR HAS A JUST REMEDY 
 
 mand the confidence of the country and the con- 
 testants, and it would be but a short time before the 
 strike would be obsolete and we all would wonder 
 that human intelligence was ever so low and human 
 passion ran so high as to give it a place among us. 
 It would be incredible to coming generations that a 
 great and free people ever attempted to settle great 
 judicial questions by the contest of conflicting inter- 
 ests and that men were permitted to deny personal 
 rights to others which they claimed for themselves. 
 We have been long coming to realize that law 
 mst be applied to the labor union as it is to other 
 bodies of men and to other interests. We have 
 tried to dodge the issue, and the more since it 
 reached political proportions. Class legislation has 
 been made for it, and there have been exceptions 
 favoring the unions when laws relating to strikes and 
 boycotts and picketing have been passed. But at 
 last the union leaders themselves have forced a pub- 
 lic sentiment against lawlessness which the courts 
 and the administration cannot disregard. This 
 arrogance by union leaders and the general condi- 
 tions throughout the country call for law, and only 
 law, to determine the rights of men. The people 
 are insisting that no men shall be permitted to take 
 matters into their own hands and determine, by con- 
 spiracy or invasion of the rights and property and 
 liberties of other men, their contentions. 
 
 In a word, the strike has had its day. The coun- 
 try will pass a law that all strikes and lockouts, ex- 
 
 289 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 cept against riot, are criminal, and the law will define 
 the crime and make the penalties severe enough to 
 prevent it. Common-sense equity will sustain such 
 a law. It violates every sense of justice that a body 
 of men shall conspire against a business because it 
 hires men who do not belong to its organization, or 
 that men shall be at liberty to assail and maim 
 men who dare to work at given places and times 
 without their permission. One finds it difficult to 
 believe where such things obtain in America that 
 this is any longer a land of free men. How 
 has it gone so far? Why was it not arrested 
 in the first instance? Everyone concedes that a man 
 who is not satisfied with his wage, or with the boss 
 of a job, has a right to quit and find employment 
 elsewhere. But it is another thing when men con- 
 spire to take all men off the works at the same hour 
 and set pickets to prevent other men going upon 
 them until the strikers are taken back on their own 
 terms. 
 
 Mr. William H. Taft has made an astounding 
 remark about the coal strikers, if reported correctly, 
 at a time when the government needed his voice, and 
 there has been no correction. He says, "The work- 
 ingmen have a right to organize as much as the em- 
 ployers have that right." No intelligent man hai 
 ever denied them that right, but they have no righl 
 to organize to prevent me from doing what I prefei 
 to do, nor to interfere with my business. That is th< 
 contention. Judge Gary, to whom reference is 
 
 290 
 
MY NEIGHBOR HAS A JUST REMEDY 
 
 made, has not objected to the men of his corporation 
 organizing within their rights, and for purposes of 
 self-government, or the betterment of their condi- 
 tion. He objects, as every sensible man with any 
 self-respect and courage does, to his employees or- 
 ganizing to interfere with his business, to decide 
 what wages it can pay and what men shall come and 
 go with their disturbing labor doctrines among the 
 workingmen employed by the corporation. To say 
 that laborers have a right to organize is wide of the 
 question to-day. Of course they have, if they do 
 not organize to meddle with other men who have 
 
 much right not to organize as they have to 
 ganize. It is because of conflict of opinion about 
 j;ht that arbitration is indispensable. 
 Mr. Gompers assails the government and pro- 
 nounces the injunction of the courts unjust and an 
 invasion of human freedom, and intimates that it 
 will not be obeyed. As to the safety of such leader- 
 ship in a time of excitement, and as to its loyalty to 
 the government, the public will safely judge. It 
 quickly takes the measure of such a man. But the 
 important thing which bears upon my contention is, 
 Who is to decide the justice or injustice of our laws? 
 A law, right or wrong when the final court has ren- 
 dered its decision, must be obeyed. If it is right, all 
 loyal citizens will be glad to obey it. If wrong, 
 there is a safe way provided in our economy to 
 remove it or to revise it. If there are inconven- 
 iences, these must be endured until regular processes 
 
 291 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 have provided the remedy. In the mean time the 
 Court of Arbitration is the safest redress for all 
 concerned. 
 
 The conditions which have given thoughtful men 
 apprehension and anxiety have developed rapidly 
 toward a state within the state; and unsafe leaders 
 have found such favor in the government and have 
 seen so small resistance to the strike and other forms 
 of violence, that they have presumed upon an au- 
 thority which they are startled to have even the 
 United States courts resist and rebuke. So deep- 
 seated has become the lawless assumption that it 
 requires a night and half a day to decide that the 
 safe thing will be to obey the law. The indication 
 is very plain that the law would have been defied 
 had there been any hope of success. The statement, 
 therefore, that "We cannot afford to disobey our 
 government" will deceive no one, nor will it cause 
 the country to relax a vigilance to which it has at 
 last awakened, none too soon to preserve the great 
 barriers against our deadliest foes. Should oppor- 
 tunity offer, they would quickly forget all regard for 
 their country at every point of difference where they 
 have always shown their greatest allegiance. With 
 them, related by not too great distances, are those 
 men who promised in the same week destruction of 
 all government, the removal of all lines that mark 
 private property, and the rejection God and re- 
 ligion as useless superstitions. 
 
 Whenever a man puts his interests above those 
 292 
 
MY NEIGHBOR HAS A JUST REMEDY 
 
 of his neighbor, and refuses to be restrained by law, 
 the steep downward grade of that man's descent is 
 swift and certain. When concessions are made to 
 any man's self-rule it kindles fires that soon pass 
 beyond control. If any law can be defied, if any 
 court order can become a subject for debate, it shows 
 how far a course of conduct has proceeded and how 
 dangerous it is. If it does not pass over into ex- 
 tremest forms of anarchy, it is largely responsible 
 for them. It should not be left to courts with in- 
 junction. All such questions should go before the 
 Court of Arbitration, with authority to issue writs 
 and fix penalties. 
 
 No class of men can live without law and not 
 corrupt, in time, the whole body politic. Every 
 strike is a blow at the jurisprudence of the whole 
 country and should be resisted, not only for the 
 injury it does to business, but for the harm that 
 comes to a fundamental institution of the country. 
 Things said, like the demagogic utterances of a 
 labor leader who rails at the administration and the 
 courts, are small in comparison with a practice which 
 has increased in defiance of good order and law until 
 it claims recognition everywhere, and boasts that it 
 cannot be stopped by law. If that is true, what 
 would hinder the nonunion men, in vast majority, 
 from striking against the strikers, and wrecking 
 their lodge rooms and running them off the jobs by 
 which they have been denied work? Certainly, any 
 tacit consent or any law which makes the slightest 
 
 293 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 concession to the strike practice, should be repealed 
 at once unless we are going to allow men to settle 
 their own difficulties by the strike. Are we ready 
 for that sovietism? We have been winking at a 
 form of anarchy in our own country which, carried 
 to its conclusion, is of the same character as the 
 Bolshevism which we abhor. It is not safe because 
 we are strong. If we are not strong enough to 
 prevent its incipiency, we shall not stop its extreme 
 peril when that comes. 
 
 We are passing through our lesson. We have 
 had our warning. Our houses of Congress have 
 many weighty things to do to put us back upon the 
 secure platform of the republic, but it has nothing 
 more important than to establish respect for law 
 among all the people. It should insist that all 
 strikes, which have multiplied into hundreds of every 
 kind of contention, shall be replaced by the law in 
 the form of a Court of Arbitration. 
 
 One of the great events in our history, one which 
 will take its place among the crises, is the settlement 
 of the coal strike leaders' revolt, by the courts, in a 
 way so decisive, so effectual, and so prompt that it is 
 amazing that it never has been tried before. Atlanta 
 was not inviting to the agitating leaders, and they 
 could figure out for themselves no other destiny. 
 Mr. Gompers proposed to go, but he didn't! Il 
 was a force, unexpected, which Mr. Gompers 
 charged to the sickness of the President. He was 
 mistaken. He had not heard the moving in the tops 
 
 294 
 
MY NEIGHBOR HAS A JUST REMEDY 
 
 of the mulberry trees. The whole people had never 
 been imperiled before. They had looked on and 
 seen contractors losing money and laborers denied 
 right of labor as a penalty for not joining the unions. 
 They had seen town housings held up and property 
 destroyed. But these things touched only a few. 
 Now they were face to face with cold and hunger 
 and the paralysis of business everywhere, and it was 
 a public and a general interest. The people were 
 all connected with it, and the people were the coun- 
 try, and at last the lawless tyrants felt the force of 
 the whole people. The petty tyrants, who had 
 domineered and dictated to business, learned for the 
 first time how mighty is law. They could bluster 
 and threaten and tell how the trouble was to be in- 
 volved and made impossible of adjustment by the 
 mixing in of the courts. They could appeal to 
 justice, which never before had had a place in their 
 vocabulary, and demand rights from a source they 
 always had ignored. And then they could whimper 
 and plead abuse of privileges as American citizens ! 
 But the courts proceeded with quiet dignity, backed 
 by an hundred million people. And they obeyed! 
 There was nothing else for them to do. They were 
 not contending with strike-breakers. They were 
 not resisting sympathetic police. They were not en- 
 couraged by an apologetic press. They were not 
 invited into compromising conferences. The law 
 spoke, and they obeyed. They were dealing with 
 the law and the law courts. All of which shows 
 
 295 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 that a Court of Arbitration the law is the way to 
 settle strikes. 
 
 The wail of the petty tyrants was that the govern- 
 ment had joined the plutocrats to ruin the unions. 
 But the government had joined nobody but the 
 whole people and it was by no means to ruin the 
 unions. If protection of the people, or any class of 
 the people, will ruin the unions, then they ought to 
 be ruined. Nothing has a right to thrive at the ex- 
 pense of the rights and safety of the government, 
 nor by the embarrassment and loss of citizens with 
 equal rights. Nothing has done the unions so much 
 harm as the claim by their leaders of a superior 
 privilege which puts them beyond restrictive legisla- 
 tion and the mandates of the courts. This is not a 
 country of government by injunction when it applies 
 to the union ! This is not a government of democracy 
 when it protects a nonunion man in his work! It 
 is right and just only so long as it obeys the behests 
 of a class, a minority class, and gives it right of way 
 over every other class. This was what was ruining 
 the unions. An autocracy under the dictation of a 
 most oppressive autocrat was reaching out for con- 
 trol of business and of all labor, even the forms 
 which were nonunion. That was what made the 
 unions unpopular until the people were ready to arise 
 against them and the government reminded them of 
 a restraining law. It was "horrible, " in the language 
 of their chief autocrat, to find that anything so pro- 
 fane and unholy as an injunction could apply to an 
 
 296 
 
MY NEIGHBOR HAS A JUST REMEDY 
 
 organization which had asserted its tyranny un- 
 challenged so long that the general government con- 
 cerning all labor matters existed by the leave of the 
 federation from whose leaders the President and the 
 lawmakers had been taking orders most subservi- 
 ently. One or the other must go the government 
 or the union. It was well for the union that it de- 
 cided to go. With a new set of officers to replace 
 those who have discredited themselves, who boasted 
 their willingness to go to prison in defiance of law, 
 the unions will take a new and respected place. It is 
 not the desire of anyone to destroy and remove the 
 unions, if they will cease their work of destruction 
 and serve their country by the elevation of labor and 
 by universal justice and fairness toward all laborers. 
 We only want to know whether they purpose to be a 
 part of the country, or to continue to control the 
 country. Is the belated utterance of one of their 
 leaders, u Our country," something new, to become 
 the common and familiar sentiment of all union 
 members, and is the attack upon the government by 
 Mr. Gompers to be repudiated by the federation? 
 If so, it will do much to restore labor unions in the 
 confidence and esteem of American citizens who 
 place their Constitution and equal liberty to all men 
 before every other consideration. 
 
 The only desire of those who have long protested 
 the disloyalty and intolerance, the arrogance and un- 
 fairness of the union, has been to place it under law 
 and bring it to an appreciation of the fact that it by 
 
 297 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 no means represents the workingmen of this country. 
 They want the strike made criminal, whoever uses 
 it. But they want so to plan it with a great court 
 which, influenced by no consideration but justice and 
 right, will protect all men the union miner protest- 
 ing his low wage and the coal employer with his side 
 of production and just profit; the steel workingman 
 protesting his grievances and the employer his right 
 to direct his own business or the business of his 
 corporation; the union man on the job and the non- 
 union man's right to go on any job; and the con- 
 tractor's right to efficiency and an honest day's labor. 
 We find no unfair spirit toward the unions, nor 
 desire to use law to destroy them. Arbitration 
 makes no pronouncement against the right of men 
 to organize, but it proposes to examine the purposes 
 of an organization and the uses which are being 
 made of it. It will not say that a man shall not quit 
 a job when he pleases. That is as much his right as 
 it is for him to begin to work when hired. It is an 
 inalienable right deeper than statutes. But it will 
 inquire as to why the employer may not decide when 
 his services are no longer wanted, and also as to 
 whether the act of his dismissal is arbitrary and un- 
 just, as has often happened by the act of some unfit 
 boss or foreman. Arbitration will hear and settle 
 protests of a whole body of men which heretofore 
 has resorted to strikes endangering life and property 
 and costing our country untold millions of money in 
 wages and products. Such disputes are now settled 
 
 298 
 
MY NEIGHBOR HAS A JUST REMEDY 
 
 by a test of endurance and the greater loss and em- 
 barrassment which can be inflicted. That always is 
 attended by deep resentment and it displaces calm 
 judgment and the capability of seeing the other's 
 cause. Men never have been capable of settling 
 personal controversy when anger and passionate 
 strife enter into the contention. The attempt often 
 has resulted in life enmity or in revenge by incendiar- 
 ism and murder the very principles of the strike. 
 Such a condition should not be allowed as a right 
 and privilege by American citizens. It strikes at 
 the whole public and is a menace to any community 
 when it is permitted. The law of arbitration should 
 not be used in the case of labor unions only, but it 
 should be a general law to take the place of all 
 strikes of every kind. 
 
 Those who object to the present form of the 
 labor union simply insist that it shall come under law, 
 and that its acts shall be altogether lawful, and that 
 it shall use nothing against the nonunion man nor 
 business which is not lawful; that its leaders shall 
 respect our laws and obey them and not oppose 
 them nor defy them. We insist that the union 
 shall be ruled, not by an oligarchy of aliens, but that 
 they shall be ruled by the United States. 
 
 A New Year's letter of Samuel Gompers shows 
 how blinded a man may become by the persistent 
 pursuit of violated law and privilege. He says that 
 "American workers stand ready to do their full 
 duty as American citizens." Mr. Gompers is speak- 
 
 299 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 ing for a minority of American workers. He is not 
 representing the nonunion workers. And Mr. 
 Gompers has forgotten that it is not a month since 
 he said that if the government passed certain laws 
 and it doubtless will pass them he "would not obey 
 them." Mr. Gompers said in his letter, "As citi- 
 zens, we are true to the American ideal of equal op- 
 portunity for all." Does that mean the nonunion 
 man? Is he one of the "all"? Or are the union 
 men the "all" who shall enjoy equal opportunity of 
 labor? Mr. Gompers tells us in his letter he "has 
 found it necessary to fight agencies that sought to 
 establish special privileges" ! "Those fights have 
 been to assure to wage-earners the rights and oppor- 
 tunities that all should possess." Have the fights 
 been for all laborers, or only for union men's "spe- 
 cial privileges" ? This champion of human freedom 
 when it is union organized tells us further that 
 "the great struggle has been to assure workers in 
 their industrial relations the rights of free citizens." 
 That is a narrow concept of American freedom. 
 Ours is a freedom which contemplates every citizen 
 who obeys the law, both union and nonunion, laborer 
 and capitalist. And any militant struggle against 
 any of our citizens to secure benefits to other citi- 
 zens is against the law and should be forbidden. 
 No man has any right to lead in any such contest. 
 That leaves him to be the legislator, the court, the 
 executive and the militant commander, all of which 
 Mr. Gompers has long assumed to be ! I make one 
 
 300 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR HAS A JUST REMEDY 
 
 more quotation from the famous New Year's greet- 
 ing, which contains more fallacies than I ever saw in 
 five paragraphs: "The immediate problem of the 
 world is to develop a production organization that 
 will benefit directly those who are the real producers 
 and serve the needs of starving nations/' Why an 
 organization, why not all men? "The real produc- 
 ers" are the men who put their money into factories 
 and shops and machines, and who hire men and 
 women to "develop production." These are the 
 real producers the man with the money; the man 
 with his day labor for which he is paid. The man 
 with the money and business sagacity and risk of 
 loss must be paid out of the profits. He consents 
 to pay the workingman first. 
 
 301 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 MY NEIGHBOR'S EMPLOYER 
 
 THERE are at least two distinct responsibilities 
 where two men or two kinds of employments meet. 
 There is one humanity, and one Golden Rule, always 
 as fundamental obligations, and nothing exempts nor 
 removes them. But the laborer cannot displace the 
 employer, nor can the employer take the place of 
 the laborer except where the work of both can be 
 done by the same person. Collective bargaining is 
 a loosely jointed formula if applied only to the inter- 
 ests of one side of a controversy which uses it and at 
 once gets into trouble with the side which it opposes 
 and attempts to control. It is not a happy phrase, 
 and has made no small mischief. The employer has 
 the initiative and represents the housing, the ma- 
 chines, and the material to pass into products. The 
 workman also comes into his purview in a large way. 
 The laborer has his skill, his brawn, his health, the 
 sustenance and comfort of himself and family, the 
 savings against the rainy day, and the social and 
 religious life, and the civil and domestic economy 
 of his town, all as problems of his employment. 
 These must all be considered when he takes up the 
 question of where and for whom he shall work. 
 The workingman must settle these propositions care- 
 
 302 
 
 
i 
 
 MY NEIGHBOR'S EMPLOYER 
 
 fully. It is not simply a question of the ability of 
 the employer to pay, but of all the conditions that 
 insure permanent and safe employment. It is un- 
 wise to leave these matters to be settled afterward 
 by collective bargaining. A disinclination to work 
 under given conditions is a strong corrective of care- 
 less employers. It is rather late in the world's 
 istory for the laborer's time to be spent upon cor- 
 ecting wrong appointments of factories, such as 
 bad sanitation, heat and light, or readjustment of 
 wage. A direct pressure is in the silent, unprotest- 
 ing absence from that plant of efficient workers. 
 The same privilege is reserved to the employer 
 quietly to exclude the inefficient from his shops. This 
 is all the right which is established by themselves be- 
 tween the employer and the employee. It is sub- 
 ject to withdrawal of either or of both. 
 
 A laborer cannot take out of his employer's busi- 
 ness more than is in it, and when he takes out his 
 weekly wage he leaves in that business the risk of 
 loss and the depreciation which his discontent and 
 insistence upon larger pay creates. All turns upon 
 what the business is making. It has no other source 
 of revenue. It cannot anticipate nor draw back 
 from the reserve of past years. What is the pro- 
 duct by the workers and what the demand for that 
 product? Every laborer has a very direct and con- 
 tract relation to the market, and it is not possible to 
 read the market offhand. That is the problem for 
 the employer. It is his job. The workingman is 
 
 303 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 really employed by the market. What does the 
 world want? It would be foolish to work on shoes 
 if there were no demand for shoes, or on clothes if 
 there were no demand for woolens nor dress goods. 
 Upon my neighbor the workingman is placed as 
 much as upon the employer the products demanded 
 by mankind. If they are not produced and men 
 want them, the prices become prohibitive. If they 
 are produced, they sometimes become a drug in the 
 market. The workingman sometimes appears to 
 think that business is made arbitrarily; and if it is 
 not made, it ought to be taken over by someone who 
 can produce it and make it pay wages. It is true 
 that sometimes faulty methods of distribution and 
 sales have to be corrected, for the fault is not with 
 overproduction but with under sales and bad man- 
 agement. But it remains just the same problem of 
 taking out only what is put into the business by the 
 employer and the employee, and the world has the 
 determination of all that. Every workingman is 
 working for the public, and he has more than he may 
 imagine the making of the public demands. The 
 present conditions of limited production and high 
 prices have been brought about very largely by short- 
 ened hours and repeated increase of wages. It may 
 not -have been too much wage that is for the public 
 to say for it becomes a question as to whether the 
 people can afford it, and the public is not something 
 apart from the wage-earners. They are foolish if 
 they think that they are receiving something from 
 
 304 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S EMPLOYER 
 
 capital and from those who can afford to pay. The 
 laborer must help pay the tax of the high cost of 
 living which he creates. If as the result of his 
 short hours and high pay it costs more to build in a 
 community, he must pay more to build his cottage. 
 Material is forced up and he must take a per cent 
 it of his pay envelope to buy this material. If 
 rages are doubled on the farm, as they have been, 
 ie must pay more for milk and potatoes and eggs 
 ind poultry, for it costs more to raise grain and 
 vegetables and corn for stock. When the city work- 
 igman doubles his pay he at once doubles the pay 
 >f the farm hand and becomes a purchaser of farm 
 >roduce as one of the public, at an increased price. 
 [e cannot escape. The folly of the Bojsheviki is 
 iat they imagine that they are a separate class and 
 take a new economic law. The old law remains, 
 'ake out the labor and you take out the product; 
 icrease the pay of labor and you add to the price of 
 product. You can keep it going until it becomes 
 irohibitive. The manufacturer goes no further 
 than the demand goes, and the demand stops when 
 the people cannot afford the article. They will substi- 
 tute something less expensive, or do without it when 
 possible. It is plain enough, therefore, in the final 
 analysis, that the workingman's employer is the pub- 
 lic and that he is a part of the public. Public spirit 
 becomes a self-protective spirit. What promotes the 
 public good and offers attractions to business is of 
 first and most direct concern to the man who works 
 
 305 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 with his hands. Every store and every shop depends 
 upon the ability of men and women in the town to 
 buy. This is what makes prosperous labor condi- 
 tions. It is not something arbitrary for which capi- 
 talists and employers are responsible. It is a law of 
 cause and effect, as certain and dependable as the 
 law which governs the tides of the sea or the move- 
 ments of the stars. Men may disregard it, but they 
 will find that its court is always in session, and its 
 penalties are sure. There are no suspended sen- 
 tences. What is done has its sequences, and they 
 will be of its kind and time. What men do in labor 
 has far and exact consequences. 
 
 Intelligent employers, feeling the force of this, 
 have tried every expedient to conserve labor and 
 secure to it contentment with an adequate wage. One 
 of the experiments has been profit-sharing. In this 
 way it has been thought that the workingman could 
 be made to feel a responsibility for the business, and 
 work as a silent partner. The theory contains a high 
 ideal, but it is based upon a presumption which does 
 not obtain among workingmen. Such a scheme can- 
 not be made practical with exceptions. It must be 
 general. It must comprehend the whole crew, the 
 entire body of laborers. 
 
 The two fields of business management and 
 labor efficiency are widely different. The laborer 
 is not patient of the slower processes. If the busi- 
 ness can pay a profit at the end of a year, it must pay 
 me increased wage, or I go, he says. And if I am 
 
 306 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S EMPLOYER 
 
 to share in profits, am I not to share in losses ? That 
 I cannot afford on my income. I cannot wait for 
 the profits of one year with another to balance the 
 account in making the totals. The plan has not 
 contributed essential harmony and become general 
 in the businesses of the country and we believe never 
 
 Kill be. There are instances where enthusiastic 
 aims are set up for the plan, but they are in cases 
 here conditions are exceptional, such as skilled 
 manufacture which eliminates hand labor largely 
 and takes in a form of skilled artisanship. In one 
 of these great establishments where the plan has 
 been in operation for a long time it is admitted by 
 the management that a large per cent of the em- 
 ployees are college graduates. This shows an ex- 
 ceptional condition which would furnish no guide to 
 ordinary forms of labor. Workingmen are not 
 college educated. They are not technically educated. 
 Many of them are highly intelligent and proficient 
 in their chosen calling. The firm to which I have 
 referred is employing more than workingmen. The 
 men who go to work there are putting in something 
 more than hand labor. They are putting in that 
 which cost them thousands of dollars in money and 
 in preparatory time, and they should expect and 
 have more than weekly wages. 
 
 A plan which might apply to such quality of work 
 would be difficult to adjust to manual labor strictly 
 and exclusively. Men should take away what they 
 bring to the job, and no more. That would be for 
 
 307 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 the workingman what his labor is worth in the 
 market of workers. His employer represents other 
 values intellectual capacity, influence and confi- 
 dence among owners, power to employ and to secure 
 from workingmen their money value in the products 
 of labor. He is the man who went out and found 
 the contract and began to work for a profit after 
 reckoning material and labor. He is the man who 
 gave his bond and ventured all his savings. The 
 workingmen did not do it. They could not take a 
 contract. They could work on it and nothing more. 
 
 There is something due the employer, therefore, 
 something more than four dollars of work value, the 
 price of a day's work. The laborer owes a certain 
 value in dependableness. A contract is made to 
 deliver a building in a certain time, or to pay a for- 
 feit. There is a contract, actual or implied, with 
 carpenters and masons, tenders and handy men. 
 These men are in honor bound to their employer if 
 he is to them. If they are not to be, he cannot 
 begin a contract. The man who furnishes lumber, 
 the hardware man, the cement man, cannot put up 
 prices from week to week arbitrarily without regard 
 to agreed contracts. 
 
 Collective bargaining is not bargaining. It is all 
 one-sided if it may be set aside and ignored when- 
 ever a union decides to insist upon higher wages. 
 "Collective" means more than one party. It is as 
 much in the interest of the workingman as it is to 
 the interest of the employer that there be stable 
 
 308 
 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S EMPLOYER 
 
 conditions, and the compelling force should be the 
 stability of employment. It goes without saying 
 that the man coming to a job must bring two hands 
 and two feet, and that he must have common intel- 
 ligence if he is to assert any claim upon the em- 
 ployer. But it should be equally true that he must 
 bring sobriety and common honesty. He must keep 
 his contract with his employer. The employer hires 
 a contented man. He is there presumably because 
 he wants to be. He would rather be there than in 
 any other place. He need not have come if he did 
 not like the wage. He is a dishonest man who takes 
 advantage of a place on a contract job to sow dis- 
 content among his fellow workmen and, if possible, 
 disrupt the crew. The agitator often begins this 
 way. Most of the strikes begin by betrayal of the 
 employer. The collective bargaining is not with the 
 employer, but against the employer. The peculiar 
 state of mind of the labor agitator has been il- 
 lustrated in recent pronouncement of the federation 
 against government meddling with labor unions. It 
 brings out fully the perverted thought of independ- 
 ence of employer, of the public, and of the consti- 
 tuted authority of the land upon the part of the 
 labor unions. The avowed claim is made that they 
 are free men! Free men to dictate prudence on 
 their own terms and to deny it to whom they will. 
 A recent utterance charges the government with en- 
 croaching upon the rights of workers ! What work- 
 ers? The nonunion workers? Another outcry is 
 
 309 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 that it is "time to call a halt upon oppression of 
 workers by the courts." Why is it worse for the 
 courts to oppress workers than it is for workers to 
 oppress workers? Have not union workers been 
 oppressing nonunion workers for a full generation? 
 Are such men likely to be heard or heeded when 
 they whimper about the oppression of the courts 
 which are restraining them from oppressing the 
 whole country with their immoral and criminal 
 strikes ? 
 
 Again the federation council speaks: "Men born 
 free will not long suffer tyranny or deprivation of 
 natural liberty in whatever form, without de- 
 termined resistance." That is a pronouncement 
 which we have long waited from union authority. 
 Men born free, without restraint of a self-consti- 
 tuted authority, have a right to work where and for 
 whom they choose for their own agreed wage, and 
 no man has a right to interfere with them. If he 
 does, he will be met with determined resistance ! 
 
 The convention which so vehemently resists court 
 injunctions applied to union strikes and never resents 
 injunctions against corporations, declares that: 
 "Treason should be defined to include willful viola- 
 tion by any public official of any constitutional right 
 of a citizen." Why by an official of the government 
 any more than by an official of the federated unions ! 
 If anything is made to appear it is that the time- 
 honored injunction, which is one of the most com- 
 mon forms of restraining government in all enlight- 
 
 310 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S EMPLOYER 
 
 ened lands, has been delayed in this land altogether 
 too long. Why should a body of men under any 
 pretense or claim be permitted to violate any consti- 
 tutional right of any citizen? and why should such 
 violators defy the restraints of the government 
 which keeps them simply within their lawful bounds 
 and protects individual and public interests from the 
 oppression of their tyranny? 
 
 At last the government has come in as an em- 
 ployer. It has too long left the oppressed indi- 
 vidual worker to fight his unequal battle. But when 
 the government came to run railways and to appre- 
 ciate that the railways must have coal, it appreciated 
 what it was to be an employer. And when the 
 union took Uncle Sam for an employer and at- 
 tempted to run its strikes, it ran against what has 
 ;en used against defiant offenders from the begin- 
 ning of the government. It is profoundly to be 
 hoped that the same law will enforce the right of 
 the individual and the entire public whenever a con- 
 spiracy by tyrants attempts to oppress the people or 
 even one of the people. 
 
 Mr. Lincoln said that we could not remain half 
 free and half slave. That is our condition in labor 
 now; one half free to work as it pleases and to dic- 
 tate terms to employers and contend against law, 
 and the other half slaves to the first half to work 
 only when permitted and to be hunted and hounded 
 about from job to job and forbidden to work en- 
 tirely, if possible. The two cannot remain in this 
 
 311 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 divided way, and the whole must be altogether 
 free. 
 
 No body of men have any corporate or associated 
 right in our country to become inimical to any public 
 interest or to the perfect freedom of any person or 
 any other body of our citizens protected in their 
 rights under our Constitution. That men may re- 
 fuse to work for any employer under any conditions 
 which they may set up, no one will deny. If their 
 patriotism falls so low and their self-interest so far 
 disregards the Golden Rule, they can, of course, 
 retire within themselves as a mud turtle pulls its 
 head into its shell. But they cannot, in free 
 America, deny the rights of other men to enjoy the 
 privileges which they claim for themselves. We 
 cannot insist upon this too often nor urge it too 
 earnestly. 
 
 Labor is not simply for wages. It is not only to 
 sustain the life of the laborer and his family; it is to 
 enter into the improvement and development of the 
 country and to add to the advantages in the future of 
 himself and his associates. It is a short-sighted 
 mistake to think that the results of labor are carried 
 away by the man who pays the wage. It is only the 
 gambler who carries away what he gets and leaves 
 nothing. What the workingman builds remains a 
 road, a dwelling, a commercial or an educational 
 building. If a factory, it adds more business; if a 
 dam, it supplies water power; if an electric plant, it 
 furnishes light. A man pointed to a great structure, 
 
 312 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S EMPLOYER 
 
 the pride of his city, and said, "I helped build that." 
 He felt that by so much he was a public benefactor. 
 Mechanics have often said to me, "I worked on 
 your great buildings of the University up on the 
 Hill." They had just pride in their work and I 
 always met them afterward with a different interest. 
 They seemed to me to have had an important part 
 with our patrons in making possible the presence of 
 thousands of students in the University halls. They 
 'ere in a way founders of the institution. It is in 
 this way that the community looks upon its honest 
 and efficient workingmen. It has pride in them. 
 
 The calamity which has fallen upon American 
 labor is the separation between the workingman and 
 the employer. It has been brought about by an or- 
 ganization which has been taught that the employer 
 is seeking to rob the laborer of his hire, that he cares 
 only for what he can get out of his contract, and 
 "his results in a defensive feeling upon the part of 
 ic employer and you have two men of the same 
 lesh and blood, whose interests should be common, 
 in sharp antagonism. The builders' associations 
 ind the labor unions are playing points upon each 
 >ther when they should be promoting each other's 
 interests, because they have a common cause. The 
 ! ailure of either hurts both. They should be so 
 identical that the thinnest wedge of the agitator could 
 lot be inserted between them. No man should 
 stand between the men and their employer. The 
 man who does always makes mischief. He is 
 
 313 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 preaching discontent, and it does not stop with 
 wages. It reaches out into the business. It attacks 
 the conditions of society and begins propaganda of a 
 new economic and social order. It attacks the church 
 and the nation, and you see a caste created, and the 
 workingman, for the first time, comes to believe 
 that he is oppressed and that courts are a tyranny 
 and that the government ought to be overthrown. 
 The curse of the workingman is the man whom he 
 has let in between him and his employer, the mischief 
 meddler whom he has let in to set up his notions 
 from collective bargaining to strikes. The country 
 has paid nearly three hundred millions for the 
 meddlers' steel strike besides millions of lost wages 
 of men who were being paid more wages than college 
 professors and preachers were receiving. There 
 have been no differences between intelligent workers 
 and their employers which would not have been 
 settled if they had been left to the workers and the 
 employers. No one will contend that the employer 
 has always been just, and it is equally true that the 
 worker has not been faultless. Often he was drunk 
 on the job; and, if not, he often was surly and quar- 
 relsome, or shiftless and lazy. There were two 
 sides. 
 
 As a rule, the employer is the workingman' s best 
 friend. The go-between is not an altruist and an 
 unselfish friend of the laborer. In nearly every in- 
 stance he was a malcontent and in some conspicuous 
 cases had served his country behind grated windows. 
 
 314 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S EMPLOYER 
 
 Their taste of the law was so bitter that they never 
 have liked the taste of it since, as is shown by their 
 references to it even under the restraint of prudence. 
 Such men offer their services to the unions only when 
 and because they find it possible to arouse discontent. 
 They complain of employers, whom they call capital- 
 ists, and secure a following by flattering the work- 
 ingman by preaching the doctrine that were he given 
 what belongs to him he would have what the rich 
 have, and the rich would have nothing. The 
 meddler makes it appear that if the laborers will 
 organize and assess a moderate fee and meet the 
 expense, legislation can be influenced and the em- 
 >loyer can be forced to pay a large wage and the 
 workingman will control the situation. If you will 
 study the situation, you will find that here is where 
 "he laborer and the employer got into cross-purposes 
 and the labor chiefs have found their fat pickings, 
 'hey live on the fat of the land whichever way the 
 fight goes. The employer is represented as an agent 
 of the plutocrat, and human society and human gov- 
 ernment are grinding the toilers and forcing upon 
 them poverty. The agitators claim to be the only 
 unselfish friends of the workingman. The only test 
 of this would be to withhold the fat salaries of the 
 chiefs and the pay of the loafing walking delegates. 
 It would be interesting to uncover the startling loss 
 to the workingman by the agitators' strikes in a 
 period of twenty-five or thirty years. It amounts to 
 billions of dollars. 
 
 315 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 The employer to-day has to figure every contract 
 by putting the corps of labor officials and agitators 
 into it. If he had to reckon only with his workmen, 
 he would be surer of his profit, the men of their 
 wage, and there would be more jobs. It is the 
 hundreds of thousands of dollars of the working- 
 man's wages that are going into the high living and 
 high travel of a useless corps of mischief makers, 
 men who have done more to hinder and embarrass 
 labor than all the other obstacles combined with 
 which it has had to contend. Clear out the whole 
 crowd. Use the union for mutual improvement and 
 social entertainment on the plan of mutual benefits, 
 as the Masons and Odd Fellows use their lodges, 
 and keep the fees within the town where they are 
 earned, for the health insurance of the members, 
 greet every workingman as a neighbor and friend, 
 and talk face to face with the employer and not be- 
 hind his back in a union, about him, and in a decade 
 the improved conditions of labor and capital will 
 astonish the world. 
 
 It is a prodigious mistake for the workingmen to 
 withdraw themselves from their employer and from 
 the public and make a class of themselves. It is, 
 on the face of it, a confession of inferiority, like a 
 body of men who cannot stand upon their own merit 
 but must stand in a threatening attitude, squared to 
 fight. Strong men do not do that. That is some- 
 thing inculcated by an alien interpretation of our 
 liberties and the defense of our rights. For a gen- 
 
 316 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S EMPLOYER 
 
 eration the unfortunate leadership of union labor 
 has been putting our sturdy, rugged citizens into a 
 belligerent mood. Such leadership is absolutely an 
 unmitigated curse to this free land. Americans 
 should never consent to be led by such alien leader- 
 ship. It is unsound and unsafe. It does not con- 
 fine itself to bettering the conditions of workingmen. 
 [t is a political propaganda. To hold its place it 
 mst constantly agitate. We shall have no peace 
 tor established order until the misguided victims of 
 icse insinuating meddlers arise to the dignity and 
 >atriotism of American citizens. They are not serfs, 
 'hey are not oppressed. They are not downtrodden, 
 'he employers are on equal terms of citizenship with 
 them and the law makes no difference between them, 
 'he rich build hospitals and schools, not for them- 
 ;lves, but equally for the poor. There is no favored 
 lass, unless it is the man who finds it in a land where 
 ic can use his opportunity with what he has. The 
 >anks are not hoarding the money of the rich, but 
 >rotecting the money of the workingman also. It 
 a crime, a treasonable crime, for any man to seek 
 to excite envy, discontent, and a class spirit in our 
 jlorious republic, which offers opportunity to every 
 lan up to the measure of his ability to use it. It is 
 tot our crime. It is an imported crime. It is not 
 idigenous. It finds a foothold here only because 
 >f our mixed and cross-bred and un-American con- 
 litions. It does not thrive with Americanism. 
 
 317 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 MY NEIGHBOR'S FRIENDS AND FOES 
 
 SEVERE criticisms are not always aimed at men, 
 but oftener at measures. If the labor union has 
 fallen into disfavor, those who condemn it are not 
 seeking to destroy it, but to correct it and make it 
 serve both its members and the country. Any 
 privilege claimed by any body of men must not only 
 be based upon what it is to do for those who claim 
 it, but as much upon its service to all men. If it 
 helps those who use it and injures any others who 
 are outside its membership, the case against it is 
 plain enough. A widely extended sentiment has 
 been created against the order by labor unionists and 
 especially by those who use it against the liberty of 
 other men. It is not a prejudice. It is a conviction 
 forced by the effect of the union upon business and 
 upon labor. If it is claimed that its object is to 
 promote the interests of the workingman, we are 
 met by the fact that it seeks the good of only a small 
 per cent of the laborers. More than four times its 
 membership it opposes. It is not an answer that 
 these might join the union. They have a right to 
 determine that question themselves. They demand 
 the liberty of private and personal judgment. That 
 is more important than all other considerations. 
 
 318 
 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S FRIENDS AND FOES 
 
 That is where manhood differentiates and its free- 
 dom begins. In this country that is the first ques- 
 tion asked. Men are justly and fortunately sensi- 
 tive upon matters of their personal choice and 
 liberty. The objections to the union are not from 
 the politician with low and small ambitions and 
 personal ends to serve. It is a plain case of judging 
 by the fruits which are borne on the tree. If a dif- 
 ferent quality of fruit suited to all is grafted into 
 that tree, there will be no longer contention and 
 opposition. The unionists cannot begin too soon 
 that process of engrafting. If I have a religion, it 
 ust be for everybody. If I have politics, it must 
 e for the whole country. If I have a business, it 
 ust oppose no other business except by fair com- 
 etition. If I have a union, it must injure no one. 
 hat is the test. It is twofold: it must do no harm 
 nd it should do good. In any event it must do no 
 arm to anyone. It must proceed upon the principle 
 f equal rights to all men. It will not answer ob- 
 ections to say that selfish men want to destroy my 
 rganization because it protects me from their un- 
 ust and cruel designs. While I am protecting my- 
 If what am I doing to others? 
 The opponents of the union as it has come to be 
 re the best friends of the union workingman. They 
 re championing the rights of the nonunion man. 
 t is not a spirit of anger and blind prejudice, it is a 
 irit of loyalty to all men. The worst enemy of 
 e union workingman is the leader or controlling 
 319 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 member who urges the thought that the criticisms 
 against their organization are by men who wish to 
 destroy it. That covers defects which ought to be 
 seen and corrected. The American spirit in the 
 union should have founded it upon the constitution 
 of our country and prevented those things which 
 have been harmful and destructive. The union 
 should look within itself for its foes. They are 
 alien to American institutions. They are men who 
 have never come in sympathetic touch with our 
 fundamentals of government. It is a strange and 
 startling thing that the American republic is a 
 failure, and that our workingmen are to unlearn its 
 lessons and substitute for the courts and executives, 
 and lawful good order, strikes, sabotage, and per- 
 sonal abuse and riot. It is a startling voice which 
 we hear declaiming against the injunction of con- 
 spiracy and in threats of revolution by violence 
 against a government which for one hundred and 
 forty years has stood firmly upon defense of all 
 oppressed both rich and poor. It is a strange new 
 plan of government which is coming to use govern- 
 ment for the few and to overthrow by violence the 
 many who oppose the riotous few. Our union 
 friends who think we are their enemies will do well 
 to inquire where their friendship is going and if 
 their country may not be greater than their union. 
 Do they consider what it means to take for their 
 guides and champions men who are enemies of their 
 country, men in some cases who have faced the 
 
 320 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FRIENDS AND FOES 
 
 charge of personal crime and have looked out 
 through prison bars for conspiracy against the freest 
 land on the earth? These are not friends. They 
 are enemies. "Faithful are the wounds of a friend." 
 The deceivers who have posed for years as the 
 champions of labor persist in the slanderous lies 
 that men who furnish money to make jobs possible 
 and the employers who select workingmen for the 
 jobs and all who oppose the fatal principles of the 
 unions are all enemies of the laboring man. So far 
 from this having a shred of truth in it, they all are 
 friends of the workingman and have every reason 
 to be his friends. They are asking nothing from 
 him for which they do not give an equivalent. 
 
 What do their leaders give? And what do all 
 >uch men do? Is there ever trouble and con- 
 tention which they do not promote and prolong 
 is far as possible? Their dupes are left to go the 
 limit and pay the bills. Some day the workingman 
 will discover his real and unselfish friends. 
 
 No man is a friend of the laborers who attempts 
 to make of them a class, who speaks of them as 
 :he laboring class. In this country men are not 
 livided into classes. We have no lower and 
 ipper classes except morally, and that is within every 
 lan's determination. Men who come here from 
 mntries where there are caste classes and appeal to 
 >ur working citizens to throw off the yoke of the 
 >ppressor and resist a tyrannical government show 
 LOW dense is their ignorance of our Constitution, 
 
 321 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 laws, and customs. While our churches open their 
 doors to the English Bible and our little red school- 
 houses stand on the hilltops of our country roads, 
 and at twenty-one years of age our young men and 
 women have the ballot, you cannot make classes of 
 the American people. Caste classes are not broken 
 through and equalized. The American is held to 
 none. The long-persecuted Jew knows no such re- 
 straint. In minorities of a republic where there is a 
 ballot he reaches positions of great eminence and of 
 great wealth. The American is conscious of his 
 citizenship. If changes are needed, he does not 
 need to change. He holds in his hand the power to 
 make the change. His danger is that he will over- 
 assert his independence and resent what he imagines 
 is patronage. Pity that he does not resent the im- 
 plied weakness in the suggestion of oppression and 
 slavery with which he is held up for sympathy in all 
 contested questions^of wage and labor privileges. 
 
 It would help our universal manhood if all in- 
 timations of class were instantly resented as offen- 
 sively slanderous. Those who come among us from 
 alien countries should be shown at once that such 
 things are unknown to us. Men choose their sta- 
 tions in life here. If there is any trouble, it is that 
 sometimes they are too free to show their independ- 
 ence. Men are most independent who say the least 
 about it. Altruism is the chief element in genuine 
 independence. If a man will have friends, he must 
 be friendly, and not simply where there is personal 
 
 322 
 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S FRIENDS AND FOES 
 
 gain by exchange, but upon the broader principles of 
 humanity. 
 
 One of the secrets of American independence is in 
 the fact that we are a working people. A man is a 
 man for all of that. The leisurely people are the 
 aged. The rich are the most active among us. It 
 is, therefore, difficult to lead the laborer "to the 
 manner born" into class hate. "It is only a gener- 
 ation from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves." The 
 man who condemns strikes and boycotts is willing 
 to show his hands. His experiences lead from his 
 father's New England farm to the farthest Western 
 ranch. He knows stagedriving and steamboating. 
 He has gone through all the experiences of the work- 
 ingman. This is true of the capitalists: few of 
 them who have not been on the farms and in the 
 mills and factories. It sounds strange to them when 
 they hear the radicals picturing the plutocrat's in- 
 difference to the downtrodden workers. Some of 
 us who are branded as aristocrats recall with pecu- 
 liar pleasure our boyhood homes where luxuries 
 created a sensation, but where frugal and temperate 
 habits were a constant joy and are a sacred memory. 
 Thought turns often to the old house beneath the 
 elms, and the eyes moisten as memory reproduces 
 the familiar faces and scenes of those far-off days 
 when all pennies were counted and such a thing as 
 envy was unknown. Those people made a great 
 country. The richest products of it were the mighty 
 men born in the homes of the heroic and noble poor. 
 
 323 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 One year compared with another and what was short 
 in one was made up in the next. Neighbors were 
 friends with a common bond. What concerned 
 one was the estate of all. There is something 
 greater than wage. All men must have wages to 
 be sure, whatever the calling, but the man who has 
 only a wage is the poor man of the community. 
 Friendship is the greatest asset. It is always cur- 
 rent. It is fatal to a community where men are 
 taught to get along without it. Money cannot re- 
 place it. 
 
 In the early days our country was rich in a com- 
 mon bond. We were of one kind. We had what 
 we had made in government and home and business 
 and begrudged no man his opportunity. There was 
 a sharp sentiment against men who did not make 
 the most of themselves. There is nothing greater 
 than the earnest development of oneself with what 
 one has. But that is vastly different from the pas- 
 sion for gain. To develop oneself is greater than to 
 increase one's bank account. In our strange time 
 there does not seem to be much difference in the 
 money passion between the workingman and the 
 capitalist, but the effect upon the country favors the 
 capitalist. His accumulations and profits result in 
 more products. They are turned over in increased 
 business, and more factories go up and more men 
 are employed and the price of goods is decreased 
 because there are more of them. But when the 
 workingman carries his demand beyond a point justi- 
 
 324 
 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S FRIENDS AND FOES 
 
 
 fied by the demand for products, he increases the 
 cost of the article, and that means the high cost of 
 living. And this is singularly so when to the higher 
 cost of production is the lessened production by dis- 
 contented and indifferent and inefficient labor. There 
 is a demand put upon manufacture which reacts upon 
 the man when he forces higher wage. It is here 
 that the laborer is his own worst enemy. The 
 public teacher who shows him the folly of constant 
 insistence upon higher wage when it can only be 
 secured by the strike is his best friend. It may be 
 said that a given business pays an enormous profit 
 out of proportion to the wages paid, but there are 
 great losses also, and some of them made by the 
 success of the business which furnished employment 
 to the workingman, and these losses are not shared 
 y the wage-earners. I cannot see that the in- 
 dustrial fault is all with the capitalist. Both the 
 employer and the employee seem to be equally intent 
 upon the mighty dollar. The plea is made that 
 ith the employee it means food and clothes. But 
 at is not the gauge set. It passes far beyond that, 
 nd the day laborer is favored both by large wage 
 nd comparatively small expense. All are glad to 
 ee high wages paid if the business in one year with 
 nother can pay it, but the protection of the country, 
 he prosperity of business, the sources of income to 
 11 must be carefully studied. It is not a grab game, 
 ound philosophy is not the devil for the hindmost, 
 ut for every man a fair chance. 
 
 325 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 Since I began this chapter I see in the public press 
 that the State Federation of New York has declared 
 for some decided changes in the unions, namely, "the 
 elimination of industrial and social disturbances 
 from labor unions of the State, the deposing of 
 union leaders whose policies are radical, and the 
 Americanizing of the entire federation by forcing 
 those within its membership to become citizens of 
 the United States and by swearing the entire body 
 to allegiance to the government." 
 
 This is exceedingly gratifying. It is a wholesome 
 symptom in a disease that has had a long run. 
 Whether it means a cure remains to be seen. It is 
 a confession in a diagnosis of all the essential things 
 which I have charged. The union has been the 
 worst enemy of the laboring man. It has been and 
 is conspicuous for its industrial disturbers. Its 
 leaders, including Mr. Gompers and others promi- 
 nent in union councils, have been often reported as 
 radicals, going to the extreme of defying law and 
 declaring that they would not obey certain proposed 
 laws if enacted by Congress. It is time that they 
 were sworn to allegiance to the government. The 
 swearing should be begun with the leaders. 
 
 But how much does the "elimination of industrial 
 and social disturbers from labor unions" mean? 
 Are we to understand that union men are no longer 
 to be permitted to interfere with institutions and 
 forms of business which refuse to unionize? that the 
 walking delegate will not be sent around to spy upon 
 
 326 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FRIENDS AND FOES 
 
 the men who are on the job and drive them off 
 because nonunion men are working on that job? 
 That has been one of the worst kinds of "industrial 
 disturbance." It will be a great day for the union 
 when it fraternizes with all workingmen and justi- 
 fies itself by peaceful methods and by a superior 
 quality of workmanship. And will the "elimination 
 of social disturbers" go to the limit of common 
 courtesy with nonunion men, so that, for instance, 
 we shall hear no more loathsome and degrading 
 epithets from man to man and woman to woman and 
 child to child? The man who accomplishes all of 
 this will be the reformer of the unions, whose name 
 will be a blaze of glory a century after the disturbing 
 meteor lias fallen below his narrow horizon in ashes. 
 The world never needed more than now all its 
 workers, and any plan or organization which re- 
 fuses to permit them to answer to this demand puts 
 itself across the track of human progress like a 
 bowlder which has fallen out of its uncertain place 
 in the gravel and sands of the hillside. It would 
 be impossible to compute the damage to civilization, 
 and especially to America as a people, by a scheme 
 which has put an arbitrary limit upon labor, scaling 
 it down not to the demands of progress and neces- 
 sity, but to the narrow and selfish notions of an 
 arbitrary competition. The plan of our founda- 
 tions, upon which we were building our land and 
 country, called for all men and women who could 
 work. It was a plan to build a new free country 
 
 327 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 and not to originate a class of industrial dictators 
 and tyrants. It opened the doors to every man to 
 learn the trade he chose to follow. It was a plan 
 to set everybody to work, for everybody was needed, 
 and not to select the few and favored to control 
 industries. There never has been a time when all 
 have not been needed. The appeal now for work- 
 ers all over the country is not to be traced to the 
 dead and maimed of the war. That would not have 
 made a perceptible impression in a land of such a 
 rapidly increasing population. The trouble with 
 us is that the labor unions have been opposed to 
 increase of workers. The young men have been 
 shut out of apprenticeships, as I have shown, and the 
 workingman, the plain mechanic, has felt no stimulus 
 and ambition to make the most of himself. How 
 could anything worse have been done to discourage 
 labor and disqualify the mechanic, once the pride of 
 the country? It is now a constant lesson that the 
 chief end of labor was higher wages. Everything 
 has yielded to this until it holds up the capitalist as a 
 grinding enemy and also attacks the nonunion man 
 who sees his employer's side of the controversy as 
 an enemy. In a period of the greatest demand and 
 opportunity the workingman is made the proponent 
 of our greatest difficulties and the enemy of our 
 prosperity. If we can get rid of this opposition, we 
 can go on again. It is strange, an amazing fact, 
 that the enemy of labor is the laborer. In his short- 
 sightedness he has gone on blindly obstructing 
 
 328 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FRIENDS AND FOES 
 
 progress. He has adopted crude theories by men 
 conspicuously incompetent to lead, until the work- 
 able theory for which he has stood for years has 
 produced its results in a burdensome cost account 
 which has moved up with the equal pace of his 
 wages and has been as much more disastrous as his 
 tyrannical control has limited the number of hours 
 with pay and a half and double pay. At last a small 
 light dawns on the eastern horizon, which we hope is 
 the sunrise coming. We hope that it is not an 
 arctic sunrise which will disappear on a cold and 
 cheerless horizon as soon as it appears. Our hope 
 is enlarged and strengthened because we believe that 
 it is the promise of an awakening people. The 
 country is getting its eyes open. The question is 
 going around as to whether our broad land is to be 
 intimidated by an oligarchy of aliens in control of 
 our houses of Congress with the Gompers and Fost- 
 ers and Lewises writing the party platforms of our 
 Presidential candidates. When the American people 
 wake up they will make short work of a common 
 foe. They will not leave enough of it to offer in 
 barter between political parties. I predict that the 
 discoveries which have been brought to the surface 
 in the perilous coal strike closing our industries and 
 threatening thousands of lives will make it impos- 
 sible for any political party to take up the outcast 
 leaders condemned by the whole people as enemies 
 of humanity. We condemn ourselves, we challenge 
 our capacity for self-government when we permit rats 
 
 329 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 to gnaw themselves into our Constitution and make 
 their nests there and claim that they are a legitimate 
 and lawful part of our national household. The 
 present conditions in the high cost of living, in the 
 paralysis of building by cost of material and labor, 
 are not due to any usual law of supply and demand 
 but to propaganda which has been going on for a 
 generation by men who have no interest in the 
 country, nor in the laborers, but who are using the 
 unions and dictating the statutes for their own 
 selfish ends. It is a fruitful field. The appeal is 
 in the realm of exaggeration. The contrasts are 
 drawn between rich and poor, between capital and 
 labor. It is not the workingman who is the propa- 
 gandist, it is the socialist leader who offers his 
 services to the downtrodden laborer and takes his 
 fat salary from the union fees. It is easier to be a 
 walking delegate, to be a federation leader or chief, 
 than to work in a union at the bench or in a mill or 
 factory. The workingman has been hoodwinked 
 and fooled constantly and easily by men who pre- 
 tend to be his friends, and who are his worst 
 enemies. The more unions the more salaries, the 
 more wages the bigger fees for the leaders. There 
 never have been richer pickings for the ignorant and 
 ranting demagogues. It is a marvelous scheme for 
 those who work it. It is remarkable that the in- 
 telligent mechanics of the United States fall such 
 easy dupes to it. It is the pot of gold at the end 
 of the rainbow which the child chases. It is the 
 
 330 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FRIENDS AND FOES 
 
 search for fabled buried treasures. There has been 
 no employment, nor wage, nor condition which 
 would not have come to merit without suspicion and 
 contention. 
 
 Any platform built outside the Constitution is 
 built on sands. Any philosophy of economics which 
 does not include all men on equal terms will inevit- 
 ably clash with our institutions of personal freedom 
 and in time must go down in hopeless wreck. It is 
 folly to plan a revision of our fundamental laws 
 to meet something which conflicts with common fair- 
 ness among men, which opposes the square deal 
 preached by Roosevelt. Our founders did not set 
 up a government for a class and much less for a 
 minority class. Every man who qualifies as a citizen 
 and pays his tax, however small, has an indisputable 
 claim upon all the rights and privileges of any man 
 under the government. One of these primal rights 
 is his privilege to earn his own living by honest 
 labor, and no man has a right to hinder him. To 
 hinder and prevent him is the act of a highwayman. 
 But the laborer is more than caring for his own life 
 that is a primary object. He is a citizen of the 
 republic. He belongs to the public. He and his 
 employer and the men who furnish the capital and 
 their friends are the public. There is no other 
 public. When, therefore, any agitators come in 
 to take away this man's privilege and make difficult 
 his earnings, they injure the whole public and should 
 be made to settle with it. As a people we often do 
 
 331 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 not appreciate the relation of individual rights to the 
 government as a whole. Neglect lies in carelessness 
 of fundamentals. We knock out substantial under- 
 pinnings when we allow any exemptions to one group 
 which interfere with another. Listen as Ameri- 
 cans to recent complaints that promises have been 
 given to the federation of labor leaders that a 
 certain law of the country should not be applied to 
 union workers. How long could any government 
 stand upon such an application of law? But that 
 has been the puerile assertion of arbitrary right 
 which has dominated the country from the same 
 source all these years of abuse and violation of law. 
 But the exemption from law is not the province of 
 any executive or the lawful demand of any leaders. 
 The laws belong to the whole people, and not to a 
 part of the people. There is not, nor can there be, 
 any such thing as private interpretation. In the 
 instance we have a striking illustration of the peril 
 of permitting any body of men to set up laws for 
 themselves and practice things which override the 
 rights of others defined by our laws and protected by 
 our courts. What has been allowed without law 
 comes to be put forth as law, and if at any point it is 
 disputed, a wail of betrayal is sent up. We cannot 
 insist too earnestly upon and repeat too often the 
 peril through which we have been coming. Con- 
 gress has been making our laws and the unions have 
 made others, and with astounding effrontery they 
 have secured amendments which have given to them 
 
 332 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FRIENDS AND FOES 
 
 immunity from unblushing violation of the plainest 
 rights of men. It is not strange that we have a vig- 
 orous assertion of Bolshevism among us. We have 
 looked on with passive curiosity while it has gath- 
 ered force and now dares to challenge the veracity 
 of the President and to question the justice of our 
 courts. 
 
 How far can it all go unhindered and unoppressed 
 without a revolution? It dares to-day to threaten 
 every hearth in the land. It threatens to stop every 
 wheel of railroads over which come our food and 
 our fuel. Can any loyal Americans afford to be 
 associated with any such propaganda? 
 
 I wish to affirm what I have already said: The 
 workingman should have an adequate wage to meet 
 the demands of an industrious, temperate, and 
 : rugal life; that he may have his home, whether a 
 cottage which he owns or rents in a wholesome 
 and clean part of the town; that he may be 
 l clothed, so that his wife and children may be 
 :omf ortable in their persons and their feelings ; that 
 he may be well fed and have his share of the 
 amenities of life which belong to a prudent family; 
 that he may meet the demands upon a citizen and 
 have his place in his church and in the common 
 charities. I would have him receive enough for a 
 margin for the savings bank. And I would also 
 have this workingman appreciate the fact that his 
 wage must come from the profits of the business 
 which employs him and that it cannot come from any 
 
 333 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 other source. The world is not to divide with him ; 
 he must earn what he is to possess. And even in 
 schools and churches and hospitals he must bear his 
 part. I would have him understand that he is not 
 to be legislated for as a class any more than the 
 traders with their shops and stores or the clerks or 
 commercial travelers or the teachers in the public 
 schools or the nurses in the hospitals or the preach- 
 ers, priests, and rabbis. There is no reason why 
 the workingman should form a political party more 
 than men of other callings. He is a citizen of the 
 whole country, and what he is and does must be for 
 the country. If born into this country, this should 
 be one of the first lessons taught him in the kinder- 
 garten, and he should never be permitted to lose it. 
 If he comes here, he should meet that obligation to 
 the land when he comes from the gangway, and the 
 minute he shows that he ignores it and is here only 
 for what he can scrape up and has no other use for 
 our country but to destroy it, he should be sent back 
 whence he came. Our country is first, and those who 
 prefer any other country or come here to reform our 
 country we do not want, and we should not permit 
 to stay here. They are a thousand times more to be 
 feared than the coolie Chinaman or Japanese. 
 
 The workingman owes it to himself to appreciate 
 what he has. He is, all things considered, the best 
 paid man in the country to-day. His average pay 
 is over a thousand dollars a year, and some of the 
 labor callings pay twice and three times that amount. 
 
 334 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S FRIENDS AND FOES 
 
 His average pay is more than the average of the 
 pay of the preachers of all denominations of our 
 country and more than that of the teachers. Some 
 of the workingmen of the United States receive far 
 more than the salaries of college professors. The 
 workingman's pay has gone up as far as it can go 
 without economic injury to him and to the country. 
 In many cases it is far too high and is chargeable 
 with the high cost of living. It has been a fatal 
 blunder for him to be used by his leaders to force 
 wages up because he could beyond where the country 
 can pay them. 
 
 I am in hearty sympathy with the workingman. 
 I was once a day laborer. I paid for my^own educa- 
 tion, and no man gave me a cent except the founders 
 of the schools which I found waiting for me, and 
 which every laborer finds waiting for his sons and 
 daughters. For nearly a quarter of a century the 
 majority of members in my church were working 
 people, and I greatly delighted in them and never 
 found it necessary to appeal to any class spirit among 
 them. They were intelligent, clean, wholesome, 
 noble people. Some of them, starting in poverty 
 and humble circumstances, became rich. I found 
 no jealousy and envy among them because of their 
 differing estates in life. I prefer that kind of a 
 church to one wholly rich or wholly poor. I would 
 prefer the second to the first. I would be more at 
 home in it. For more than another quarter of a 
 century I have been at the head of a poor man's 
 
 335 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 university. I do not want it to be any different 
 except that I may have more to help the poor man's 
 sons and daughters. I have begged hundreds of 
 thousands of dollars to help through college young 
 men and young women who were helping themselves 
 as best they could, but who would have failed with- 
 out further help. I have received this help from 
 all classes, among them millionaires, not one of 
 whom did not begin life a poor boy or a poor girl. 
 Mrs. Russell Sage, one of our most liberal patrons, 
 sat at an open window to hear Jenny Lind sing be- 
 cause she had not the money to pay the admission to 
 the concert. Fortunately, she lived next door to 
 the church where the concert was given. Will you 
 workingmen ever again permit your noblest bene- 
 factors to be hunted through the world as plutocrats 
 and the predatory rich? 
 
 The capitalist has not always been the working- 
 man's friend. He sometimes has treated him like 
 a lathe or drill press a machine. But the excep- 
 tion should not be charged as a rule. Some men 
 of money have coined their dividends out of blood 
 and the sweat of the brow. They have been with- 
 out mercy. But there is little of that left now, and 
 the agitator who teaches laborers to look upon all 
 employers as heartless and grinding is not the work- 
 ingman's friend. Occasionally there is a man of 
 great wealth, through fortunate circumstances more 
 than ability, who attempts to befriend the laboring 
 man in an unwise and harmful way. The highest 
 
 336 
 
in 
 
 MY NEIGHBOR'S FRIENDS AND FOES 
 
 interests of the workingman are in an established 
 and widely recognized law of profit'and wage. It is 
 best for him that he is included in a general condi- 
 tion rather than in spasmodic fluctuations, even if 
 they allow him in a given industry in a year, greater 
 pay. The multi-millionaire who scatters eight or 
 ten millions of wages among the thousands of his 
 workingmen is not a wise friend to laborers. He 
 does positive harm by disturbing the whole fabric of 
 labor. I do not question his motives. His un- 
 wisdom is plain enough for anyone to see. It is 
 fine to set a pattern of good wage, but bonuses are 
 unstable and disturbing. If the profits are ex- 
 travagant after the best material and workmanship 
 has been put into the product and high wages are 
 paid, the price could be lowered. It belongs to the 
 public, and the competition would do no harm in a 
 period of extravagant prices. 
 
 The prosperity of all is the highest prosperity of 
 my neighbor the workingman. Building prospers, 
 the factories prosper, the stores prosper, the farms 
 prosper; these are the best patrons of labor. The 
 workingman's prosperity cannot be forced ahead of 
 the general conditions of prosperity in his com- 
 munity. He may force a temporary gain or receive 
 an unwise bonus, but he depends upon everybody's 
 success. He cannot be set aside as a class, and all 
 the world set its gauge by him and for him. He 
 must come on with all men and help all men. 
 
 337 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 MY NEIGHBOR'S RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 IT is an old maxim in which are sound principles 
 of human life that "No man lives to himself." One 
 of the troubles with our country is that men are 
 trying to reverse that ancient teaching, which, if old, 
 is not out of date, but on the contrary has been 
 established by its age. The world never has moved 
 forward a rod where the principle has been for- 
 gotten. Our hope of manhood and our stronghold 
 upon manhood has been in the ample provisions in 
 our laws and institutions for all men. Men who 
 organize themselves into a political party to over- 
 throw our institutions and set up a new code of laws 
 among us are not of us. They no more resemble us 
 than do the Simians of tropic jungles because they 
 stand on two legs and are gregarious. 
 
 The other day these Simian descendants met in 
 Chicago and organized themselves into a third 
 political party which they called "The Labor 
 Party." It is strange that they called themselves 
 the labor party. They did not affiliate themselves 
 with the lawyers, nor the teachers in the colleges, nor 
 with the merchants and manufacturers. They 
 chose labor. Was it because there is anything in 
 
 338 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 the conditions of labor in this country which calls 
 for agitation and defense by aliens who have 
 insinuated their perverting notions into its organi- 
 zations ? This attempt to establish a political propa- 
 ganda does not represent American labor. The 
 great element of labor in this country is loyal 
 and contented. Strikes in nearly all cases are pro- 
 jected by foreigners or their descendants, who never 
 have learned our laws and whose ignorance is the 
 secret of their diabolical mischief. Our working- 
 men are responsible for permitting such characters 
 to have any place among them and to hang up their 
 red flags above the roofs of labor unions and make 
 them their headquarters. These founders of the 
 first openly declared Bolshevic political party in our 
 country, men defeated in bomb-throwing and other 
 kinds of assassination and sabotage, declare as their 
 political principles, in the name of labor, the aboli- 
 tion of the United States Senate ; the overthrow of 
 our federal courts by electing with popular vote, for 
 terms of four years, the judges who are now safe- 
 guarded in honest, judicial opinions by life terms; 
 the condemnation of government injunctions; the 
 release of all political and industrial prisoners; the 
 internationalizing of all labor; demand of free 
 speech, free press, and free assembly; old-age unem- 
 ployment and sick pensions; incomes of individuals 
 to be limited by law; the ownership by government 
 of banks and the control by the government of all 
 banking operations; government ownership and 
 
 339 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 operation of railroads; and the application of the 
 home rule principle (of Bolshevism) in State, county 
 and city government. 
 
 Here we have, out in the open, what Ole Hansen 
 fought in Seattle and Calvin Coolidge fought in 
 Boston. It will surprise thousands of our citizens 
 who have thought it the harmless ranting of the 
 soap-boxers. There is coupled with it the dignity 
 and influence of labor citizenship, although tens of 
 thousands of the champions of these alien doctrines 
 could not cast a ballot. There are also coupled with 
 these monstrous doctrines, appeals calculated to 
 catch the popular eye of those who can read, certain 
 sympathetic promises: approval of woman's suf- 
 frage, equal pay of men and women, criminal prose- 
 cution of profiteers and exploiters of labor, con- 
 demnation of universal military training, govern- 
 ment work to be done by day labor and not by 
 contract. 
 
 I say it will surprise thousands of our citizens to 
 know that anything so destructive to the entire struc- 
 ture of our constitutional government and a dupli- 
 cate of the Bolshevic, soviet, and I. W. W. teachings 
 has taken root deep enough to bear this up as fruit 
 in our political economy. But what surprises me is 
 that such teachings do not surprise our workingmen 
 as they go out under their new flag. I shall be 
 surprised, perhaps I should say, if there is not an 
 instant protest in all the labor unions and by the 
 independent workers of the whole country against 
 
 340 
 
 
. 
 
 
 MY NEIGHBOR'S RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 these formal promulgations in Chicago by declared 
 enemies of our country. The responsibility is upon 
 the labor union as an organization which can speak 
 in the community with one voice and which owes it to 
 itself to exterminate this pernicious thing. The 
 virus can no longer be denied, nor concealed. Labor 
 unions must accept and champion it or refute it. 
 Union men must either stand for these doctrines or 
 come out from the unions in which they have taken 
 shelter and which practically indorse them. 
 
 Look at them ! They propose the destruction of 
 our Constitution, not in a vague, undefined way, but 
 by striking down and destroying a coordinate form 
 of our government. Has the attack by the Presi- 
 dent upon the Senate emboldened the Bolshevists to 
 insert this plank in their platform? They demand 
 the destruction of our courts. Are our workingmen 
 ready to substitute the reign of terror for the reign 
 of law? They ask that banks and financial opera- 
 tions shall be put into their hands. That involves 
 all business, all commerce, and all manufacture. Do 
 they want such men to hold the mortgages on their 
 cottages? The next step would be the nationalizing 
 of women and families, for the foreign authors of 
 these doctrines have declared against the family 
 as the foe to their propaganda. Are the working- 
 men of America prepared for these things? Will 
 they stand for such politics? Will they permit 
 themselves to be used even as silent partners in such 
 infamy? Will they stand by and have their hon- 
 
 341 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 orable name put forth for these monstrous proposi- 
 tions so late as the twentieth century? 
 
 The men who have projected this labor party, 
 with these anarchistic planks, are not Americans; 
 their birthright is not in the twentieth century. 
 They are as barbarous as the hordes of Alaric and 
 the mad Kaiserites whom we have just overthrown. 
 They have no right to the name of labor. They 
 have no part with labor. They destroy everything 
 they touch. They add nothing constructive to our 
 country, and in the country from which they bring 
 the model of their diabolicism they have poured a 
 flood of pestilential ruin upon the unfortunate 
 people, deluging them with every imaginable hurt 
 and misery and sorrow. In this country the work- 
 ingman is a citizen. He is already, and always has 
 been, in the majority. He knows that the alien 
 counterfeit which circulates appeals to him against 
 the government for his help as a laborer, in an 
 effort to overthrow our Senate and courts, is not 
 for labor, but for anarchy and Bolshevism. It is not 
 for a greater chance to labor or more just hours or 
 larger wage. It is to steal the name of labor with 
 which to serve Bolshevism. It is to use labor to set 
 up a rule of anarchism and steal the estates of men 
 who have won what they have by labor. Labor has 
 never been so grossly outraged, never so shamelessly 
 defamed, as it is in being put forth by these wild 
 agitators as champions of their murderous preten- 
 sions to a reform party. Can it be possible that 
 
 342 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 there is sufficiently dense ignorance in any body of 
 men in our country to encourage th'ese "murderers 
 general" to attempt an organized attack upon our 
 constitutional government and our world-renowned 
 finance and commerce? And who are the persons 
 into whose hands they are to place it all? The 
 Berkmans and Goldmans are their champions. 
 The prisons at Atlanta and Leavenworth are to 
 yield the Debs and Nearings, while Mooney will be 
 brought over from San Quentin. The soap-box 
 orators, in the tramps' unclean rags, will take charge 
 of the banks and the bomb-makers can be spared to 
 run the factories. There will be no great men 
 needed for the Senate. There will be no Senate. 
 It is entertaining; it is exhilarating to let the mind 
 dwell upon the wonderful change which will come 
 over this great land, when the new Congress, the 
 new courts, the new banks, the whole new order 
 remove the present order and substitute their men 
 for the old United States and set up for us a new 
 and improved land and country! Of course they 
 have qualified somewhere in something! They 
 have proved themselves as statesmen and jurists and 
 financiers! We have been in the habit of insisting 
 upon this test. Ninety per cent of labor has de- 
 manded it before it could go to the polls and vote; 
 that is, all labor has except the new labor party! 
 Possibly the new champions of human freedom will 
 point us to Russia! There is one encouragement: 
 there need be no fear of coal strikes the smokeless 
 
 343 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 factory chimneys prove that. There would be no 
 need of casket companies they have buried more 
 people over there with less coffins than the world 
 has ever known. The folly of savings banks can be 
 set aside the people have nothing to deposit; their 
 representatives take all of that. There will be no 
 taxes no one will own anything and the state or 
 government will do everything. Lenine is appeal- 
 ing to his imperiled constituency against the few, 
 daring to own small farms, as capitalists and pluto- 
 crats who will attempt to overthrow his nothing-f or- 
 anybody plan, with which even some proletariats 
 begin to show symptoms of discontent. When has 
 there been anything in our land so degrading and 
 humiliating to intelligent men and women as this 
 unblushing announcement, by a crowd of imbeciles, 
 of a party to reform our government throughout, in 
 the name of American labor? 
 
 How did it get so far along, and how did it 
 venture to take on the name, if the Judas among the 
 twelve of labor had not betrayed the country by 
 sympathetic fellowship and bargaining with our 
 enemies? The responsibility is with the labor 
 unions and the men who have inspired strikes and 
 defied injunctions and assailed the Senate until 
 Atlanta loomed up before them. The men who 
 have been praised for their loyalty to our nation 
 have been making the conditions which have made 
 possible the courage of anarchists to form an an- 
 archist political party among us, that they may 
 
 344 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 escape the penalty of seditious speech by posing as a 
 political party. The truckling, the compromises, 
 the abuse of the coordinate Senate of the great 
 government by the administration so desperately un- 
 fortunate for us at a time like this, have been 
 sources of inspiration to every malcontent plotting 
 to overthrow our mighty republic. Sturdy Ameri- 
 canism at Washington, resisting the first inception 
 of labor's unreasonable demands and enforcing de- 
 portation at New York before it became too 
 notorious to hide or defend, would have saved the 
 country from an invasion which would not have dis- 
 banded the police of Boston nor shot our brave boys 
 at Centralia, and left it safe for traitorous maraud- 
 ers to organize publicly in Chicago. We are back 
 at the old game again with men as disreputable as 
 the Boston police, flattering them for loyalty after 
 they have held up the whole country for five weeks 
 in winter, closing down business at a time when the 
 whole world is crying out for production, and freez- 
 ing the homes of vast areas, with no mercy for the 
 sick and aged. While it is true that we all had a 
 right to expect our authorities to make short work 
 of an abuse of privilege so glaringly disloyal and 
 ii.human, I cannot resist the thought, which is gen- 
 eral, that labor in its organic form has a large re- 
 sponsibility for conditions so antagonistic to the 
 sacred interests of our country. Labor must not be 
 used by designing politicians nor by Bolshevist 
 pirates. 
 
 345 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 Labor in every form, and especially in the unions, 
 should respect itself so instantly and thoroughly as 
 to make it impossible for any alien and dangerous 
 element to shelter under its roof, or to use its name. 
 It cannot escape being judged by its associates. Its 
 sympathies will bear fruit. They are the buds, and 
 they are poison buds which it does not take an expert 
 to detect. It will be strange, and convictingly so, 
 if all over this mighty land labor does not speak its 
 tremendous protest against being used in name in 
 any attempt to overthrow our government and espe- 
 cially in an effort with particulars more traitorous 
 than traitor ever uttered in our history. If labor 
 does not repudiate this use of its name, it gives its 
 name to be used and is as traitorous as the gang of 
 our foes at Chicago. It is a case of being against 
 them or with them. If labor would claim a patent 
 upon its name for anything, it should be for loyalty. 
 It cannot be careless of its country and live. Our 
 hope in our labor, the overwhelming majority of it, 
 is in what it is in its citizenship. Property cannot 
 afford to be disloyal and give its destiny into the 
 hands of anarchists who can be held to no responsi- 
 bility for it. Hundreds of thousands of our laborers 
 own their neat homes and have modest savings in 
 the banks. They own small farms and truck plots 
 and milk routes. They have small mills and shops, 
 and those who do not actually possess these things 
 have them in their ambitions and prudent savings. 
 The workers who count upon them to overthrow the 
 
 346 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 republic where such things are so common, reckon 
 their own overthrow. Ours is not a discontented 
 labor. There is only a small per cent of it so, and 
 that is under alien influence. Millions of our work- 
 ingmen have gone under the saving influence of the 
 common school and the free high school. Millions 
 of them read newspapers which teach the sound 
 principles upon which the great republic was 
 founded. Millions of them have been schooled 
 to correct our country's mistakes by changing men 
 and not by destroying law. When they make a mis- 
 take by carelessly choosing wrong men, they wait 
 their time and choose the next time more carefully, 
 and they choose always to build up and not to tear 
 down. They cannot be rallied to destroy. They 
 can be rallied to defend our institutions and our 
 liberties. In forty-eight hours a million of them 
 would be on their way to recruiting camps to march 
 out against the hairy, unwashed gang which has 
 made the mistake of imagining that we have a griev- 
 ance over here which we cannot redress with our 
 own intelligence and our own loyal support of prin- 
 ciples which must be made the foundation stones of 
 every permanent land. Our workingmen cannot be 
 enlisted in the cause of ignorance, of vice, of cruelty, 
 of murder, of tyranny, of riotous destruction of 
 property, under a flag of hatred of the prosperous 
 and contented borne by the indolent, the licentious, 
 and the traitorous foes of all order and all govern- 
 ment. Men of the Bolshevistic stripe, who think 
 
 347 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 that our men can be rallied in such a course, have 
 not taken their measure. They have overlooked 
 the little red building on the hilltop. They have 
 not seen the farm paper or the church paper or the 
 illustrated weekly in the country home. They have 
 not examined the book tagged with the public library 
 which the boy is reading in spare moments. They 
 have not attended the town meeting where com- 
 munity affairs are discussed and noted the numbers 
 of young men eager listeners, nor seen the crowds 
 of young men and boys who made up a large per cent 
 of political gatherings where great national ques- 
 tions are the common property of all the people. 
 Those who propose to destroy our Senate at Wash- 
 ington will have to show the most ignorant of us 
 why. They will find it as deep-rooted as our 
 churches and our homes. Politically men will differ 
 with it, but they will respect it and honor it as their 
 government, and to be without it has never entered 
 the most intense partisan thought. They will change 
 the men in it, but it stands forever. Under stress 
 of political feeling, they may recall a judge, but 
 they will never reverse a judicial decision by popular 
 vote. To recall men is one thing, to recall law is 
 quite another. 
 
 I do not direct my neighbor's attention to the 
 anarchists who dare to declare themselves as an 
 American political party in the name of labor be- 
 cause I have any fear that they will ever rally the 
 labor of this country under their red flag of riot. 
 
 348 
 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 I am moved by an instinctive loyalty which protests 
 anything so revolting as an avowed purpose to over- 
 throw my government, however idiotic that purpose 
 may be. I speak that my neighbor the working- 
 man may not carelessly allow himself to stand for 
 anything which so outrageously slanders him and 
 misuses the honorable name of labor. There are 
 things in this country which we do not fear, but 
 which we loathe, and if they are not perilous, never- 
 theless we cannot tolerate them with self-respect. 
 The self-respect of our laboring men is a priceless 
 asset. Without it we would not be safe a day 
 against the Bolshevist and the wild-eyed socialist. 
 When the silly theorists of the colleges and the 
 newspaper forum are wallowing in the quagmires of 
 internationalism, we can always depend upon our 
 solid workingmen of the farms and shops to re- 
 member that this is America and that there is no 
 land between the seas so safe, so kind in its oppor- 
 tunities, so solid in its progressive stability as 
 America. 
 
 My purpose is to warn my neighbor, whose work 
 I once helped do, of the injustice he does himself 
 and the discredit he brings upon his country when 
 he permits himself to act under a leadership which 
 antagonizes the Constitution of his great land and 
 which proposes any violation or disregard of its 
 laws. American workingmen cannot afford to per- 
 mit their names to be used in a declared plan to over- 
 turn the foundations of our government. They 
 
 349 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 may say to me that their leaders have pronounced 
 against the political party which declares its pur- 
 poses to destroy our Senate and courts, but such 
 declaration of the federation of labor is made null 
 and void by the hostile utterances of its leaders in 
 defiance of our laws and by continuing our steel and 
 coal strikes. Men who are on record with their 
 statements that they will not obey laws against 
 strikes and their contempt for injunctions, differ so 
 little from the anarchist leaders of politics as to have 
 no influence against them or to represent loyal work- 
 ingmen. They may pronounce against Bolshevism, 
 but they are Bolshevists. They oppose all law 
 which opposes their practices. They oppose the in- 
 junction when it enjoins them. They say that they 
 do not sympathize with agitators and radicals. 
 What are they themselves? We have had no 
 worse agitators than the men who have inspired a 
 generation of strikes and sabotage. These men tell 
 their followers that the land is governed by injunc- 
 tion and injunction is the decision of one man, as 
 though there were no court to vacate it if unjust, 
 and as though a lower court's decision is not always 
 by one man. It is Bolshevism which demands court 
 decisions by popular vote. 
 
 It is too late for federation leaders to declaim 
 against the introduction of the Bolshevist spirit into 
 the federation of labor. It has been there for years. 
 It has been a controlling spirit from the beginning. 
 It started with the spirit of dictation and tyranny 
 
 350 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 and put itself across the plain path of constitutional 
 liberty of the overwhelming majority of the work- 
 ingmen of this country. And it is only when it sees 
 the handwriting of the people on the wall, against 
 disloyal utterances condemning the courts, that it 
 puts forth professions of loyalty and renounces the 
 work of its own hands and repudiates the foes of our 
 land whom it has fostered and used against us. 
 
 What is the persistent attack upon capital but 
 Bolshevism? The anarchist party says, "Limit the 
 amount a man shall have." The federation assails 
 capital blindly and condemns capitalists for what 
 they have, without regard to consequences. It is 
 worse, for it is destruction without limit and dis- 
 organizes the whole structure of business and labor. 
 The anarchist political party in the name of labor 
 has the intelligence and courage of definiteness. I 
 cannot understand what labor is going to do when 
 capital is restricted. It is a peculiar limitation of 
 the rights of man. It opens a large question, reach- 
 ing even into the divine economy. There are 
 certain primary questions. If we are to limit a 
 man's right to get all the money he can by ability 
 and honesty in business, why not limit his right to 
 learning since his larger learning gives him ad- 
 vantage over his associates? He would learn engi- 
 neering and applied science and mechanics. He 
 would have larger reasoning faculties. Why not 
 limit the size of his home, make it one story instead 
 of two or three, and restrict the cost, becgju.se the 
 
 351 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 workingman lives in a one-story cottage? Why 
 not limit the number of his children, for they inherit 
 his fortune when he dies and increase the number 
 of capitalists! 
 
 There is no such thing as reductio ad absurdam 
 with the enemies of capitalists. They start with an 
 absurdity too great for anything more absurd to be 
 reduced from it. As well talk about labor without 
 skill and muscle as business without money and 
 money-making employers. For workingmen to plot 
 against capital is as senseless as it would be to cut 
 their feet off because shoes cost too much. Capital 
 is a part and parcel of labor. It is the laborers' 
 capital furnished them by men who might keep it 
 from them by not using it or by turning it in other 
 directions. It is the extreme of folly to talk about 
 capital being an interest by itself and labor being 
 another interest by itself, and that they can be 
 opposed to each other. Capital has nothing and 
 can do nothing of which labor is not an identified 
 and an essential part. And labor can be nothing 
 which does not concern capital. The health and 
 contentment and skill and all the habits of working- 
 men are a part of capital. These things are an 
 essential investment of the capitalist. What folly, 
 suggesting the inmates of the feeble-minded institu- 
 tions, when men, who have forced themselves into 
 leadership, preach antagonism between these iden- 
 tical interests which depend upon each other for the 
 success of either. 
 
 352 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 As I have said, capital has sometimes been unjust 
 to labor. It has withheld wages when it should 
 have paid more, and been indifferent to conditions of 
 sanitation, and charged in its stores exorbitant prices 
 of its employees. Its bosses have often been brutal 
 and dismissed men unfairly. But labor has been 
 unjust to capital. It has done its work inefficiently 
 through ignorance and shiftlessness, spoiling valu- 
 able machines and material. It has laid off as it 
 chose and grumbled and excited discontent without 
 cause. The just complaint has not all been on one 
 side. Let us have the account in particulars. I 
 have been a laborer and an employer. It is my con- 
 viction, from an extensive acquaintance with both, 
 that the capitalist has a more just ground for com- 
 plaint than has the laborer. Recently a careful 
 computation of the case between capital and labor 
 has been published. It is largely the strike account. 
 The cost to labor in the one year now closing is three 
 quarters of a billion dollars. It would be interest- 
 ing to know how the account balances when the 
 workingman puts in his pocket the increased pay. 
 But what of the capitalist? The laborer has forced 
 a loss upon him, a loss over a billion and a quarter 
 of dollars in the same year. And that was the 
 money of the public, and it added distress of higher 
 cost of living and distress for things withheld from 
 production. It was largely the laborers' loss also, 
 for it was money which would have increased busi- 
 ness and furnished more employment, and in its 
 
 353 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 regular order, a larger wage. It is a demonstration 
 of the insane folly of permitting any Bolshevistic 
 federation or leadership of any kind to set labor 
 against capital. Capital and labor are allies. They 
 must be in friendly and cooperative relation. They 
 are not nationally nor logically opposed to each 
 other, and the men who set them against each 
 other are ignoramuses in the first principles of Sound 
 economics or demagogues who are playing these 
 great coordinate forces into their contention for 
 supremacy. They care nothing for the laboring 
 man. They are the only enemies of the working- 
 man. 
 
 Let me urge the friends of my youth and of my 
 pastoral oversight an inspiring friendship that a 
 great responsibility now rests upon them. They are 
 well paid and generously paid as compared with the 
 preacher and the teacher. The only ground for 
 worry and anxiety is the disturbed conditions of 
 business, for which they are largely responsible, by 
 permitting their designing and scheming leaders to 
 create distrust of the men who supply wage and by 
 inciting the enemies of our country to disturb the 
 confidence in those men who must depend for credit 
 upon the stability of our financial centers for the 
 business which alone can supply the wage earner 
 with his job. The responsibility is upon the work- 
 ingman, for his producing power is in the factory 
 and shop and his credit goes into every store in the 
 town. 
 
 354 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 Our citizens should not consent, for an hour, to 
 be led by men with prison records and by men who 
 traduce our government and venomously assail the 
 sources of our manufacture and trade. If they do, 
 they will be held responsible for the crimes of which 
 their leaders are guilty. The American citizen 
 needs no one to defend him against his government 
 nor to protect him against his employer and his non- 
 union neighbor. He should repudiate such signs of 
 disloyalty and weakness. 
 
 America expects her workingmen to be citizens 
 in their own right. They must not ally themselves 
 with any element which opposes their country or 
 welcomes here any principles which oppose the ut- 
 most liberties provided in our state and national 
 institutions. They must not become anything nor 
 do anything which classifies them as of .an inferior 
 or dependent order. Under no circumstances must 
 they be herded and driven as raw immigrants are by 
 their own kind, who qualify only by having been 
 longer in the country. It is degrading to American 
 citizens. Self-respecting citizens will not permit it, 
 nor will men who wear such a yoke be respected by 
 their neighbors. For such things to be is to cost us 
 independent and self-respecting men who are the 
 most valuable source of our citizenship, and the 
 most reliable and dependable defenses of our free 
 institutions. The only feature of serfdom we have 
 in this country is in those men who refuse citizenship 
 and permit themselves to be controlled, body and 
 
 355 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 soul, by designing men who would forsake them 
 to-morrow were it not for the large share which 
 they have in the ignorant man's wage. We should 
 not permit such a condition in our country, and it 
 is a humiliating disgrace that native-born American 
 citizens should be found among these serfs. Noth- 
 ing but freedom fits into our country. None but 
 free men, capable, intelligent, self-governing, loyal, 
 have a right to a place in America. Such men soon 
 own their own property and save their own wage 
 and choose their own State and national representa- 
 tives. No citizens should be higher, none more 
 safely trusted. Our land should be secure in the 
 hands of our independent and self-reliant working- 
 men. 
 
 My neighbor the workingman should insist that 
 his union shall standardize its men and their work, 
 and lift employment out of the haphazard and 
 conflicting conditions which are a source of conten- 
 tion. It has come to pass that any group of men, 
 however inefficient, can agree overnight to push 
 their wage into an absurd figure for the kind of 
 work they do, and compel employers to grant it 
 or compromise by some substantial advance. It 
 does great mischief to labor and arouses antagonism 
 among employers. Take the case of the ashmen. 
 Suddenly in winter snows and zero weather they see 
 their opportunity to prey upon the householder and 
 strike for absurd pay for their services. The man 
 who, before the war, was glad to take two dollars 
 
 356 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 or less for a day's work, demands five dollars, not 
 because the high cost of living has reached him, but 
 because he believes he can force it upon a helpless 
 community. There should be an authority to resist 
 this, and it should be among the workingmen them- 
 selves. They should be responsible for insisting 
 upon justice among workingmen and resisting un- 
 fair and cruel treatment of the community by any 
 class of laborers. The unions should standardize 
 labor. A scale should be fixed, a definite measure 
 should be set up. There should be a common 
 agreement as to values of labor in trades or callings, 
 and of laborers of the same trade according to their 
 proficiency and the quality of their work. And men 
 should not be permitted to select a time to enforce 
 their demands which causes suffering and embarrass- 
 ment to the community to the poor not less than to 
 the rich, to the sick and to the well. The country 
 has long felt the injustice of unclassified work. 
 Workingmen owe it to themselves to standardize 
 and to demand simple and plain justice upon the 
 part of labor if they are to expect it from employers. 
 
 357 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 MY NEIGHBOR'S FUTURE WAGE 
 
 WE have shown plainly that the workingman is 
 one of the best paid of all men in this country, 
 whether he is the coal miner, the railroad man, the 
 skilled mechanic, or the manual laborer. Wages 
 have doubled and quadrupled. The Italian digging 
 a ditch gets more pay than the school-teacher fitting 
 young America with his first ideas. The carpenter 
 is paid more, twice over, than the average preacher 
 of all denominations combined. The railroad en- 
 gineer of government-managed roads receives more 
 than the college professor. It all resolves itself 
 into the question : Do teachers of common schools, 
 professors in colleges, and preachers get too little, 
 or do the workingmen receive too much? It is 
 certain that the teachers and preachers do not get 
 too much, nor do they get half what they ought to 
 have. Their conditions are a disgrace to their con- 
 stituents, whether of the town or the church. 
 There is high authority for an earnest claim for 
 them "The laborer is worthy of his hire." And 
 there can be no higher service to mankind than 
 they are rendering. 
 
 Is the workingman receiving too much, and is he 
 358 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FUTURE WAGE 
 
 waiting a decrease in the high cost of living or is it 
 a new and permanent scale of wage which must be 
 kept up because in a decade or more it has been too 
 low? I think that I have reason for believing the 
 latter. Have the changed conditions of the average 
 man, the needs of the new and better way of living, 
 his part in the responsibilities of life, made it neces- 
 sary for him to set a higher price upon his labor? 
 Can he meet the new scale of obligations on the old 
 scale of wage? Must not the times, which have 
 placed upon him this new order of things, help him 
 carry it? It is a practical question as to whether 
 our country wants this new condition, and if it does, 
 can it afford to pay for it. Thinking men and 
 women will say we must have the best conditions 
 possible for our laboring men. The country de- 
 mands it. Our civilization, our progress, our pros- 
 perity, have their roots in the contentment and thrift 
 of the men of mechanic arts and manual labor. The 
 better homes they live in, the more comforts within 
 these homes, the nearer they live like the well-to-do, 
 the more promptly their bills are paid, the more like 
 other folk they and their wives dress, the more self- 
 respecting their boys and girls are, the better it is 
 for our land and country, the greater country we 
 shall have. Our prosperity is not in the number 
 of our millionaires, even if it is seldom that one 
 of them lives to himself, but it is in the general thrift 
 and frugality and happiness of the average man. I 
 purposely avoid saying the common people, for I 
 
 359 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 was reared to respect and revere the honest, temper- 
 ate, hard-working American man, who daily bends 
 his back to the common burden. It will be a sad 
 day for this land when that man cannot dig enough 
 out of life's task to make a happy home for his 
 family. The divine obligation is upon him. The 
 man who does not care for his own household is 
 worse than an infidel, is the teaching of the Holy 
 Scriptures. And a land which does not provide for 
 the possibilities of that family's self-support, in its 
 laws and economics, and enforce those possibilities 
 by a vigorous common sentiment, should not call it- 
 self a Christian land. 
 
 We want, therefore, the highest and noblest estate 
 for our fellow workers who labor for wage. It 
 should be inculcated as a common sentiment, not 
 as a concession and in no form of a charity. It 
 must be arranged so that it is a right, as much as 
 the right to trade -at a profit, and to manufacture, 
 and to build, and to invest for legitimate gain. The 
 workingman must be on the same plane with his 
 prosperous neighbors. 
 
 One of the secrets of the stability of our country 
 and of its progress is that our people are expected 
 to own property. The savings bank is a temporary 
 arrangement for the safe accumulation of wages. 
 The objective is a home and with it goes the thought 
 of citizenship. Communism is destructive to citizen- 
 ship and never has succeeded from the first days of 
 the common necessity of Christ's disciples to the 
 
 360 
 
 

 MY NEIGHBOR'S FUTURE WAGE 
 
 transcendentalists at Brook Farm. Bolshevism, be- 
 sides active destructive elements, ' carries its own 
 downfall in denying individual property and rights, 
 or permitting only a scattered and unearned posses- 
 sion of properties robbed from rightful owners. 
 There is a firm anchorage for the man of the little 
 farm to which he holds a title defended by the state. 
 His home, to which he holds a deed, even if mort- 
 gaged, gives weight and dignity to his vote. He feels 
 that he has a voice which no man can deny him, be- 
 cause he owns property. It fixes his habitation. He 
 is not a tramp nor a wanderer uncounted and unac- 
 countable. He has a street and number, and what- 
 ever concerns the town is his concern. Anything 
 which affects its property, its health, its good name, 
 has to do with his property. It is easy to see the 
 bearing of a man's property upon the prices and 
 thrift, the prosperity and contentment of a com- 
 munity. It can be seen that an intelligent business 
 town is paying in wages for something more than the 
 cost of manufactured articles in days' work. It gets 
 a citizen. It is paying for general thrift. It helps 
 build the homes and fixes the quality of the goods 
 bought and paid for in the stores. Many large 
 manufacturing firms build homes for their help to 
 live in at a nominal rent, and this is commendable. 
 Unfortunately, such help has not the making of 
 citizenship. But it is an infinite improvement when 
 the laborers own their homes and pay their own 
 taxes and with pride make the repairs. This is 
 
 361 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 American citizenship and it is an invaluably impor- 
 tant part of our best citizenship. We lose it at our 
 peril. 
 
 If we could have but one of two conditions, 
 namely, a thousand men in a community owning and 
 supporting their cottages with labor and thrift, or 
 one multimillionaire with other men working for 
 wages only, it were far better for the community to 
 have the thousand men than the one. The ideal 
 way is to have them both. That puts no limit on the 
 poor man; and it is from the poor that the rich come 
 in nearly all cases, not because they are poor, but we 
 have discovered in our country that among the poor 
 are often found some of the keenest and clearest 
 minds of the land. 
 
 There is every logical reason for America to pro- 
 mote the thrift of the working people, and it has 
 not been backward in doing so. It sounds strange 
 in our ears to hear men, foreign-born, declaiming 
 against our institutions and laws as unfriendly to our 
 laboring people. Such empty talk is from sources of 
 dense ignorance. This fact cannot be enforced too 
 vigorously upon our people. 
 
 America is made up of the plain, intelligent, faith- 
 ful workers. We have no trouble with them. They 
 always have been reasonable and have shared their 
 country's lot and destiny without complaint. Those 
 who disturb our land have no claim upon us. They 
 have no right to stay here. They do not earn that 
 right and are justly deported, and should have been 
 
 362 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FUTURE WAGE 
 
 shipped away decades ago. The hundred-per-cent 
 American laid our foundations deep and strong. He 
 came here with freedom in his heart, or he was born 
 here with law and order as his creed. He fought 
 the battles which made us free and kept us one 
 people. He went millions strong across the seas 
 to battle for the world's freedom. He has returned 
 to keep in sacred trust that freedom in these United 
 States. He has been overwhelmingly in numbers 
 and force the workingman. He was in the begin- 
 ning. He has been all the way up through our 
 history. Every American wants this man, in shop 
 or farm or wherever he toils, to have all that there 
 is for him, and insists that whatever there is in law 
 needed by him he shall have that law. The country 
 will do all for him that it can do and be just to other 
 men in both law and wage. But if this country is 
 to afford this increased wage and start out with it in 
 a new and permanent epoch, the workingman must 
 help carry the burden. He must not expect it to be 
 done for him, or set up the claim of back pay for an 
 underpaid past. There must be an equivalent upon 
 his part. It must be a wage for service rendered 
 and not a bonus out of other men's business. Is 
 the workingman ready to enter into such a bargain 
 with the community in which he lives? Will he do 
 all the work that the business requires and be con- 
 tent with what it can pay, until he helps it pay more? 
 It is a plain case of arithmetic. What is paid must 
 be paid out of what is produced. If time is wasted, 
 
 363 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 it is a loss as truly as it is if material is wasted. If 
 power is shut down or run on short time, it is the 
 same as leaving raw material unused and not worked 
 into the typewriter, the automobile, or whatever is 
 produced in a factory. If the day laborer intends 
 to have double the old-time pay, he must give the 
 manufacturer a chance to make it. He must not 
 waste a billion and a half of wage money in six 
 months, nor force his employer to lose two and a 
 half billion dollars in the same time. The four 
 billions loss to the country by strikes during the past 
 year would have put wages on a sound and greatly 
 increased basis for a long time. It was a loss. The 
 goods were not produced. The world did not re- 
 ceive them. It is four billions poorer, and the loss 
 cannot be recovered. I am not discussing the fault. 
 It may have been on both sides. I am stating a fact. 
 Such planning will make it impossible for wages to 
 remain where they are. Wages cannot be forced 
 above production, and they cannot long be kept be- 
 low production. Wages are not arbitrarily de- 
 termined by either capital or labor. As everybody 
 who thinks must know, they have their own law by 
 which they ebb and flow, as truly as the sea. Pro- 
 duce the goods, or do not produce the goods. The 
 result is as visible as neap tides and full tides. If 
 the workingmen reduce the hours and force up the 
 wages, the goods must pay it, both the short time 
 and the increased pay envelope. Business is not 
 done as a charity. It must pay dividends or it will 
 
 364 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FUTURE WAGE 
 
 not be done. Business is not done to help the 
 laborer. It is willing to pay for what it gets. Is 
 the workingman willing to work for what he is paid? 
 If he arrogantly demands more pay and insolently 
 loafs on the job, if he not only shortens hours but 
 obstructs men who want work and must work if 
 they live, the price of manufactured commodities is 
 correspondingly increased and the people must pay 
 their money for the higher-priced article and cannot 
 pay it for wages ; or, if they do pay it for wages in 
 the higher price for the article, quickly the money 
 is reduced in price and higher wage is worth no more 
 than lower wage. The workingman has the de- 
 termination of the whole question of wage in his own 
 hands. It is production. The world can afford 
 the wage and will be made to see its justice, if the 
 laborer will produce the goods. This is the solution 
 of the problem. It is not profit-sharing. That is 
 impracticable. In exceptional cases, with business 
 of exceptional adaptations, it will work for a time, 
 but as a general rule it will not work, and the work- 
 ingman should not waste his time contending over it. 
 He puts nothing into the profit side of the business, 
 except his labor, and that he is to be paid for with 
 a sufficient wage. He plans no market nor buys 
 material. He takes no chances of loss, nor puts on 
 the road agents of the firm. He establishes no 
 credit at the bank, and carries no risks of compensa- 
 tion and accident, nor fire and flood. It is folly to 
 attempt to mix the labor and the capital of a business 
 
 365 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 and make either do both. If workingmen are to 
 have a share in the profits, they must stand their 
 part of the loss. There would be more friction and 
 contention by suspicion of dishonesty or charge of 
 inefficient business management than we now have 
 in disputes over the length of the day and the size of 
 the pay envelope. 
 
 A modified Bolshevism, in which the laborer is to 
 take a part in the business management and profits 
 and at the same time is responsible for the wage- 
 earning, will never fit into a republic where all those 
 matters have been wrought out and are guided by 
 laws which provide for all emergencies and changes. 
 The workingman, who ascends to property owner- 
 ship, must permit his employer, who provides the 
 business, to own and manage his own property. The 
 practical question is for the artisan and hand laborer 
 to make the business pay profit to the owner and 
 more wages to the worker, if honest work will do it. 
 And that is so simple and elementary that it requires 
 no complicated machinery on either side. It does 
 not demand high-salaried agitators, nor an expensive 
 organization by the workers. To-day, if the fore- 
 most papers of the country may be believed, the 
 day laborers are paying immense sums for a ma- 
 chinery for the purpose of guarding their exclusive 
 rights and wages, which their country can do better. 
 Men who occupy their time in shouting against em- 
 ployers control millions of fees and funds. Men 
 who lament the hard lot of the American working- 
 
 366 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FUTURE WAGE 
 
 man are paid from ten thousand to eighteen thou- 
 sand dollars annually in salaries besides traveling 
 expenses, to keep up a row in the world of labor. 
 
 All these union expenses and high salaries should 
 be cut out and the men should turn their unions into 
 mutual benefit clubs, to which all self-respecting toil- 
 ers are welcome. With strikes abandoned and un- 
 lawful, there will be no demand for the lobbyist and 
 stump-speaker, and the workingman can devote him- 
 self to the humanity of a common brotherhood and 
 the self-respect of his citizenship. It will be a great 
 day for the workingman when he stops fighting his 
 employer and combines with him in a common inter- 
 est. When he gets rid of the foreign-born meddler, 
 he will make a large contribution to the increase of 
 day wages. We can afford the greater wages when 
 we all pull together. Whenever we have worked 
 together in this country we never have had starving 
 laborers. We have had some squalor and misery 
 from the saloons, but our sober and faithful workers 
 could always earn a healthful living, and now the 
 days will brighten and the old-time citizenship will 
 come back as we return to American wages and 
 leave to their false gods the blind prophets of labor 
 who have led our workingmen into the ditch. We 
 can afford the higher wage if it is to give us greater 
 men. 
 
 One of the faults of our country is its wrong 
 objective, and in this our laborers have been 
 schooled assiduously for a generation. Increased 
 
 367 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 pay has been set before them by leaders from lands 
 of poverty and conditions of discomfort and distress, 
 and there has been example sufficient from the 
 prosperous of our own land who have not regarded 
 economy and frugality in their personal and home 
 habits, but who have made money their god. The 
 passion has been to get more, and then to get more, 
 and keep it all for one's appetite and ambition. 
 There have been noble exceptions, but they have 
 been exceptions. They can be counted easily in any 
 community. They are conspicuous in the nation. The 
 purpose of getting money, the great and useful things 
 to do with it, are forgotten. All is left for a hurried 
 legacy, and usually that is all required to meet the 
 cultivated extravagances of a family record in an 
 atmosphere of riches. No wonder the toilers 
 measure their condition with this pattern and forget 
 the contentment enjoined as one of the fundamental 
 principles of a useful and happy life. We cannot 
 afford to have men prosperous in any callings, if they 
 are not to add to the community something more 
 than physical prosperity. We must have more man- 
 hood than property in every town in our America. 
 We can afford to pay the highest wages if they are 
 going into greater intelligence, greater loyalty, 
 sounder religion in charity, in fraternity, and ways 
 of practical usefulness. Such wages are an invest- 
 ment. We cannot afford not to pay them. The 
 trouble has been, not that employers grudge good 
 wage, they insist that the men shall be worth it. 
 
 368 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FUTURE WAGE 
 
 Much that they employ is unfit in every way. The 
 manufacturer has equipped his factory with ma- 
 chines of delicate mechanism at great cost. To 
 heat a journal or break a gear or bend a shaft out of 
 line means an instant loss of hundreds of dollars. 
 The employer cannot afford to have that man among 
 his machines at any price, but the present system 
 forces him to take help sent to him with a ticket 
 from the union. 
 
 The first thing to be demanded, if the community 
 is to keep the high wage where it now is and increase 
 it, is that the man who expects it shall qualify the 
 man who is to receive it in his manhood. I know 
 that gumption is born, but common sense, just plain 
 common sense, can be cultivated. And one of the 
 greatest elements in proficiency is a high type of 
 manhood. The moral traits enter largely into the 
 qualities of an artisan. They are fine, polished, 
 firm grain of his composition. They are like the 
 rhythmic sense of the musician, the color of the ar- 
 tist, the vision of the architect. Every workingman 
 should qualify for the best that can be done with 
 skilled hands and the tools of the mechanic, and 
 the first principle of it all is plain, old-fashioned 
 manhood. That man will not have to spend his 
 evenings growling and gnashing his teeth at capital- 
 ists and plutocrats. He will belong in their com- 
 pany and have a common interest with them. It is 
 the surest way to increase wages. 
 
 Every community can afford to pay the working- 
 369 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 man his full share when he takes his place as a citi- 
 zen who qualifies for the best things. Our public 
 schools are to help him. The whole spirit of 
 America appeals to him. He is the man who should 
 be employed. It is a serious question whether a 
 contractor should hire brutal men over and above 
 men of intelligence and the American habits of liv- 
 ing. Thousands of foreign-born men are among 
 our best citizens, and such have been welcomed to 
 our shores by ship loads. But they have assimilated 
 and are the proverbial one-hundred-per cent Ameri- 
 cans. I insist that if the builder and manufacturer 
 are to pay first-class wages, they must have first- 
 class men. Second-class men, who are contented to 
 be so, must accept second-class pay. The mischief 
 done labor by the practice of the unions in forcing 
 all kinds at the same price has been done at an 
 enormous cost to our country. We cannot afford it. 
 The intelligent workingmen cannot afford it. It 
 must be an immensely greater gain to put every 
 man on his merits than to protect labor by barring 
 apprentices and slowing up the job. 
 
 If we are to have high wages, the contractor can- 
 not do it alone. The workingman must help. He 
 must do his full share. He must make his labor 
 worth the capitalist's money. He must make his 
 labor produce all that it is paid for, and these two 
 the money and the labor will compel high wages. 
 It is all summed up in a few plain principles : The 
 workingman must be an American; if not American 
 
 370 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FUTURE WAGE 
 
 born, he must be American loyal. If born here, 
 our public schools will take care of his common in- 
 telligence. If foreign born, he must learn our 
 language and use it. He must read our papers in 
 English and study our Constitution. Night schools 
 will help him. He should read Lincoln's great in- 
 augural and the Gettysburg address, and the utter- 
 ances of other of our immortal statesmen. The 
 public library will furnish them to him, the school- 
 teacher, the preacher, the rabbi, the priest will tell 
 him about them. If he stays here, he must obey the 
 laws which protect him. If he does not, we should 
 send him back whence he came. It is our duty to 
 protect our own country from all foes. Foolish 
 sentimentalism about free speech is an insidious foe 
 of us all, and of none more than of the workingman, 
 who must first be a patriot. He must put his coun- 
 try first. The workingman's organization must be 
 for self-improvement and not for obstructing and 
 hindering any man. A union has no more right to 
 keep another man out of work because he does not 
 belong with the union than I have because he does 
 not belong to my church. The workingman should do 
 away with the walking delegate, and come face to 
 face with his employer. Get rid of the salaried mis- 
 chief-makers and meddlers. Every workingman 
 should put his manhood beyond his wage. It is the 
 surest way to become a high-priced man. 
 
 The workingman should abandon the strike 
 whether the law commands it or not. It is uncivil- 
 
 371 
 
MY NEIGHBOR THE WORKINGMAN 
 
 ized and barbarous. It works against higher wages. 
 The menace of it is figured into the cost of every 
 contract, and that figures it out of wages. The edi- 
 torial contention in a great New York paper, that 
 the anti-strike law compels a man to do honest work 
 against his will, is nothing more than silly. There 
 is no sound sense in it. The proposed 'law does 
 not force any man to work. It only provides against 
 a conspiracy of workingmen to prevent work by 
 anybody. In recent strikes in the great steel plants 
 thousands of men believed the strike a mistake and 
 were opposed to it, but were forced against their 
 judgment to join the strikers of their unions. 
 
 The character of a strike is seen in destruction 
 of property, assaults, and murders. The call for 
 soldiers and an extra police guard tells the story. 
 The strike stands for everything which America 
 opposes. It is violence. It is riot. It opposes 
 liberty. It is dangerous to life by exciting men to 
 unrestrained and dangerous passions. It takes con- 
 trol of properties unlawfully and forces loss into 
 business, forbidding construction and manufacture. 
 It destroys credit in trade and reduces the profits 
 from which wage is paid. 
 
 No one would object if dissatisfied men were to 
 leave a job and go quietly away to another, leaving 
 those satisfied to remain and work, or the employers 
 to hire whom they please. That is every man's 
 privilege. It is different from the conspiracy of the 
 strike which violates every right and privilege and 
 
 372 
 
 
MY NEIGHBOR'S FUTURE WAGE 
 
 should be forbidden, if any conspiracy should be un- 
 lawful. 
 
 I argue for higher wage, higher than we are now 
 paying, if the workingman will join the employing 
 man in furnishing the money to pay it. Such a 
 higher wage the employer would be glad to pay, and 
 such a wage honestly earned is the only one a laborer 
 has a right to expect. Our American workingmen, 
 greatest in number, found in all callings, dependable 
 in all things, are our greatest citizens. They must 
 never forget that they are citizens. They must not 
 forget that the capitalists are citizens also and with- 
 out them the fires would go out under the boilers and 
 the wheels would not turn an hour. The labor agi- 
 tator who assails capitalists and makes laborers their 
 enemies is a fool among men and a traitor to 
 the country and to the workingmen whom he betrays 
 for demagogic purposes. 
 
 True Americans will work together for good 
 citizenship, good business, good wages, and good 
 fellowship. 
 
 
 373 
 
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