LABOR IN THE 
 CHANGING WORLD 
 
 R.M.MACIVER
 
 AGO 1480
 
 LABOR IN THE 
 CHANGING WORLD 
 
 BY 
 
 R. M. MAcIVER 
 
 NEW YORK 
 E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 TORONTO 
 J. M. DENT & SONS 

 
 COPYRIGHT, 1919 
 Bv E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 All Rights Resented 
 
 Printed In the United States of America 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CUfFWA LIRRAF
 
 PREFACE 
 
 Now that the conflict of nations is ended, let 
 us hope forever, another conflict, the abiding and 
 paramount issue between labor and capital, takes 
 the center of the stage. What is that issue? 
 Whither is it driving us? What way of deliver- 
 ance is possible from the grievous disturbances 
 and monstrous evils which it reveals ? These ques- 
 tions I have sought to discuss and if possible to 
 answer in this little book. 
 
 I have limited myself to the central question, the 
 place of labor in the industrial system. The real 
 issue lies beyond the recriminations in which both 
 sides indulge. It is of course natural that the 
 workers should insist on the exploiting selfishness 
 of employers in general, and that employers 
 should charge the workers in general with slack- 
 ness and irresponsibility. Each party can bring 
 evidence to support its indictment. But what is 
 the conclusion? That workers, in the situation of 
 employers, would be less grasping? Or that em- 
 ployers would be more industrious and "loyal" if
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 put in the place of working men? Of course not. 
 And if not, although the aforementioned evidence 
 is symptomatic, the recrimination, the ethical con- 
 demnation, is vain. For it is the difference in 
 situation that evokes the difference in character. 
 It is due to the unlike fate of like-motived human 
 beings within the economic system. The system, 
 with its assignment of power and lack of power, of 
 opportunity and lack of opportunity, the system 
 with its evocation of the tempers and attitudes 
 akin to the necessities which it imposes the sys- 
 tem alone is impeached. 
 
 Every great social division divides also, at just 
 this point, the thoughts of men. For it raises this 
 fundamental question: Shall we impute the re- 
 sponsibility to human nature primarily, assuming 
 that the system, or lack of system, within which 
 the division falls, is on the whole consequence and 
 not cause ; or have we ground for the belief that a 
 practicable change of system would mitigate, if 
 not heal, the division ? The conservative answers, 
 "You must first change human nature," assuming 
 also, as a rule, that this is not practicable, perhaps 
 not desirable. The advocate of reform answers 
 that a change of system can, without changing
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 human nature at all, reveal a change of heart. 
 Most obviously this question is raised to-day in 
 respect of the disastrous international divisions of 
 the civilized world; and according as men in gen- 
 eral are led to accept one or the other of these 
 alternatives, the whole future of the world will 
 turn this way or that. 
 
 And surely no less may be said of this other 
 great cause of offense, the economic division 
 summed up in the words "labor" and "capital." 
 Have we any basis here for the more optimistic 
 view that a change of system can precede and 
 evoke a change of heart or, more precisely, for 
 that is all our argument requires, an effective 
 change of mood? 
 
 Patchwork will certainly not avail, and I have 
 therefore laid no stress on the half-hearted and 
 sometimes deceptive devices that pass under the 
 names of profit-sharing and "co-partnership," nor 
 yet on those conciliation schemes which, however 
 useful in their own place, are calculated to bolster 
 up the existent order. On the other hand, the suc- 
 cess of such experiments as have seriously at- 
 tempted to organize production to serve the com- 
 mon interest of the producers encourages the hope
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 that a real program of industrial reconstruction is 
 not only necessary but feasible. 
 
 But, apart from such experiments, there are cer- 
 tain general considerations which may here be 
 advanced. It is in the first place necessary to 
 regard the industrial system as an evolution with- 
 out fixity or finality, and assuredly dependent at 
 any time on the motives of its half-creators and 
 half-slaves for it is true of every institution that 
 it both springs from and dominates the wills of 
 men. When the will of a large class within the 
 system changes and I try to show in what fol- 
 lows that it has been changing rapidly the system 
 itself either changes or breaks. It breaks if the 
 dominant minority-will is so obdurate as to induce 
 a counter spirit of dominance on the opposite side. 
 Then we have Bolshevism, the seed of which is 
 always sown and nurtured by its bitterest foes. 
 
 On the other hand no open-minded observer, 
 certainly no educator, can fail to be struck with 
 the wonderful way in which men normally respond 
 to the institutional systems within which they 
 grow. There is a most significant contrast be- 
 tween the enduring, and often too rigid, frame- 
 work of institution and custom on the one hand
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 and on the other the responsive spirit of each 
 fresh generation before it in turn takes on the cast 
 of time. Change the system, and beyond doubt 
 you change also the thoughts of men. Wherever 
 it is practicable to remold the system to express 
 a new ideal, it is certain that you thereby perpetu- 
 ate that ideal. Now a world-earthquake has shak- 
 en the social system, including also the economic 
 order. The forces allied to the old order are al- 
 ready at work to restore and to confirm it. Those 
 who believe in a new order must seize the perhaps 
 brief time of opportunity. They must proclaim 
 alike an ideal and a practicable way of its attain- 
 ment. 
 
 The root of industrial evil is the present wage- 
 system. The ideal towards which we must strive 
 is some more cooperative order of production 
 within which there at length remains, as we now 
 understand these terms, neither "capitalism" nor 
 "wagery," neither wanton upliftedness nor haz- 
 ardous dependence, neither prodigal waste nor 
 sheer degrading poverty. Thus roughly stated, 
 the ideal doubtless suggests revolution. All ideals 
 do, or else they remain forever ideals. But revo- 
 lution as a result and not a means, revolution as
 
 x PREFACE 
 
 the significance of a new order duly established by 
 intelligent process, not the blind catastrophe of 
 despair. Perhaps fate offers us finally the choice 
 between these two. 
 
 There is a temper of revolution which is but 
 the other side of the seal of tyranny. From such 
 no new order can arise, only a grotesque reversal 
 of established dominance. There is also a tem- 
 per of revolution which, with no less prophetic 
 a vision of the end to be attained, would yet build 
 in patient determination, rejecting no stone that 
 may be fitted into the new edifice. From such 
 alone can a new order proceed. 
 
 What is to be feared for America is that the 
 apathy of the majority and the narrow domina- 
 tion of a plutocracy owning unprecedented power 
 may, while repressing the constructive spirit, pro- 
 voke yet further in the subject ranks of labor the 
 spirit of anarchy and overthrow. This would be 
 countered by an increasing conservatism in the 
 rest of the community, including the superior 
 ranks of labor. Thus America, which already, 
 for all its magnificent opportunities, is laggard in 
 the movement of industrial progress, may prove 
 that nowhere is it so hard to change an old order 
 as in a new world.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 PREFACE v 
 
 I. THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS AND THE 
 
 SHAKEN SUPERSTRUCTURE .... i 
 
 II. THE CHANGING ATTITUDE OF LABOR . 27 
 
 III. THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR . . 39 
 
 IV. THE WIDENING OF THE IDEA OF LABOR . 64 
 
 V. THE WASTE OF THE PRESENT INDUSTRIAL 
 
 SYSTEM 77 
 
 VI. THE CRISIS 93 
 
 VII. INDUSTRIAL RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT 
 
 BRITAIN: PLANS AND PROPOSALS . . 104 
 
 VIII. LIONS IN THE PATH 133 
 
 IX. THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD: A CON- 
 TRAST IN LABOR CONDITIONS . . . 156 
 
 X. RECONSTRUCTION AND THE TRADE UNION 168 
 
 XI. LABOR, IMMIGRATION, AND THE BIRTH- 
 RATE 183 
 
 XII. THE LABOR OF WOMEN 197 
 
 XIII. THE DAY OF BIG THINGS .... 210 
 
 XIV. SOME PRACTICAL CONCLUSIONS . 226
 
 LABOR IN THE 
 CHANGING WORLD 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS AND THE SHAKEN 
 SUPERSTRUCTURE 
 
 The assault of new ideas. The position of the 
 State: the new limits to Its sovereign power. 
 The transformation of the economic order. 
 The significance of "labor unrest." 
 
 The foundation of economic order In the in- 
 creasing necessity of cooperative production. 
 Importance In this connection of the growth 
 of productivity as compared with population. 
 The alternative channels of the energy and 
 resources so liberated. 
 
 I 
 
 IT is the law of nature, for nations and for 
 men, that they pass through the crumbling stages 
 of past life to new experiences. These they must 
 receive or they inevitably decay. There are
 
 2 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 periods of secretion and gestation and also of 
 travail and birth; periods of quiescence and also 
 of struggle; periods of slow growth and also of 
 violent transition. It is our fortune to live in 
 the disturbing days of great changes, fulfilled and 
 impending, in a time of national travail and of 
 new deliverance. The war, it is said, has shaken 
 society to its foundations, to its foundations, yes, 
 but the foundations themselves remain. The su- 
 perstructure is shaken, but the foundations are 
 in the heart of humanity; and, while that endures, 
 while men hunger and thirst, while they love and 
 fear, while their wants and strivings can be satis- 
 fied only by obedience to the abiding laws both 
 of their own nature and of the outer world, the 
 bases of society endure. 
 
 I am not advocating the hoary fallacy that hu- 
 man nature does not change. Man changes all 
 things else upon the earth because he changes 
 himself first. He builds new worlds because he 
 is himself different. He widens the bounds of 
 society because his own mind is widened. He 
 masters the forces of nature because his own in* 
 telligent force has grown. But, though social 
 forms and institutions pass away, the ties which
 
 THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 3 
 
 bind men in society are not thereby broken. Men 
 remain dependent upon one another; rather, they 
 grow more dependent on one another. The com- 
 mon welfare grows more, not less, real ; more, not 
 less, insistent. The foundations of society can 
 never fail while the truth stands that the essential 
 needs of men are best or alone fulfilled in the mu- 
 tuality and cooperation. 
 
 The foundations remain, but the superstructure 
 of institution is badly shaken. There is scarcely 
 a social institution that the storm of war has left 
 wholly unscathed. Some will soon be repaired, 
 but others must be rebuilt. These last, though 
 bulwarked by custom, had been weakened by the 
 continued assault of new ideas, by the growing 
 urgency of conscious needs seeking a satisfaction 
 these failed to give. The war broke the seals of 
 custom and thereby gave potency to the attacking 
 forces. 
 
 For in these days of history-making it is well 
 to remind ourselves that the only thing that does 
 make history is a change in men's ideas. Finally, 
 it is not wars or conquests, not King or Emperor 
 or President, it is the ideas which they represent 
 or incarnate, the ideas which they stimulate or
 
 4 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 repress, that change the face of the world. Actions 
 fade into memories, but ideas live as long as there 
 is a brain to think them. Over them alone time 
 has no sway, but it is they that give time its mean- 
 ing. We divide them into epochs because of 
 the changing thoughts of men. Actions are cir- 
 cumscribed by the hour and the place. Ideas are 
 winged and seek all over the earth for the re- 
 ceptive soil; just as the germ mysteriously appears 
 where its appropriate breeding place is prepared, 
 so wherever the spiritual soil is favorable the idea 
 finds its way. It waits patiently for the hour 
 and the place that it may strike root, and there 
 it grows and fructifies and can be extruded only 
 by the presence of another and more potent idea. 
 An old Scottish theologian used to speak of the 
 "expulsive power of a new affection." The 
 phrase may be applied to ideas. No force, no 
 medicine, nothing but the expulsive power of a 
 new idea can drive out that vital germ from the 
 mind of man. 
 
 The war confounded the general sense of se- 
 curity which exists in an ordered society, disturbed 
 that complacency which the more fortunate wrap 
 around them as a garment, and still more com-
 
 THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 5 
 
 pletely dissipated that spirit of acquiescence which 
 the less fortunate acquire as part of their ad- 
 justment to life's conditions. The ferment of 
 ideas is more advanced in the older lands, but it 
 inevitably spreads, as do most socio-economic 
 movements, from east to west. It is well, there- 
 fore, that we should ask ourselves, with special 
 reference to the labor situation, just what has 
 been shaken and what remains as solid rock. 
 
 First, the position and power of the State itself 
 has been subject to the assault of new question- 
 ings. Never in history has the State been so 
 supreme, so absolute, as it became under the ne- 
 cessity of war. Never did it enter so intimately 
 and so irresistibly into the life of every individ- 
 ual, assigning to millions the issues of life and of 
 death, prescribing what men shall work at, what 
 they shall eat, what they shall wear, even what 
 they shall think. In earlier times the theory of 
 absolutism went further, but it required the mod- 
 ern centralized mechanism of production, it re- 
 quired the modern press, it required the network 
 of railway, telegraph and telephone, to arm the 
 central political authority with swift and univer- 
 sal dominion over the lives of men. And yet
 
 underneath there were forces at work which were 
 preparing to challenge as never before the old 
 principle of State-sovereignty. While the menace 
 of autocracy was being thrust down, democracy 
 itself in its historic significance was insecure and 
 full of doubt. The struggle for democracy had 
 been, historically, a struggle for the liberty of 
 representative parliaments. The struggle seemed 
 over, the liberty achieved, and men felt a curi- 
 ous dissatisfaction with the result. Consider the 
 mother of parliaments herself. It was only in 
 1911 (when the veto of the Lords was broken) 
 that the last stage of its emancipation was com- 
 plete, the end of an age-long struggle. And yet 
 when the war was over and the time came to 
 elect a parliament that, constitutionally, must de- 
 cide the most fateful questions ever submitted 
 to any body of men, most observers recorded 
 an unwonted indifference on the part of the elec- 
 torate. Many felt that it was not there, or by 
 these representatives, that the fate of the world 
 would be decided. Within the nation there had 
 grown up other powers, great new associations 
 that the political sovereign had perforce to recog- 
 nize. With the most formidable of these powers,
 
 THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 7 
 
 the opposing forces of capital and of labor, the 
 English parliament, all-powerful in name, omni- 
 competent by constitution, has been compelled to 
 treat, as one power with others, ostensibly acting 
 as mediator, but doing so not of choice but of 
 necessity. The State is no longer Leviathan, su- 
 preme and alone. It is one collectivity among 
 others. It finds new and strange limits to its 
 power. 
 
 In the international situation another change 
 of the political structure is being prepared. Fed- 
 eration of peoples, which nearly all men regard as 
 desirable in some form, cannot be attained without 
 a surrender of a part of the old sovereignty of the 
 individual state. Besides the national parliament 
 there may arise the international parliament. It is 
 well to recognize that this would profoundly affect 
 the currents of national life, that it would mean 
 the stimulation of new ideas, that it would mean in 
 particular a further and progressive revision of 
 the idea of political sovereignty. It would create 
 new problems for democracy, showing that the 
 mere achievement of full parliamentary institu- 
 tions, far from being the final solution of the prob-
 
 8 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 lem of liberty and order, was but the first step on 
 a long journey of peril and of hope. 
 
 Enough may have been said to explain the 
 statement that the political structure has been 
 shaken by the power of new ideas. Much that 
 once seemed sure has grown uncertain, much that 
 once men accepted as cardinal political principle 
 Is questioned. Those who look for finality in 
 human institutions must journey elsewhere on their 
 fruitless quest. I turn next to the economic struc- 
 ture, the true storm-center of the struggle. 
 
 The present economic system is often described 
 as a competitive one. The description has long 
 ceased to be accurate, if it ever was. In reality 
 the present system is the unstable resultant of two 
 opposing sets of forces, the competitive and the 
 anti-competitive, and the latter has been gaining 
 ground at the expense of the former. This is 
 revealed very markedly in three ways : in the grow- 
 ing control of the state over economic conditions, 
 ranging from actual ownership to such legal de- 
 terminations as Factory Acts ensure; secondly, 
 in the vast modern organization of capital, by 
 means of amalgamations, trusts, cartels, selling 
 agreements, interlocking directorates, associations
 
 9 
 
 of manufacturers, associations of agricultural pro- 
 ducers, alliance of banks with trust companies and 
 industrial corporations, and so forth ; and, thirdly, 
 in the extension of unionism among the workers. 
 The semi-automatism of the competitive system 
 is being in part superseded by the conscious ef- 
 fort of these three great forces to gain or retain 
 control of the productive process, and, perhaps 
 still more, by the struggle between the two latter, 
 capital and labor, to obtain the greater share of 
 the product and in the effort to use the machinery 
 of the state. 
 
 While these mighty contests are straining the 
 whole industrial fabric, the strife is gradually 
 concentrating around the wage-system. Here is 
 the real significance of what we call labor unrest. 
 As it grows self-conscious it proves to be nothing 
 less than an ever more resolute attack upon a sys- 
 tem. We shall go far astray if we think that 
 praise or condemnation, of either side, has any 
 relevance to the situation. The worker, if he 
 changed places with the employer, would be over- 
 persuaded by the system even as the employer is; 
 the employer, if he changed places with the work- 
 er, would likewise learn the bitterness and inertia
 
 io LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 of wage-earning. Employers and workers alike 
 are bound up in a system which neither has created, 
 but naturally the attack comes from the side which 
 suffers from it most. Labor unrest witnesses 
 to a deep-rooted evil. It springs from poverty, 
 hazard and privation, but still more from the 
 sense of exploitation and the frustration of op- 
 portunity for all of which it accuses the wage- 
 system. Labor unrest is not something to be ex- 
 orcised, it is not even something to be feared. 
 It is part of what distinguishes the human being 
 from the sheep. It is inevitable in a civilization 
 which leaves from twenty to forty per cent of 
 the industrial population in a state of sheer desti- 
 tution, and which concentrates, as in Great 
 Britain, two-thirds of the total wealth of the coun- 
 try in the hands of one-seventieth of its popu- 
 lation, or, as in America, the same proportion in 
 the hands of one-fiftieth of the population. It 
 is part of the eternal striving of humanity for 
 a better and fuller life, fraught no doubt with all 
 the difficulty and aberration, but also with all the 
 necessity which accompanies every process of 
 growth. The unrest of to-day makes the civiliza- 
 tion of to-morrow. Had there been no unrest in
 
 THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS n 
 
 the stone age, the world would be still in the stone 
 age. 
 
 It is our duty to understand this momentous 
 uprising, to examine it with clear and fearless 
 eyes, to search beyond symptoms for causes. Let 
 us not think of it as a mere troubler of the peace. 
 It exists because there is no peace. Let us not 
 dismiss it as agitation, as disturbance of the es- 
 tablished order. It exists because there is deep- 
 seated disorder. We should no more meet it with 
 reproval and indictment than a physician re- 
 proaches or indicts a disease. We should no 
 more seek to remove it by vain palliatives or 
 vainer incantations than a physician seeks thus to 
 remove the causes of disease. If those of us who 
 are not in the ranks of labor do not go out with 
 sympathy and understanding to apprehend the 
 human meaning of these discontents, we are but 
 helping to give them narrower, more bitter, and 
 more explosive character. Blindness is always 
 the counterpart of revolution. 
 
 A great new consciousness of need has arisen 
 within the present system of industry. It is in 
 part the product of education, and in part the 
 product of machinery. For education, the educa-
 
 12 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 tion fostered by experience rather than by the 
 schools, has brought a greater consciousness at 
 once of dignity, of power, and of possibility. It 
 teaches men to refuse the position of being a 
 commodity, to be bought and sold without regard 
 for the human costs of the buying and selling. 
 When once that degradation becomes conscious, 
 it ceases to be long tolerable, and the days of any 
 system which makes it necessary are numbered. 
 Machinery was in a measure the means of that 
 degradation. Machinery massed men and deper- 
 sonalized their work. It destroyed the old crafts- 
 manship the intimate relation of the worker to 
 the integral product of his hands. Machinery is 
 man's great agent of deliverance from the drudg- 
 ery of life, but it offers deliverance at a price. 
 The price is the loss of the specialized skill known 
 as craftsmanship. Machinery breaks down the 
 barriers between crafts. It does not destroy skill 
 but it generalizes it. It specializes function and 
 generalizes skill. It has destroyed the mystery, 
 the exclusiveness, and the privilege of the old 
 crafts. No longer can the workman find in his 
 specialized function the living interest which a 
 men seeks in his work. He must now gain less
 
 THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 13 
 
 narrow interests, even as his skill is less narrow. 
 He must share in the interest of the whole process 
 of production of which his work is a fragment. 
 He must consciously cooperate in production, as 
 one who is a partner in production. The absence 
 of this spirit of cooperation is the final indictment 
 of the present breaking system, and there will be 
 no peace until that spirit is regained. Ask almost 
 any employer, and he will tell you that the work- 
 men have no interest in their work. Lord Lever- 
 hulme, for example, declares that the present sys- 
 tem turns the workers into a race of ca'canny 
 shirkers and slackers. What can you expect? 
 Has it not always been true that the hireling flees 
 because he is a hireling? 
 
 The loss is twofold, in the effect upon charac- 
 ter and in the effect upon productivity. When 
 men lose interest in their 'work they lose the sense 
 of responsibility. Much of the energy of life is 
 lost, and much is misdirected. The demand for 
 mere excitement witnesses to the loss of a more 
 central interest. Because men fail to find interest 
 in their work they pursue the spurious excitations 
 of sensationalism, to the provision of which all 
 social institutions, but especially the press, the pic-
 
 14 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 ture house, and the pulpit, may be perverted. 
 The balked intrinsic desire, the natural desire 
 of men to fulfill themselves in their work, issues 
 in a restless craving for extrinsic and unsatisfy- 
 ing stimulation. On the other hand, there is the 
 direct economic loss. Is it not a curious com- 
 mentary on our economic order that the great 
 mass of those who produce should take pains to 
 lower their own productivity? While in all other 
 things men seek to be efficient, here they seek not 
 uncommonly to be inefficient. The sense of op- 
 posing interests means, here as elsewhere, ineffi- 
 ciency; the sense of a common cause alone brings 
 cooperation, and therefore efficiency. But in in- 
 dustry in general there is cleavage, not coopera- 
 tion, and therefore inefficiency. The general con- 
 clusion is clear. A way of cooperation, of partner- 
 ship, must be found which will unite all producers 
 in the work of production, making it the common 
 interest of them all, so that men cease to feel as the 
 helots and hirelings of their fellowmen. All sig- 
 nificant schemes of industrial reconstruction, such 
 as that of the Whitley Committee in Great Britain, 
 are directed to the attainment of this end. They 
 recognize the necessity for a new order, a more
 
 THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 15 
 
 representative order, a more cooperative order. 
 This cannot be attained without changes of great 
 importance in the economic superstructure of so- 
 ciety. 
 
 II 
 
 The economic foundations are secure. Every 
 advance of society, every discovery, every appli- 
 cation of science, make the foundations more se- 
 cure. For they make men more dependent upon 
 one another over greater areas of community. 
 Already not one of us but employs unwittingly 
 the hands and brains of countless thousands of 
 his fellowmen. Carlyle prophetically saw it when 
 he declared that not an Indian could quarrel with 
 his squaw but the world must smart for it the 
 price of beaver would rise! That hyperbole 
 grows in fact more true with every advance of 
 science, for science destroys isolation and estab- 
 lishes interdependence. The history of man is in 
 one aspect the history of the growth of an or- 
 ganization which diversifies the work of each, 
 making each more dependent on others in order 
 that by the surrender of self-sufficiency he may re- 
 ceive back a thousandfold in fullness of life. It is
 
 16 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 becoming true between nations as between men. 
 The world knows to-day that a nation cannot in- 
 jure another without doing grave injury to itself. 
 What it has yet to learn is the happier counter- 
 part of that truth, that a nation cannot serve itself, 
 cannot honestly prosper, without benefiting other 
 nations also. 
 
 Cooperation is more fruitful than conflict. 
 Man works to satisfy his need, and seeks to do 
 so in the most economical way. He therefore 
 chooses more and more the method of coopera- 
 tion. Economy and society go hand in hand. 
 Where there is no society there is waste. Where 
 there is social dissension there is waste. The great- 
 est waste in the modern world, from the economic 
 standpoint, exceeding even the waste of the war- 
 fare between nations, is that of the warfare be- 
 tween Labor and Capital. If that seems a hard 
 saying, it is because we have not realized the ex- 
 traordinary wastefulness of industrial disharmony 
 the waste of unemployment, the waste of labor 
 turnover, above all the waste of unwilling task 
 work. This warfare will never be ended, it will al- 
 most certainly grow worse, until labor ceases to be 
 mere labor and capital to be mere capital. This
 
 THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 17 
 
 means equality of opportunity, so that neither 
 status nor accumulated wealth, but natural endow- 
 ment and quality shall determine leadership in in- 
 dustry. It means security against exploitation, so 
 that none shall grow rich out of the poverty of oth- 
 ers. It means assurance of employment, so that 
 none who have the will and capacity to work shall 
 seek for it in vain. It means a more representative 
 system of industry, so that all who share in its 
 toil shall have the right to express their needs 
 through an orderly constitution. It means indus- 
 trial citizenship, so that no class shall be without 
 a voice in the determination of its fate. Let us 
 clearly understand that the alternative to these 
 conditions is no longer, in the present temper of 
 our civilization, the retention of the present sys- 
 tem it is the ferment of revolution, and revolu- 
 tion can gain, by whatever violence and disturb- 
 ance, no other ends than these. It may attempt 
 more, but it cannot obtain more. Any economic 
 order whatever must rest on the economic founda- 
 tions of society. Men must finally adopt the sys- 
 tem which is in the widest sense most economical, 
 the system which, with the least expenditure, pro- 
 duces most of what men require to satisfy their.
 
 i8 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 needs. Neither the selfishness of the few nor the 
 tyranny of the many can long defeat the lesson 
 of experience. Because cooperation is in the 
 long run most economical, men must in the long 
 run resort to cooperation. They must, whether 
 they desire it or not, obtain their individual ends 
 through economic solidarity. 
 
 There was only one lion in the path which 
 could have made this progress impossible. The 
 most formidable question, within the economic 
 sphere, which any man has ever asked, was that 
 raised by Malthus. Malthus raised the question 
 of productivity versus population. He held that 
 there was a constant tendency for population to 
 outrun productivity. The increase of mankind 
 was naturally more rapid than the increase of the 
 means of life. If this were true, then men must 
 always be subject, in the absence of a prudential 
 control which Malthus thought desirable but rare, 
 to endless conflict, and the economy of coopera- 
 tion could never be established. But the period 
 that has elapsed since the works of Malthus first 
 disturbed the optimism of the early nineteenth 
 century has witnessed developments which have 
 removed that terror and implanted, in the more
 
 THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 19 
 
 fearful-minded, another of a very different kind. 
 Falling birth-rate and falling death-rate, in all 
 civilized countries, witness to profound changes 
 in the social order. Into the significance of these 
 changes we cannot here enter. It must suffice to 
 state the conclusion, which many facts and figures 
 could be brought forward to substantiate, that 
 there is now every reason to believe that pro- 
 ductivity is advancing more rapidly than popula- 
 tion. The period of war was a sad exception and 
 yet the unheard-of economic waste of that period, 
 while yet the general standard of living suffered 
 comparatively little, furnished a remarkable proof 
 of the general truth. In all civilized communities 
 there is created in every normal year a surplus 
 of production over consumption, a surplus which, 
 as increased capital, can be made to enhance con- 
 tinually the general standard of economic pros- 
 perity. 
 
 This is a fact of immense significance. It opens 
 up a prospect full of hope. It points to a time, 
 in the quite near future, when a recognized mini- 
 mum of material comfort shall eliminate the sor- 
 did destitution in which multitudes are living to- 
 day. The philosopher Godwin held the view
 
 20 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 that in the truly scientific age half an hour's work 
 a day would suffice for the satisfaction of ma- 
 terial needs. We may think such a statement 
 absurd and Utopian, but it is worth while reflect- 
 ing that probably some such minute fraction of 
 modern industrial activity is in many directions as 
 productive as the whole weary day of work which 
 our ancestors of not many generations back en- 
 dured. The spindles of Lancashire to-day pro- 
 duce as much as would have required the services 
 of two hundred million men unaided by machin- 
 ery. Of course needs grow with the power of 
 satisfying them. Need is the hydra which when- 
 ever one head is cut away grows two new ones 
 in its place. If it were not so, there would be in 
 the world to-day no poverty and little wealth. 
 
 Let me dwell for a little on this hydra charac- 
 ter of human needs. It has an important applica- 
 tion. When an original need is satisfied, two 
 new possibilities of satisfaction are revealed. 
 When, for instance, men have provided for their 
 need of food their former desire may go out to- 
 wards a finer diet, not more food but different, or 
 it may be diverted into some different channel al- 
 together. When all the primary organic needs of
 
 THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 21 
 
 men are satisfied, men may either refine on these, 
 seeking their more luxurious fulfillment, or they 
 may pass to the satisfaction of what we may call 
 higher needs, cultural needs. Usually, of course, 
 both directions are pursued together, and the 
 character of a civilization is defined by the de- 
 gree of stress it lays upon one or the other. Capua 
 went one way and Jerusalem another; Florence 
 went one way and New York another. In every 
 case the foundation is the economic one, the satis- 
 faction of the primary needs. In Aristotelian 
 terms, there must be life before there can be the 
 good life or the luxurious life. Man is econo- 
 mist before he is either stoic or epicurean. Hence, 
 man's increasing productivity, his increasing con- 
 trol over the material environment, opens out two 
 great avenues of life. Being liberated from the 
 pressure of organic necessities, he may be carried 
 by the very momentum of the previous effort to 
 satisfy these into the ever more intensive pur- 
 suit of their endless varieties of refinement. If 
 he follows that way, and that alone, his liberation 
 is illusory. As the power of satisfaction grows, 
 custom and habit turn into necessity what was 
 formerly otiosity. The pressure of necessity is
 
 22 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 restored, with the difference that a hundred ne- 
 cessities have taken the place of a few. I do not 
 mean to imply that the refinement of organic 
 needs is not itself a process of great cultural sig- 
 nificance, but only that the complete engrossment 
 in these prevents that greater liberation of the 
 spirit which the enjoyment of intrinsic interests 
 can bestow. This is the other great avenue which 
 man's economic mastery prepares. Here is the 
 greater emancipation, in the spirit of free devotion 
 to ends in themselves worth while, in the pride not 
 of possession but of the quality of life, in the 
 satisfaction of workmanship and art, in the under- 
 standing of men and in the appreciation of na- 
 ture, in the sense of fruition through the exercise 
 of all man's faculties. These are the treasures 
 laid up in heaven which thieves never break 
 through to steal, for taking does not impoverish 
 nor does withholding enrich. This is the living 
 bread which can be distributed among the multi- 
 tudes and grows the more it is divided. 
 
 These intrinsic satisfactions are in part the 
 alternative to, in part the complement of, the 
 former. They are different modes of seeking 
 what all men seek as naturally as the plant the
 
 THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 23 
 
 light the sense and reality, the thrill, of living. 
 One mode is extrinsic, because it is shallow and 
 impermanent and rests on comparison and con- 
 trast; the other is intrinsic, because it is deep and 
 permanent and satisfies in the direct relation of 
 subject to object. In our civilization this latter 
 avenue is all too neglected. If only the claim of 
 intrinsic interests were more imperative, it would 
 restrain the encroaching habituation of further 
 extrinsic interests, and thus redirect some of the 
 enormous social expenditure of energy which the 
 satisfaction of these involves. It would thus in 
 time ensure for all men that liberation from en- 
 grossment in mere necessity which is the final con- 
 dition of the fulfillment of life. 
 
 The civilization of this continent, even more 
 than that of Europe, needs to be saved from ab- 
 sorption in these extrinsic interests. It was in- 
 evitable, in a land of great resources newly opened 
 to exploitation, that the extrinsic interests should 
 dominate the mind and the temper. It was in- 
 evitable that, until the economic foundations were 
 fully laid, the cultural interests should be neg- 
 lected. But this too exclusive devotion to exter- 
 nal ends at last defeats itself. For it creates pov-
 
 24 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 erty as well as wealth, by an excessive diversion 
 of resources to material display. It hinders social 
 cooperation and stimulates division. It develops 
 one aspect of character at the expense of another, 
 and robs life of the finer satisfactions. In the new 
 lands, where the appeal of wealth is most insistent, 
 there is a development of mere forcefulness at the 
 expense of personality. It means finally that 
 many who have obtained amply the means to live 
 have lost in the scramble the faculty of living. I 
 remember a conversation related to me of a New 
 York architect who builds elaborate houses for 
 wealthy Americans. "Do they get any happiness 
 out of them?" he was asked. "No," he replied; 
 "it drives them crazy," adding, "and I think it 
 will some day drive me crazy too." So the fine 
 arts are perverted because men have not learned 
 to build on the economic foundations. They have 
 not learned the lesson of the intrinsic devotion 
 demanded for all permanent satisfaction. The 
 stones of civilization have been quarried and cut, 
 but no formative soul has built them into its own 
 home and abiding monument. Here we have all 
 the stones for the great building, a land broad 
 and rich in resources, a soil that yields as yet on
 
 THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS 25 
 
 the average but a fraction of its potentiality, a 
 people enduring, healthy-minded and clear-willed. 
 What is less manifest is the spirit of cooperation 
 in communal purposes, the sense of direction to- 
 wards a goal, in a word, social education. 
 
 This is true in some sense of our whole modern 
 civilization, European as well as American. Nar- 
 row, dividing, extrinsic interests, born of engross- 
 ment in material aims, have threatened civilization 
 itself. They still threaten it, though one great 
 peril is past. They threaten it because men still 
 believe that the gain of one nation is necessarily 
 the loss of another, not understanding how much 
 more fruitful, both materially and spiritually, is 
 cooperation than conflict. Even the deep sense 
 of a sacred international cause, which led multi- 
 tudes to death and mutilation in willing but awful 
 devotion, has scarcely sufficed to teach that lesson. 
 They threaten it too because men still believe 
 that within industry the methods of autocracy and 
 oligarchy are possible, in a world that has suf- 
 fered so much in the name of the opposite cause. 
 If recent events have any lesson for us at all, it 
 is that the common interest must be widened, and 
 that the narrow ambitions of nation or class in
 
 26 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 these days of interdependence must end in mutual 
 disaster. 
 
 This is the spirit in which it is necessary to ap- 
 proach the whole problem of labor and its new 
 demands.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 The conflict of interest between labor and capital. 
 The new attitude of organized labor as re- 
 vealed in the causes of strikes. The danger 
 ahead. A new order or else chaos. 
 
 IN the flux of all things, of ideas and of sys- 
 tems, which the war has hastened rather than 
 created, it was not to be supposed that so unstable 
 an equilibrium as that of "capital and labor" 
 would remain as it was before. On the contrary, 
 the situation has changed, rapidly and momen- 
 tously. It is of the greatest importance that the 
 movement in question should be understood as 
 widely as possible. Without understanding, 
 tragic errors are inevitable, and the world we live 
 in has had enough of these. This matter con- 
 cerns us all, whether we employ others or serve 
 for hire, and will concern us more closely in the 
 near future. My object in these pages is to ex- 
 plain the new situation as best I can discern it. 
 
 37
 
 28 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 Naturally it is full of uncertainties, and there is 
 room for much difference of opinion. Such differ- 
 ence is welcome and salutary so long as it springs 
 from honest attempts to read the situation, so 
 long, that is, as we are not content to follow, with- 
 out questioning, the guidance of our own immedi- 
 ate interests but seek to find, in the light of the 
 facts, what is to the interest of the country as a 
 whole. 
 
 The change in the situation is due mainly to 
 a new attitude on the part of labor. We often 
 think of the relation of capital and labor as a 
 kind of warfare, and it is part of the truth that 
 capital and labor, as at present constituted, are 
 ranged against one another as opposing forces. 
 Anyone who to-day speaks of the "essential iden- 
 tity of interest between capital and labor" is con- 
 victed thereby of either simplicity or hypocrisy. 
 Is there identity between costs and profits? Is 
 not business run for profits, and is not labor a 
 cost from that point of view? Does not the 
 worker seek to enhance that "cost" by securing 
 as high wages as he can? Does not the ordinary 
 capitalist seek to minimize it, like other costs, 
 by employing the cheapest grade that will serve;
 
 THE CHANGING ATTITUDE OF LABOR 29 
 
 by getting, through long hours, low wages, and 
 intense application, as much out of every unit 
 of labor cost as he can; by substituting for it 
 machine-power whenever it pays to do so; and in 
 general by making for it only such provision as 
 brings an economic return which, be it observed, 
 is naturally less in the case of the worker than 
 in that of the machine, for new machines involve 
 heavy capital expenditure but new workers can be 
 procured, seemingly, with no initial outlay? We 
 may find modifying principles in the "economy of 
 high wages," the superior efficiency of moderately 
 short hours, the saving effected by a low percent- 
 age of turnover, and so on; but, important as these 
 principles are, their limits are obvious. Even if 
 they were applicable much further than we have 
 any reason to suppose, they would not remove the 
 fundamental difference. For how can there be 
 identity of interest between two parties one of 
 which seeks to diminish what the other seeks to 
 augment, to one of which accrues all of the joint 
 product that it can withhold from the other? 
 
 Let us be quite clear on this point. There is 
 common interest actually in so far as cooperation 
 exists, potentially in so far as cooperation is bene-
 
 30 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 ficial. We say that labor and capital cooperate 
 in production, and that both are equally necessary 
 to production. Does this mean that the product 
 is due to the joint activity of the two, that there 
 is actually a division of labor between the two? 
 That is clearly too simple a doctrine, for of the 
 two parties one merely owns the means whereby 
 the other produces. Capital so understood is a 
 passivity, not a productive function. Capital may 
 be owned by an infant or an idiot or an "estate" 
 or any other anonymity. The change of owner- 
 ship would make no difference to the productive 
 process of such. It would affect the distribution 
 of the product, not directly the sum total produced. 
 This fact would be obvious were capital properly 
 distinguished from management and enterprise, 
 which are active functions in production. Capital 
 must be owned and must be offered for purposes 
 of production, but it need not, so far as production 
 in concerned, be owned by anyone in particular. 
 So far as production is concerned it might be 
 owned by labor or by management, it might be 
 owned by the State or the community. That is 
 a matter of social expediency or justice, not of 
 economic necessity. The socialist position is not
 
 THE CHANGING ATTITUDE OF LABOR 31 
 
 turned by the argument that capital is as neces- 
 sary as labor. The extremest revolutionary can 
 still accept that doctrine. 
 
 The cooperation of management and workers 
 is something essentially different from that of 
 labor and capital, and is necessary to production 
 in an entirely different sense. The question of 
 the relationship of management and workers 
 would be a comparatively simple matter were it 
 not that management is usually associated with 
 and directly dependent on one only of the two 
 parties, worker and capitalist. Were it not for 
 that one-sided dependence we could regard man- 
 agement and workers as joint producers simply, 
 whose relative position and reward depended on 
 the comparative rarity of the higher as compared 
 with the lower capacity. In this situation there 
 would then be no world-shaking problem, but 
 just one of the ordinary matters of occupational 
 adjustment. 
 
 But as between capitalist and worker the case is 
 far more difficult and baffling. Even if we assume 
 that both capitalist and worker are essential to 
 production does it follow that the common inter- 
 est in production suffices as a ground of agree-
 
 32 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 ment? Men produce in order to possess and to 
 consume. With functions so disparate, so in- 
 commensurate, so remote from equality in human 
 costs, who can assign a principle of "fair" division 
 that both parties will accept? Hence, if there is 
 a paramount necessity of cooperation, that neces- 
 sity, within the present economic order, creates, 
 not identity of interest, but the equilibrium of op- 
 posing forces. Within the most remarkable sys- 
 tem of "cooperative" production the world has 
 known, a dangerous and bitter struggle is all the 
 time being waged. 
 
 In this struggle, labor must be regarded as the 
 offensive, capital as the defensive force. They 
 have been organizing for the conflict their re- 
 spective sides, but capital has organized to defend 
 a position already taken, labor to gain what it 
 regards as territory of which it has been despoiled. 
 Capital would be glad to make peace on the basis 
 of the status quo, labor refuses the status quo. 
 Capital upholds the existent order, the prevailing 
 law, the established industrial regime. Labor has 
 been challenging it, and it is upon that challenge 
 that the battle is being joined. 
 
 In recent years the challenge has been grow-
 
 THE CHANGING ATTITUDE OF LABOR 33 
 
 ing more insistent. It has also been changing its 
 form. A century ago labor was fighting for the 
 mere right to organize, fighting almost as an out- 
 law in society, with government openly on the 
 opposing side. A century ago, in Great Britain, 
 unions of workers were illegal, and in America 
 the common law of conspiracy was a convenient 
 engine to condemn the first combinations to raise 
 wages. Out of a thousand confusions the issue 
 has now emerged clearer and sharper. The 
 separation and the consolidation of opposing in- 
 terests are more complete. And to-day labor 
 feels a new consciousness of power. It has wid- 
 ened its claims, its horizon is no longer limited 
 to the living wage. It demands a share in pros- 
 perity and a voice in the control of industry. 
 A study of the causes of strikes reveals a signifi- 
 cant change in recent years. In the early days 
 nearly all disputes were over questions of wages 
 or of hours. It was taken for granted by both 
 sides, apart from a few "extremists," that the 
 general regulation of the conditions of work was 
 a matter which pertained to the employer alone. 
 The business was his business, and it was his to 
 decide. But the attitude of labor on this point
 
 34 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 has been changing. For reasons which will be 
 mentioned later, this is more manifest in Europe 
 than in America. But labor in America is likely, 
 as a result of the war, to be more influenced than 
 before by the attitude of labor in other countries. 
 In any case the trend of industrial evolution is 
 inevitably in this direction. In America, too, the 
 signs of the times are being displayed to all who 
 have eyes to see. For example, the 2ist report 
 of the U. S. Department of Labor presents an 
 analysis of the causes of strikes and lockouts in 
 the period 1881-1905. During that period 43 
 per cent of the disputes were due to wages, 5.4 
 per cent to hours of work, and 19 per cent to ques- 
 tions connected with the recognition of the union. 
 But this last cause was growing more important 
 all the time, until by 1904 it had become as great 
 a source of disturbance as the wage question. 
 Similarly, in Canada, an analysis of the Report 
 on Strikes and Lockouts, 1901-16, published by 
 the Department of Labor, reveals the fact that in 
 disputes concerning wage increases the average 
 time-loss through strikes per employe affected was 
 19 days, in those concerning hours 24 days, but 
 in those concerning union-recognition it was actu-
 
 THE CHANGING ATTITUDE OF LABOR 35 
 
 ally 75 days. The disputes on this ground were 
 therefore, though fewer in number, much more 
 bitter. This is very significant. It is also very 
 significant that the most difficult "labor troubles" 
 which the U. S. Government faced during the 
 war, for example, in shipbuilding, were due to 
 the demand of the unions, and the resistance to 
 that demand, for recognition and a share in con- 
 trol. It has been so in Great Britain also, and 
 the British Government, as we shall see in a later 
 chapter, has been impelled to adopt a plan whose 
 uniqueness in the history of industry reveals more 
 clearly than anything else the new labor situation. 
 If these things happened in the green tree of 
 abundant employment at good wages, while the 
 great stimulus of patriotism reenforced the ordi- 
 nary advantages of industrial harmony, what shall 
 be done now in the dry, in the time of transition 
 and the loosening of bonds, in the great disturb- 
 ance of the readjustment to normal life, when 
 men's thoughts are unsettled, and their loyalties 
 again confused? In view of the gravity of this 
 situation it is ostrich foolishness to talk, as some 
 still talk, of the essential unity of the interests of 
 capital and labor, and to preach mutual good-
 
 3 6 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 will as if that alone would see us through. The 
 system of industry must be readjusted to meet 
 the need. The system is being attacked; here 
 as elsewhere reconstruction is demanded. The 
 foundations of common interest must be broad- 
 ened before the fair superstructure of goodwill 
 can be securely raised. 
 
 The war has destroyed many things ; it has not 
 destroyed, but rather nourished, the roots of in- 
 dustrial strife. For its material legacy is debt, 
 a vast array of claims on future production, which 
 will increase the consciousness of power in the 
 interest-receiving class and increase the conscious- 
 ness of burden in the wage-earning class. (This 
 in itself is a potent reason for the cancellation of 
 the war-debt, by the most rigorous levies, in as 
 short a period as possible.) And there remain, 
 not abated but surely intensified, the old deep 
 grievances of the sheer poverty that thwarts and 
 clogs and stunts so large a portion of the people. 
 There is still that insecurity of employment which 
 creates in men a haunting dread and a sense of 
 alienation, well justified by the bitter compulsory 
 demoralization of the out-of-work. There is, 
 more than ever, that contrast of wealth flaunting
 
 THE CHANGING ATTITUDE OF LABOR 37 
 
 its superfluities and poverty stinted of its barest 
 needs which impels not only the victim of the 
 latter but every honest man to ask, "Is it inevit- 
 able, is it just?" 
 
 These things are not new, but the world has 
 been changing in other ways. The age of the 
 machine has taught its lessons. By making men 
 more dependent on one another it made them 
 more equal in power as soon as they realized 
 what interdependence meant. By making men 
 masters of mechanism it gave them a new sense of 
 power, so that they have come to regard authority 
 with different eyes, and to question the tradition 
 accepted by their fathers. By bringing the ends 
 of the earth together, while it has built the paths 
 of commerce, it has broken the grooves of cus- 
 tom. Capital found undreamed-of resources, but 
 labor is finding undreamed-of solidarity. So it 
 was before the great war came to shake what re- 
 mained of the old sense of stability. 
 
 In such a time it is systems and not men that are 
 on trial. The old order changes; if it does not 
 yield place to a new order there is chaos. We so 
 cling to the old order, we so fear the unsettlement 
 of the new, that were the choice possible we would
 
 38 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 choose to stand still but the choice is no longer 
 possible. The demands of the new situation can- 
 not be ignored; they must be faced, in the inter- 
 est of the whole.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 
 
 Is labor a commodity? Labor is not, but is often 
 treated as a commodity. The heart of the is- 
 sue, labor as commodity v. labor as personal- 
 ity. The acceptance of the latter view as in- 
 volving "economic democracy." Its meaning 
 and necessity. Economic power and political 
 power. The place of management in industry. 
 
 WE have seen that the attitude of labor has 
 been changing, that its leaders demand not simply 
 better wages and shorter hours, not simply im- 
 proved conditions of work, not merely the protec- 
 tion against stress and accident which might be 
 given even to machines when they become pre- 
 cious enough to their owners but a new position 
 in industry, a new industrial order. What that 
 means I must now try to make explicit. 
 
 In a word, labor is demanding release from 
 the category of commodities. This is a demand 
 
 of tremendous importance. To understand it we 
 
 39
 
 40 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 must enquire into the meaning of that ambiguous 
 word "commodity." A commodity is literally a 
 convenience, something whose value lies in the 
 service it can render to others, in the use which 
 can be extracted from it, in its sole quality as 
 economic means. The protest of labor, writes 
 the brilliant author of National Guilds, "only be- 
 comes reasonable and irresistible when the work- 
 ers consciously base their claim upon the funda- 
 mental fact that to sell labor as a commodity is 
 a degradation; that to reduce the untiring efforts 
 of mankind to the level of cotton and coal is a 
 crime and sin against the Holy Ghost. ... A 
 commodity is something that has exchange value ; 
 labor is priceless, and, therefore, its value can- 
 not be expressed. To give it any parity with cop- 
 per or timber is to reduce it to a chattel in prac- 
 tice, though not in form, to chattel slavery." A 
 commodity is value-for-others only, a person is a 
 value-for-himself. A commodity is something at 
 the disposal of others, and thus marketed and 
 marketable simply for its emonomic qualities, as 
 a machine might be, as a slave or his labor 
 used to be. It was the fact that his labor was a 
 commodity which made the man a slave.
 
 THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 41 
 
 Now when the question is raised, Is labor a 
 commodity or not? the answer in strictness must 
 be, labor is not a commodity, but it may be treated 
 as such. A man may be worshiped as a god, 
 but that does not make him a god. A man may 
 be used as a beast of burden, but that does not 
 turn him into a beast of burden. Nor is labor 
 a commodity because it is in too great measure 
 treated as one. To its proper owner, to the 
 seller of labor, it never is a commodity, for he 
 knows that the manner of its use or disposal, no 
 less than the price of it, profoundly affects his 
 well-being, his personality, his selfhood and social 
 quality. He is under no temptation to "give it 
 parity" with copper or timber. Where his labor 
 goes he must go too. As it is used, so is he used. 
 It is not a separable property which a man may 
 sell and think about no more. It is the capacity of 
 a person, which can never be summed up in terms 
 of economic value. So the wage-earner, as he 
 grows conscious of the meaning of labor, does all 
 he can to prevent its being treated as a commodity. 
 
 Every Factory Act, every Workmen's Compen- 
 sation Act, every Industrial Insurance Act, every 
 Minimum Wage Act, records a further step in
 
 42 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 the social recognition of the truth that labor is 
 something else than a commodity. But the logic 
 which justifies these has a far wider application. 
 The same logic which forbids these obvious sacri- 
 fices of producer to product, which forbids that 
 the welfare of many shall in that direct way be 
 sacrificed to the wealth of few, requires the final 
 ordering of the whole system of production to 
 secure first the welfare of those who produce. 
 
 The treatment of labor as commodity was one 
 of the evils which sprang from the separate em- 
 bodiment of capital and labor in two distinct 
 classes, as the result of the great industrial pro- 
 cess which created modern capital with all its 
 dangerous and all its beneficent powers. This 
 separation led the buyer of labor to regard it as 
 simply one cost in production, to be, like any other 
 cost, reduced to the minimum. The drive of the 
 competitive system made it impossible for the 
 average employer to resist this tendency. It was 
 not, and is not, his fault, but the inevitable out- 
 come of the system. The resistance, however, 
 had to come mainly from the side of labor, and, 
 after long suffering from its effects, labor is now 
 attacking the system whose remorseless wheels
 
 THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 43 
 
 have been one great cause of its woe. It attacks 
 the system because it makes labor no more than 
 a means to be bought as cheaply as possible, a 
 means to be employed, used up, driven, cared for, 
 or scrapped according to its productive efficiency; 
 because it values the raiment produced above the 
 body that produces it, and profits more than per- 
 sons. In spite of the ameliorations which mod- 
 ern industrial legislation has brought, the com- 
 modity-treatment of labor is still too obvious. 
 
 Here in fact is the heart of the present issue, 
 Is labor to be treated as a commodity, to be bought 
 and sold like any other, subject to the vicissitudes 
 of a mere article of trade, even though it is, as 
 the old song says, the buying and selling of the 
 "lives of men"? Or is labor to grow into an 
 effective partner in industry, a citizen and not 
 merely a subject within that kingdom? For 
 there, we must realize, is the alternative to the 
 commodity-position. No mere schemes of con- 
 ciliation and arbitration, no superficial devices of 
 profit-sharing, no show of patriarchal solicitude 
 or philanthropic patronage, will heal this great 
 and growing division. Much ingenuity has been 
 spent on plans of arbitration and conciliation in
 
 44 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 industry, private and governmental, compulsory 
 or voluntary, with such intermediate forms as the 
 Canadian "Lemieux Act"; but they have gener- 
 ally disappointed the hopes of their authors. 
 The sweep of the conflict has been but little af- 
 fected, but little diverted, by these inadequate 
 breakwaters. The most ambitious of them, com- 
 pulsory arbitration, supported by Government, 
 is now as a normal method almost universally 
 condemned. Certain forms of conciliation have 
 received a greater but still very partial acceptance. 
 For all these plans are remedial by intention, not 
 preventive. They assume on the whole the exist- 
 ing order, and they assume a code of industrial 
 justice which does not yet exist. Their success 
 would prevent the creation of the new order for 
 which the more enlightened part of labor is striv- 
 ing; their failure is the best proof that a new 
 order is required. And it is instructive that in 
 general those conciliation schemes have worked 
 best which have not been mere temporary devices 
 to end disputes which had arisen, but methods for 
 bringing the management and the workers more 
 continuously together in consultation. 
 
 The most successful conciliation schemes, such
 
 THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 45 
 
 as the remarkable instances in the Women's Cloth- 
 ing Industries of New York City, have generally 
 been part of a wider scheme of organization. 
 And when they have broken down, as in part in 
 the above mentioned case and as, notably, in the 
 famous case of the Brooklands agreement in the 
 Lancashire cotton industry, it is because labor 
 demanded a greater share of control than capital 
 was willing to yield. 
 
 This points the direction towards which indus- 
 try must move. Whatever else may be neces- 
 sary it is clear that in the present temper of labor 
 there is not the slightest hope of permanent suc- 
 cess attaching to any plan which does not bring 
 management and workers to one council table, 
 not merely when disputes have already arisen, 
 but continuously concerning all those matters from 
 which disputes arise. Anything short of that 
 leaves labor still in the position of a commodity 
 save that, unlike all proper commodities, labor 
 resents the character so bestowed and proves its 
 inappropriateness by endless insurrection and un- 
 rest. To its seller, the wage-earner, labor always 
 has meant, must mean, personality life and the 
 conditions of living; to its buyer, the employer,
 
 46 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 it has meant, under the drive of the competitive 
 system and the pursuit of profits, only one raw 
 material of production. It was inevitable that the 
 wage-earner should come to insist, as soon as he 
 felt the power to do so, on his being regarded 
 from the former point of view. It is inevitable 
 that, if his power and his enlightenment grow, 
 he will insist upon it more and more. 
 
 Right down to the roots of the present discon- 
 tents the distinction between labor as commodity 
 and labor as personality pierces. It is the claim 
 of labor as personality which raises the issue above 
 mere class selfishness and places it on the broad 
 ground of social welfare. It is in the light of 
 that claim that the solution must be sought and 
 found. 
 
 II 
 
 Most of us are willing enough to do lip-service 
 to the creed that labor is not, and should not be 
 treated as, a commodity. Is it not, for example, 
 now written in the law of the United States "that 
 the labor of a human being is not a commodity 
 or article of commerce"? But few realize how 
 far that simple admission carries. For there is
 
 THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 4? 
 
 but one alternative to being treated as a com- 
 modity, which is being treated as a person. And 
 being treated as a person means being treated as 
 one possessed of mind and will, capable of being 
 educated, capable of being appealed to, capable 
 of being self-directed with a thousand other 
 capacities of which, for this purpose, the most im- 
 portant is that he works for the sake of living 
 (and as a part of living) and does not live for 
 the sake of working. In a word, the denial of the 
 labor-commodity principle is meaningless or else 
 it is the affirmation of the principle of "economic 
 democracy." 
 
 "Economic democracy" the new phrase, the 
 new demand, has to many a sinister, to others an 
 inspiring sound. There are many who proclaim 
 their faith in political democracy but stir uneasily 
 when for "political" the adjective "economic" is 
 substituted. The portentous word "Bolshevism" 
 rises to the lips. They conjure up the picture 
 of business taken over by a mob of workmen, 
 without knowledge, without subordination, with- 
 out responsibility or else run, with equal ineffici- 
 ency to a like disastrous end, by popularly elected 
 governments. If that were indeed the transla-
 
 48 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 tion of "economic democracy" the condemnation 
 would be just. Such experiments as have been 
 made in that form of economic "self-government" 
 have nearly all ended in shipwreck. But is that 
 the meaning of the demand? It is too wide- 
 spread, too vehement, to be evaded. It is too im- 
 portant to be misunderstood. Misunderstanding 
 creates dangers where they did not exist before, 
 whereas understanding may remove the dangers 
 that exist. 
 
 The real demand of the worker is simple and 
 unequivocal, however hard the translation into 
 practice may prove. He is rebelling against the 
 status of mere servant, as every intelligent being 
 does in his heart. If there is any authority in 
 the command, to do as we would be done by, it 
 condemns the flat denial of this demand. For it 
 is only those who possess this liberty who think 
 that others should not have or share it. 
 
 The growing need of the situation cannot be 
 better stated than in a passage from the Report 
 of the Commission appointed in 1917 to inquire 
 into the causes of industrial unrest in Great 
 Britain. This Commission was divided into eight 
 sections, each assigned to one section of the coun-
 
 THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 49 
 
 try. The eight reports are of one accord in their 
 recommendations, but the fullest and perhaps the 
 most interesting, was that of Division No. 7, pre- 
 sided over by Mr. D. L. Thomas, Chairman of 
 the Workers' Educational Association of Wales. 
 It contains the following: "We have repeatedly 
 referred to the spirit of antagonism that has 
 sprung up the hostility to capitalism and the 
 employing class on the one hand, and the too prev- 
 alent hostility to trade-unionism on the other. . . . 
 A new spirit of partnership is therefore essential. 
 The precise mechanism of that partnership, es- 
 pecially its details, can be left to be invented and 
 developed at a later stage under the influence of 
 the new spirit. It must be a growth from within, 
 not something imposed from without, and it will 
 doubtless take different forms in different indus- 
 tries and possibly in different localities also. But 
 there should be a clear perception at the start of 
 at least the leading principles on which that part- 
 nership or cooperation of the parties engaged 
 in industry is to be based. 
 
 "Two such principles, if we may so call them, 
 appear to us to be fundamental: 
 
 "(a) That the present system should be modi-
 
 50 
 
 fied in such a way as to identify the worker more 
 closely with the control of the industry in which 
 he is engaged. 
 
 "(b) That every employe should be guaran- 
 teed what we may call 'security of tenure' ; that is, 
 that no workman should be liable to be dismissed 
 except with the consent of his fellow-workmen as 
 well as his employer. 
 
 "The frank acceptance of these two princi- 
 ples would, we believe, constitute such a recogni- 
 tion of the personality of the worker as would 
 instantly appeal to the better and nobler side of 
 his nature, and would furnish a strong and steady 
 stimulus to the development of a sense of responsi- 
 bility within him. It would tend to remove the 
 impression which so widely prevails in the ranks 
 of labor that to the ordinary employer, labor is 
 but a commodity to be bought cheap in the same 
 way as its output is to be sold dear." 
 
 The "economic democracy" set forth in these 
 statesmanlike words is neither bogey nor idle 
 dream. It represents the ever-growing, ever 
 more vocal demand, not only of labor, but of all 
 who, impressed with the social and economic 
 wastefulness of the industrial system in the pres-
 
 ent, impressed with the ominous possibilities of 
 its continuance in the stranger future that is dawn- 
 ing, are seeking with resolute hope a better order 
 of things. 
 
 But it stands in sheer contrast to the common 
 reality of economic autocracy, which is nowhere 
 more flagrant or assertive than in America. To 
 anyone who is at all familiar with industrial con- 
 ditions this needs no proof, but it may be well to 
 quote the striking admission of it contained in the 
 recent Report of the President's Mediation Com- 
 mission: 
 
 "While not expressed in so many words," says 
 the Commission, speaking specifically of the con- 
 ditions in the Arizona mining district, "the domi- 
 nant feeling of protest was that the industry was 
 conducted upon an autocratic basis. The workers 
 did not have representation in determining those 
 conditions of their employment which vitally af- 
 fected their lives as well as the company's out- 
 put. Many complaints were, in fact, found by 
 the Commission to be unfounded, but there was 
 no safeguard against injustice except the say-so 
 of one side of the controversy. In none of the 
 mines were there direct dealings between com-
 
 52 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 panics and unions. In some mines grievance com- 
 mittees had been recently established, but they 
 were distrusted by the workers as subject to com- 
 pany control, and, in any event, were not effective, 
 because the final determination of every issue was 
 left with the company. In place of orderly pro- 
 cesses of adjustment, workers were given the 
 alternative of submission or strike. . . . 
 
 "The men demanded the removal of certain 
 existing grievances as to wages, hours, and work- 
 ing conditions, but the specific grievances were, 
 on the whole, of relatively minor importance. 
 The crux of the conflict was the insistence of the 
 men that the right and the power to obtain just 
 treatment were in themselves basic conditions of 
 employment, and that they should not be compelled 
 to depend for such just treatment on the benevo- 
 lence or uncontrolled will of the employers." 
 
 Point is given to these remarks by the further 
 statement of the Commission that, in a time of 
 special urgency, one hundred million pounds of 
 copper were lost in the Arizona producing region 
 through wide-spread strikes lasting over three 
 months. 
 
 The present system is in its very nature an au-
 
 THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 53 
 
 tocracy. Those who own determine essentially 
 the lot of those who work, for the management 
 represents the interest of those who own. It 
 is in that interest that wage-rates are fixed and, 
 beyond certain minimal determinations, the con- 
 ditions of work appointed. Certain rates, by 
 piece or time, are offered. The wage-earner can- 
 not judge their "fairness," for he is ignorant of 
 the complex machinery of production, in particu- 
 lar of the relation of costs, of which his labor is 
 counted part, to returns. He has no opportu- 
 nity to learn. He lacks education and often leis- 
 ure. Above all, his representatives cannot enter 
 the council chamber where policy is determined. 
 Yet that policy concerns him vitally, for on it 
 may depend his standard of living, his chance of 
 employment, his safety from, or subjection to that 
 excessive driving which wears out life. When 
 new methods and processes are introduced and 
 the wage-rates altered, he cannot estimate the 
 "fairness" of the change. The great majority of 
 employers believe, very often with truth, that 
 their primary object in business, the making of 
 profits, is furthered by low wage-rates. Is it not 
 inevitable, if the knowledge of the conditions of
 
 54 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 production is exclusively theirs and the control 
 over these conditions is vested in them alone, that 
 employers are subject to constant temptation to ex- 
 ploit labor, and workers subject to constant dep- 
 rivation of what, on any theory of distribution, 
 can be regarded as a "fair" return for their labor? 
 On the other hand when labor is strong enough to 
 exact its own terms, it feels, under these condi- 
 tions, no responsibility to accommodate these to 
 the welfare of the industry. Hence endless fric- 
 tion and harassment, leading towards a ruinous 
 impasse. 
 
 Initiative, the condition of progress, and au- 
 thority, the condition of order, must be secured 
 under any system, democratic or autocratic. The 
 analogy of political democracy holds perfectly 
 here. Men shuddered at the chaos which would 
 spring from the granting to all men of the ele- 
 mentary rights of political citizenship but in 
 truth chaos sprang instead from the withholding 
 of these. Imperfect as such democracy has been, 
 it has not been the scramble of mob-rule nor yet 
 the "cult of incompetence." (Was incompetence 
 ever more cultivated than in the Russian autoc- 
 racy? Competence depends on the general
 
 THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 55 
 
 standard of intelligence rather than the form of 
 government.) For all its incompleteness democ- 
 racy has not lacked direction or power. And no 
 sword of Damocles is suspended over its head. 
 
 As in the political, so in the economic sphere, 
 it is true that no permanent social relationships 
 can be built on servitude, on anything finally save 
 the cooperation of willing partners not equal 
 partnership, for men differ in capacity and there- 
 fore must differ in authority, but such partnership 
 as will allow to all the choice, in due relation to 
 others, of the disposal and direction of whatever 
 powers they possess. This will come in the end, 
 for there is always something resistless in the con- 
 scious demand of any majority of men. It has 
 proved so in respect of political government, 
 though the world has passed, to learn it, through 
 centuries of confusion and bloody strife. Must 
 it be so in industry also, or do men learn only 
 from the suffering imposed by blind resistance? 
 
 Uncontrolled or irresponsible power is the grav- 
 est danger of organized society. It is an inher- 
 ent weakness of human nature everywhere that 
 uncontrolled power over others breeds wanton 
 upliftedness, the hubris with whose dire conse-
 
 56 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 quences the ancient Greeks were so mightily im- 
 pressed. As surely as children are spoiled by 
 deference, so are men by power for the use of 
 which they need render no account. It is a fail- 
 ing even more conspicuous in those who have 
 themselves risen to such power from an inferior 
 station, in the "self-made" man who has left the 
 ranks of labor, in the foreman who has been 
 chosen to petty autocracy over his fellows. Not 
 infrequently the latter, uneducated both generally 
 and in respect to the responsibilities of his particu- 
 lar office, 
 
 "Dress'd in a little brief authority, 
 Plays such fantastic tricks," 
 
 as breed resentment and smoldering rebellion. 
 With his brusque commands, his scorn of eluci- 
 dations, and his constant threat of "firing," such 
 a man becomes to the worker the concrete embodi- 
 ment of the oppression he calls "capitalism." 
 That men's livelihood should be, without appeal, 
 at the mercy of the "choleric word" of such a 
 tyrant reveals an autocratic condition of industry 
 beyond justification to-day. It is always danger- 
 ous when men hold irresponsible power over their
 
 THE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 57 
 
 fellows, whether to make their laws or to domi- 
 nate their working lives. These are times when 
 there is surely no need to insist upon that simple 
 and terribly demonstrated truth. "Economic de- 
 mocracy," in the sense above explained, is an in- 
 evitable concomitant or part of that political de- 
 mocracy which, whatever its difficulties and imper- 
 fections, seems the only way out of the blood- 
 stained wilderness into which power divorced from 
 responsibility has led the world. 
 
 Men are coming to realize the dependence of 
 political power on economic power. At one time 
 they regarded the vote as the key to the economic 
 situation, and the extension of political democracy 
 was fervently advocated and bitterly opposed on 
 that account. But neither the hopes nor the fears 
 aroused by the principle of political democracy 
 have been fulfilled by its performance. The 
 wage-earner got the vote, but when secured it 
 lost its magic. He felt no better off than before. 
 The right to vote became a futility to the man who 
 could not thereby establish the right to a living 
 wage, even the right to work. Consequently 
 there was growing up before the war, among 
 certain leaders of la'bor, a deep disappointment
 
 58 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 with the methods and results of ordinary politics. 
 One English labor daily constantly spoke of the 
 House of Commons as the House of Pretense. 
 There was growing a conviction that salvation 
 must come, not from the presence of labor in the 
 councils of the State, but more from its presence 
 in the councils of industry. It was coming to be 
 felt that economic power dominated political 
 power, rather than vice-versa; that those who con- 
 trolled finance and commerce and manufacture in- 
 evitably controlled the State also. In France, 
 always prone to extremes of doctrine, this feeling 
 resulted in syndicalism. But syndicalism combines 
 two principles which have no necessary relation. 
 It is at once a theory of industrial government 
 and a program for its attainment. The theory 
 might be sound, wholly or in part, even though 
 the program stood condemned. And in fact the 
 program revealed, by contrast, the very necessity 
 of political action. For the only alternative syn- 
 dicalism could offer, in its reaction from politics, 
 was direct action by the "syndicates" or unions 
 of workers, the seizure of economic control 
 through sabotage, violence, and the general strike. 
 This is destructive anarchy, not constructive
 
 59 
 
 democracy. But a saner form of the doctrine 
 has been spreading in other lands. It is evidenced 
 by the decline of the older type of State-socialism. 
 The simpler socialism which wanted everything 
 controlled from a single governing center in the 
 State, which would "nationalize" everything and 
 give a national government direct and complete 
 control over it all, has lost its glamor. Central- 
 ization under government has revealed its dangers, 
 and experience of nationalization has not been 
 such as to make labor desire its indefinite exten- 
 sion over industry. Labor would apply the prin- 
 ciple of nationalization further than it now ex- 
 tends, to industries like transportation and min- 
 ing which are the basis of all others; but even 
 there it is beginning to demand decentralization 
 and joint control as the necessary complement of 
 the process. A growing minority accept the doc- 
 trine of the "guildsmen," that State-socialism, as 
 formerly advocated, is but guaranteed capitalism, 
 and "nationalization," as formerly understood, 
 but the ultimate policy of endangered capitalism, 
 the "capitalist's last card." 
 
 The same tendency to demand not State control 
 but a direct share in industrial direction is evi-
 
 60 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 denced in more concrete ways. It is evidenced 
 by the growing insistence of the unions on recogni- 
 tion. It is evidenced by the breakdown of many 
 promising schemes for industrial peace which made 
 no provision for labor's sharing in the direct con- 
 trol of its working conditions. Particularly in 
 England, always in the van of industrial evolu- 
 tion, is it growing too clear for misinterpretation. 
 It is evidenced by the growth of industrial as 
 distinct from craft unionism. It is evidenced by 
 the growth of the "shop-stewards' movement," 
 particularly in the machinists' trades. The sig- 
 nificance of the shop-steward, who from being a 
 mere collector of trade union dues in the shop 
 has come to challenge the old-line leaders, is that 
 he represents industrial as distinct from craft 
 unionism. This is a difference not merely of 
 structure but of ideal. Under the old craft union- 
 ism a dozen different organizations might control 
 the workers in a single plant, whereas under in- 
 dustrial unionism the workshop is itself the unit 
 of organization. It is obvious that the latter 
 type is much more in harmony with the principle 
 of direct control. Again it is evidenced by the 
 institution of "works committees," as a representa-
 
 live agency for bringing workers and management 
 together. It is noteworthy that a number of 
 large English employers, such as Hans Renold, 
 Ltd., Barr and Stroud, Rowntree, and others, 
 have welcomed these committees and regard them 
 as a great aid both to production and to harmony. 
 Finally, it is evidenced by the reception accorded 
 to the Whitley Report and its adoption by the 
 British Government, of which more anon. 
 
 Because the world has changed the place of 
 labor must also change. It is not generally re- 
 alized that the conditions of modern industry make 
 it necessary that the worker should find a new 
 source of interest in his working life. The days 
 of the craft are gone, and with them the old spirit 
 of craftsmanship and the particular satisfaction 
 it afforded. The individual worker can no longer 
 as a rule look upon the finished product as the 
 child of his hands. His individuality is not re- 
 vealed to him in the product, one of whose thou- 
 sand mechanical processes he has controlled. He 
 has lost that specific interest forever. A new 
 interest has become necessary, correspondent to 
 his new function. Just as general skill is in the 
 machine age taking the place of specific skill, so
 
 62 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 must a general interest be found to take the place 
 of the lost specific interest. This can be found 
 only in the sense of the worker that he is an ac- 
 tive participant and partner in the whole process 
 of production within which his own work falls. 
 
 Where would this process of industrial "de- 
 mocratization" end? No man can tell. In hu- 
 man affairs only the next step ahead is clear, and 
 that is clear only because it is necessary. One 
 immediate consequence, however, would seem to 
 be that in this development management must 
 grow into a separate industrial function, becom- 
 ing management in the strict sense of the term, 
 the function of securing the most efficient adapta- 
 tion of means to end, of productive power to prod- 
 uct. The proper function of management, as Mr. 
 Webb points out in The Works Manager of To- 
 day, is the reduction of the net cost of produc- 
 tion. This net cost, however, cannot be estimated 
 aright unless we recognize the worker as in some 
 sense a partner, one for whose sake production 
 is taking place. To reduce costs at his cost is not 
 the function of management, nor would it ever 
 seem to be such if labor were represented in the
 
 JHE MODERN CLAIMS OF LABOR 63 
 
 direction of industry as well as capital. Manage- 
 ment would then appear in its true light, and be 
 relieved from the distractions and the embarrass- 
 ments inspired by its dependence on capital alone.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE WIDENING OF THE IDEA OF LABOR 
 
 The conflict in the ranks of labor. Wage-earner 
 or producer which does "labor" signify? 
 Leon Tro.tzky and Arthur Henderson. Ca- 
 tastrophic or progressive revolution? The 
 soil of catastrophic revolution. American 
 labor's apathy to the broader questions of 
 policy. The advance of the British Labor 
 Party. 
 
 THERE is an internal conflict proceeding in the 
 van of the labor movement whose issue will have 
 momentous consequences not only on the direction 
 of that movement but also on the character of our 
 whole social structure. It springs from the funda- 
 mental question, What is Labor? Whom shall 
 it include ? Two opposing views are vehemently 
 advocated. The one party would limit the idea 
 of "labor" to the class of wage-earners, exclud- 
 ing the "brain-workers," the administrators of in- 
 dustry, the technicians, the professional workers 
 
 of all kinds. To this party all these are but the 
 
 64
 
 WIDENING THE IDEA OF LABOR 65 
 
 instruments, conscious or unconscious, of its enemy, 
 capitalism. On the other hand there is a party 
 which would extend the idea of labor to include 
 all who in any real sense can be called workers 
 or producers, whether they work with brains or 
 hands (though that is a poor enough distinction, 
 since nobody works with brain alone or hand 
 alone), whether they sit at desks or toil in fields 
 or factories, whether they wear fine linen or over- 
 alls. With either view goes a corresponding 
 policy. The former party rejects all compro- 
 mises, detests all devices for "industrial harmony" 
 as props of a vicious system, dulling in the worker 
 the sense of its iniquity, and proclaims the revo- 
 lution. The latter party would emulate the tide 
 and not the storm, advancing foot by foot, gaining 
 ground wherever opportunity is given, and accept- 
 ing the orderly agencies of social and industrial 
 change, the law-making power, the taxing power, 
 the bargaining power of organized labor, as the 
 means whereby its aims shall be achieved. It 
 shuns the counsels of violence, its most forward 
 minds perceiving how insecure, how uncontrol- 
 lable, how subject to reaction and counter-over- 
 throw, are the results of social convulsion. The
 
 66 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 goal may be revolution none the less, but revolu- 
 tion progressively and not catastrophically to be 
 attained. 
 
 The following statements, explanatory of the at- 
 titude of two great protagonists of these opposing 
 doctrines, may suffice to suggest the supreme im- 
 portance of this issue. 
 
 Leon Trotzky, in his striking manifesto on 
 "The Bolsheviki and World-Peace," looks to a 
 great after-war proletarian uprising. "Even 
 though the vanguard," he says, "of the working 
 class knew in theory that Might is the mother of 
 Right, still their political thinking was completely 
 permeated by the spirit of opportunism, of adap- 
 tation to bourgeois legalism. Now they are learn- 
 ing from the teachings of facts to despise this 
 legalism and tear it down. . . . The possessing 
 classes, to their consternation, will soon have to 
 recognize this change. A working class that has 
 been through the school of war will feel the need 
 of using the language of force as soon as the first 
 serious obstacle faces them within their own coun- 
 try. 'Necessity knows no law,' the workers will 
 cry when the attempt is made to hold them back 
 at the command of the bourgeois law. And pov-
 
 WIDENING THE IDEA OF LABOR 67 
 
 erty, the terrible poverty that pervails during this 
 war and will continue after its close, will be of a 
 sort to force the masses to violate many a bour- 
 geois law. . . . This must lead to profound po- 
 litical conflicts, which, ever-widening and deepen- 
 ing, may take on the character of a social revolu- 
 tion, the course and outcome of which no one, of 
 course, can now foresee." For his own country, 
 and with his own aid, it did not require the end 
 of the war to bring fulfillment to that menacing 
 prophecy. 
 
 Arthur Henderson, whose understanding of the 
 necessities of the Russian situation, as it existed 
 in the summer of 1917, led to his resignation from 
 the British cabinet soon afterwards, as leader of 
 the British Labor Party, issued a pronouncement 
 of a very different kind. In an article on "The 
 Outlook for Labor" he put forward the new doc- 
 trine of his party on this subject. "No one," he 
 says, "who is engaged in productive work, whether 
 of hand or brain, will be excluded from the new 
 comradeship which we are organizing; and as for 
 the non-productive classes, we hardly expect that 
 any number of them will want to join a party 
 movement which seeks to make their parasitical
 
 68 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 existence impossible. The Labor Party, in short, 
 is the party of the producers of the workers, in 
 the widest sense of that noble word: of all the 
 people, without distinction of class or sex, who 
 labor to enrich the community." Inevitably, a 
 party so interpreting the scope of labor rejects 
 the facile theory of blind revolution, and projects 
 a program of reconstruction, drastic but attain- 
 able only by orderly process, by appeal and educa- 
 tion, by the winning of a voting majority, and 
 thus by the seizure of the constitutional machinery 
 of change. 
 
 When the alternative is offered, nearly all men 
 prefer peaceful to violent ways. The long-suf- 
 fering of men is far more remarkable than their 
 rebelliousness. It is only when despair seizes 
 their hearts, when oppression reveals them im- 
 potent or destitution renders them reckless, when, 
 in truth, they "have nothing to lose but their 
 chains," that they surrender to the gospel of vio- 
 lence. All the catastrophic creeds of insurrec- 
 tionary labor, Marxism, syndicalism, Bolshevism, 
 I. W. W.ism, are reactions from intolerable condi- 
 tions. Thus the revolutionary syndicalism of the 
 first decade of the twentieth century was born out
 
 WIDENING THE IDEA OF LABOR 69 
 
 of the traditional weakness of French trade- 
 unionism and the traditional repressiveness of the 
 French Government, illuminated, for example, by 
 such experiences as the suppression of the school- 
 teachers' union and the breaking of the great rail- 
 way strike by the perilously dramatic coup of an 
 ex-socialist premier who called the strikers to the 
 colors. Bolshevism was made possible and 
 necessary by outrageous tyranny, incurable cor- 
 ruption, and infinite misery. I. W. W.ism re- 
 flects the resolution of despair which animates, 
 under the harrow of ruthless exploitation, certain 
 portions of American unskilled labor. It springs 
 up where unionism is most helpless, among aliens 
 and homeless migrants, among miserably paid 
 mill-hands and railway laborers who see how 
 can they? no other means of escape from the 
 darkness of the pit which our society has digged 
 for them. This is the judgment of such able 
 investigators as the late Professor Carleton W. 
 Parker and the members of the President's Media- 
 tion Commission whose report has already been 
 cited. For all so situated the idea of labor is, of 
 necessity, narrowed until it applies only to the 
 "proletarian," to the "wage-victim." Thus nar-
 
 70 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 rowed, it stimulates a program of catastrophic 
 overthrow, for what other way is open to a group 
 so bereft of status, so poor in resources, and so 
 completely cut off from all the springs of power? 
 
 Some of those who are loudest in their condem- 
 nation of labor insurrection are themselves most 
 responsible for its growth, by blocking the legiti- 
 mate avenues of union activity. Thus the Presi- 
 dent's Mediation Commission says: "This un- 
 compromising attitude on the part of employers 
 has reaped for them an organization of destruc- 
 tive rather than constructive radicalism. The 
 I. W. W. is filling the vacuum created by the 
 operators. The red card is carried by large num- 
 bers throughout the Pacific Northwest. Efforts 
 to rectify evils through the trade-union movement 
 have largely failed because of the small headway 
 trade unions are able to make. Operators claim 
 that the nature of the industry presents inherent 
 obstacles to unionization. But a dominant reason 
 is to be found in the bitter attitude of the oper- 
 ators towards any organization among their em- 
 ployes." 
 
 Here we have merely one manifestation of that 
 age-old phenomenon,the spirit of humanity revolt-
 
 WIDENING THE IDEA OF LABOR 71 
 
 ing against servitude to man. The attempt to 
 crush these movements by frontal attack, by de- 
 nunciation, by imprisonment and fine, by suppres- 
 sion and counter-violence, will never succeed. 
 There is but one way to avoid revolution, and 
 that is to change the conditions, the conditions 
 represented in this country by Lowell and Law- 
 rence and Fall River, by the mining camps of 
 Arizona and the lumber camps of Louisiana and 
 California, the conditions which breed, in all who 
 are not reduced by them to the enduring stupidity 
 of oxen, the revolutionary mind. 
 
 The best illustration of the relation between a 
 narrowed idea of labor and the catastrophic 
 method (as the only alternative to impotence) is 
 found in the clear-cut principle of Marxism, the 
 great inspiration of all such movements. It 
 draws a hard-and-fast line between the "prole- 
 tariat," the wage-earning class, and the "bour- 
 geoisie," the capitalistic class. Its method is the 
 "class-war," and therefore it seeks to sharpen the 
 class-consciousness of the wage-earner. It pours 
 contempt on all "opportunism," all moderation, 
 all reformism, for these weaken the sense of class- 
 distinction, the necessary lever of revolution. It
 
 72 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 would reverse the dominance of classes, by the 
 triumph of the proletariat. That is the revolu- 
 tion, and beyond that it scarcely looks. It com- 
 bines simplicity of doctrine, the all-sufficient divi- 
 sion of mankind into the exploiters and the ex- 
 ploited, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, with 
 the mysticism of the Hegelian dialectic. The 
 simplicity and the mysticism are alike misleading, 
 but they exercise together a powerful appeal; 
 for the mystic element, with its suggestion of an 
 uninvestigated land of promise beyond the revolu- 
 tion, cloaks the weakness of the logic. 
 
 It is well to remember that this doctrine arose 
 in the Germany of the mid-nineteenth century, 
 which was carrying over into the industrial field 
 the sharp class distinctions of feudalism. Marx 
 himself was not a "proletarian," but a "bour- 
 geois" of protestant Jewish origin, a detached 
 and ironic personality seeking with bitter insight 
 the means of overthrowing the existing regime. 
 Wherever class domination is strongly entrenched 
 behind law and usage, in particular wherever the 
 middle class is subservient, as in Germany, or in- 
 significant, as in Russia, there is the proper soil 
 for the seed of Marxism. Hence its origin and
 
 WIDENING THE IDEA OF LABOR 73 
 
 growth in Germany hence its fateful power in 
 the second Russian revolution. But Western de- 
 mocracy is a different soil, even though the same 
 weeds of industrial exploitation flourish therein, 
 and the attempts to transplant the Marxist doc- 
 trine have had relatively little success. On the 
 contrary, there is reason for holding that the 
 failure of the once powerful Knights of Labor 
 was in great measure due to the attempt of this 
 organization to build a labor class consciousness, 
 though not on Marxist principles. There are 
 signs that more recent industrial developments, 
 the consolidation of large-scale business and the 
 completer fixation of the wage-earning status as 
 free lands become a memory of the past, are 
 working towards the sharpened distinction be- 
 tween "labor" and "capital." But other de- 
 velopments, in especial the newer immigration, 
 have been placing effectual obstacles in the way 
 of solidarity. To-day the solidarity of the dom- 
 inant labor force in America is neither that of 
 class-conscious proletarianism nor yet that inspired 
 by the sense of the common interest of all pro- 
 ducers : it is merely that of group-conscious union- 
 ized skilled labor. The great body of labor so
 
 74 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 inspired, in its too exclusive devotion to immedi- 
 ate ends, does not yet understand that here are 
 the two final alternatives for labor, the limitation 
 of the idea to the class of waga-earners (which 
 indeed for American labor would be an extension 
 rather than a limitation) or else the inclusion 
 within the idea of the whole class of producers. 
 In the former case it must move within a circle 
 of narrow aims unless it breaks through by the 
 blind violence of mere numbers; embracing the 
 latter alternative it envisages, makes /possible, 
 and prepares an industrial order fit for a real de- 
 mocracy, maintained by the self-government of 
 those who produce instead of by the autocracy of 
 those who own. 
 
 In Great Britain labor has been moving to this 
 latter conception, in spite of the practical difficul- 
 ties which it involves. It has opened its ranks 
 freely to all who accept its platform, whether or 
 not they are enrolled in trade unions or otherwise 
 directly associated with wage-earning. The line it 
 draws is not between the wage-earner and all the 
 rest, but between the active worker or producer on 
 the one hand and the mere "profiteer" and the pas- 
 sive recipient of rent and interest on the other. It
 
 WIDENING THE IDEA OF LABOR 75 
 
 welcomes the extension of unionism to the profes- 
 sions, to the civil service, to clerks and all manner 
 of employes of all grades. Its prophets are be- 
 ginning to see the disastrous effects of having the 
 technical ability and administrative skill on the op- 
 posing side. They are beginning to see that the 
 side which can win the brains of industry can win 
 the battle. The effect of the war, with its enor- 
 mous imposition of new burdens on all producers, 
 causing a great part of the results of their labor to 
 pass over, in the form of interest on war bonds, to 
 non-producers, will make easier the new appeal. 
 "Over this issue," says the manifesto of the Brit- 
 ish Labor Party already referred to, "of how 
 the financial burden of the war is to be borne, 
 and how the necessary revenue is to be raised, the 
 greatest political battles will be fought. In this 
 matter the Labor Party claims the support of four- 
 fifths of the whole nation, for the interests of the 
 clerk, the teacher, the doctor, the minister of re- 
 ligion, the average retail shopkeeper and trader, 
 and all the mass of those living on small incomes 
 are identical with those of the artisan.'* 
 
 While labor in the States has yet scarcely 
 reached the parting of the ways, it is significant
 
 76 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 that labor in Canada, closely associated as it is 
 in temper and organization with the former, is 
 choosing the greater alternative. It has recently 
 approved of the formation of a Labor Party of 
 Canada, and this party, already alive and active, 
 has resolved to admit individual members who, 
 whether members of unions or not, subscribe to 
 its constitution and program ; while it proclaims as 
 its general object the promotion of the "politi- 
 cal, social and economic emancipation of the peo- 
 ple, and more particularly of those who depend 
 directly upon their own exertions by hand or brain 
 for the means of life." 
 
 This seems the inevitable road for labor in 
 lands where political democracy is already some- 
 what advanced. By following that road British 
 and Canadian labor are moving to take a greater 
 part than before in the determination of the life 
 of the community. (But see footnote p. 161.)
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE WASTE OF THE PRESENT INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 
 
 The meaning of waste. The waste of industrial 
 strife and of the disharmony between manage- 
 ment and workers. The universal waste of 
 competition. The waste of unemployment. 
 The waste of labor-turnover. The loss of 
 educationl opportunity. The lack of voca- 
 tional guidance and of the adaptation of work 
 to aptitude. The waste involved in working 
 conditions, especially of women and children. 
 The waste of the disparity of wealth. Wealth 
 and well-being. 
 
 NEARLY everybody seems willing to admit to- 
 day that some change in the conditions of indus- 
 try is both possible and desirable. But by what 
 means? And how much? Some would be con- 
 tent to patch up the old industrial structure a 
 little cement and paint, they think, will serve- 
 while others want it rebuilt, reconstructed, even 
 from the foundations. Our attitude to this ques- 
 tion, so far as it is not determined by the sense 
 
 77
 
 78 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 of our immediate interest, will depend on our 
 appreciation of the amount of waste involved in 
 the existing system, and then on the extent of 
 our belief in the feasibility of a system which 
 would avoid that waste. To understand the 
 problem we must begin by realizing the significance 
 of the wastefulness which characterizes our mod- 
 ern industry. 
 
 By waste I mean all that loss, of potential 
 material resources, of potential energy and skill, 
 and finally of potential well-being, due to human 
 mismanagement, disharmony, and lack of the in- 
 telligent direction of means to ends. A system 
 might be, by comparison, very productive and at 
 the same time very wasteful. The present in- 
 dustrial system is many times more productive 
 than the old domestic system, and yet it is, as 
 a system, excessively and wickedly wasteful. 
 
 We are apt to think too narrowly on this sub- 
 ject. One obvious form of waste arrests our 
 attention, and we seldom realize that it is only 
 one, and far from the most serious, of many. 
 I mean the loss due to the direct strife of labor 
 and capital, in particular the loss caused by strikes 
 and lockouts. According to the Report of the
 
 WASTE OF THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 79 
 
 Department of Labor already referred to, there 
 occurred in the United States during the period 
 1881-1905, 38,303 strikes and lockouts, lasting 
 on an average 31 days, involving 199,954 estab- 
 lishments and 7,444,954 employes apart from 
 those incidentally thrown out of work. In Can- 
 ada, for the five years 1911-15 the time-loss 
 from strikes and lockouts is given officially as 
 nearly five million working days. But these losses, 
 well worth consideration as they are, shrink to in- 
 significance in the sum total of industrial wastage. 
 The whole time-loss amounts to no more than 
 the time devoted to a few holidays in the 
 year. It is little, indeed, compared with the in- 
 direct loss caused by the mutual distrust of work- 
 ers and management. For Great Britain, Mr. 
 Sidney Webb has estimated that, as a consequence 
 of the standardization of product, the use of auto- 
 matic machinery wherever possible, of team work 
 and specialization among the workers, and other 
 changes made possible for the most part by the 
 abrogation of trade union rules, "the 15,000 or 
 20,000 establishments, large or small, in every 
 conceivable industry, with which the Ministry 
 of Munitions, the Board of Trade, the War Trade
 
 8o LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 Department, and the Admiralty have been in 
 touch, are now turning out, on an average, more 
 than twice the product per operative employed 
 that they did before the war; whilst, assuming 
 the same standard rates of wages, grade by grade, 
 the labor-cost works out considerably lower than 
 under the old system." This is not, as some 
 simple-minded people imagine, a condemnation 
 of trade-union rules under the old system; it is a 
 condemnation of the system and not of the rules, 
 for the latter were evolved by the workers, as the 
 result of bitter experience, to protect them against 
 the grinding wheels of competitive industry. The 
 irony of the situation lies in this, that the worker 
 in his not unjustified fear of immediate competi- 
 tive evils, is driven to resist the very process which 
 makes possible the abolition of the poverty under 
 which he suffers, to wit, the increase of his own 
 productive power. 
 
 In truth, the most pervasive cause of waste is 
 the competitive organization or disorganization 
 of industry. The old-fashioned theory of the 
 excelling virtue of competition the "soul of 
 trade," the "fly-wheel of industry," the leveler, 
 the equalizer, the spring of inventiveness, the safe-
 
 WASTE OF THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 81 
 
 guard of the consumer, the determinant of prog- 
 ress a theory already discarded by the success- 
 ful man of business received a further deadly 
 blow when the urgency of the war compelled every 
 belligerent nation to limit, for the sake of clear 
 economy, this wasteful conflict, bringing each es- 
 sential industry into the form of a quasi-coopera- 
 tive whole. This is not the place to examine in 
 detail the dangers and the advantages of such a 
 course. I believe that there is no way back, and 
 that the lauded benefits of free competition, which 
 it so very partially achieved, must now be sought, 
 and may be far better secured, by enlightened co- 
 operation. Of this I am confident, that only by 
 the way of coordination is it possible to abolish 
 the more deadly forms of waste which have char- 
 acterized our modern industry. Under "free" 
 competition, one or two rapacious employers can 
 set a standard which the rest must follow; under 
 it worker and employer alike are at the mercy 
 of every chance fluctuation of demand and supply; 
 under it an inevitable reserve of unemployed labor 
 is constantly reducing the mass of workers to the 
 subsistence level and driving a large proportion 
 of them below the line of poverty. Most of the
 
 82 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 further wastes which we must now review are 
 products of the system of "free" competition. 
 
 In saying this I do not mean to suggest that 
 competition as a motive and stimulus in industry 
 can or should be abolished. The waste we are 
 considering is due, strictly speaking, not to the 
 presence of competition but to the absence of or- 
 ganization. The "free" competition of workers 
 or of employers means that they are not intelli- 
 gent enough, or strong enough, to cooperate in 
 pursuit of their common interest. They are de- 
 feating their respective ends by competing among 
 themselves, and the service of the whole com- 
 munity is not, as I believe, best fulfilled in the proc- 
 ess. The old theory minimized the common inter- 
 est. Under "free" competition what one loses 
 another gains but not to the extent of the loss of 
 the former. There is always a residuum of waste, 
 and when the competition is for the mere means 
 of livelihood the waste is so great as to be disas- 
 trous. 
 
 If the question is raised, "How then can we 
 distinguish between the competition which is bene- 
 ficial and that which is harmful to society?" the 
 answer, in general, is simple. Competition as at
 
 WASTE OF THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 83 
 
 substitute for cooperation is wasteful, competi- 
 tion within a cooperative order is a highly neces- 
 sary stimulus. Competition as a substitute for 
 cooperation, as for example that of unorganized 
 workers to obtain work, means a certain frustra- 
 tion by each of all the rest in the pursuit of an 
 object or interest which all of the qualified appli- 
 cants can or should be able to obtain.: Competi- 
 tion within a system of cooperation, say competi- 
 tion for promotion, if conducted on the basis of 
 relative merits, belongs to a quite different order^ 
 In this case the limit of common interest has al- 
 ready been reached. Of two competitors for ad- 
 vancement to a single office, only one can possibljr 
 achieve his end. Here competition is both neces- 
 sary and beneficial. 
 
 The truth that disorganization fof which cei*- 
 tain types of competition are a concomitant) and 
 not competition as such as the enemy is reenforced 
 when we remember that the relation) between 
 workers and employers, whether haphazard or 
 well-ordered, is not a competitive one at all. Em- 
 ployers compete with employers and workers with 
 workers, but employers do not compete with work- 
 ers. These two cooperate ^more or less will-
 
 84 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 ingly, but always necessarily) in production, and 
 they bargain in respect of the return from their 
 productive cooperation. In both regards disor- 
 ganization is in general profound, and the conse- 
 quent waste incalculable. 
 
 Consider, again, the waste due to unemployment 
 and underemployment. The imperious demands 
 of warfare have reduced unemployment to a mini- 
 mum unknown before, but always in normal times 
 there is a certain percentage of unemployed, vary- 
 ing with the season of the year. In periods of 
 depression it reaches catastrophic proportions, 
 and hasty palliatives are adopted to relieve the 
 more obvious cases of distress. Since most people 
 are quite unaware of the magnitude of this evil, 
 it may be well to give some figures. In 1905, ac- 
 cording to the U. S. Federal Census of Manufac- 
 turers, the number of wage-earners in employ- 
 ment fluctuated from 7,017^138 in one month to 
 4,599,091 in another. In the winter of 191415, 
 there were, according to the investigation under- 
 taken by the Metropolitan Life Assurance Com- 
 pany, 442,000 persons unemployed in New York 
 City. In the same winter the Ontario Commis- 
 sion on Unemployment reported some 30,000
 
 WASTE OF THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 85 
 
 unemployed in that province. It is hard to con- 
 ceive the fearful human significance of figures 
 such as these. And it is all sheer waste, waste of 
 so much productive power and therefore of ma- 
 terial resources, waste of health and decency and 
 happiness. Besides, the standing menace of un- 
 employment acts as a pernicious influence over 
 the whole field of industry. It is the more tragic 
 in that all thorough students of the subject are 
 agreed that intelligent reorganization of industry 
 would reduce genuine unemployment to a small 
 fraction of its present extent. This would re- 
 move that dread which more than any other em- 
 bitters the worker's life, makes him feel that he 
 is a mere "wage-slave," and renders him hostile, 
 because of their disturbing effect on employment, 
 to all developments of the industrial process. 
 
 Take again the loss due to "labor-turnover." 
 If a plant employing a thousand workers requires 
 to hire during the year five hundred more in order 
 to maintain its force of a thousand, then it is said 
 to have an annual labor-turnover of fifty per cent. 
 The labor-turnover of modern industry is a damn- 
 ing evidence of material and spiritual waste. In 
 some cases it reaches quite amazing figures, such
 
 86 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 as the six thousand per cent per annum which re- 
 cent employment figures for eight months on the 
 Pennsylvania Lines West reveal. This was of 
 course due to exceptional and transitory condi- 
 tions, but annual turnovers of five hundred and 
 six hundred per cent seem by no means very rare. 
 The study by Mr. Grieves of a number of metal 
 plants in the Middle West showed a turnover of 
 more than 150 per cent, and Mr. Boyd Fisher 
 found the turnover in a large number of Detroit 
 plants to average more than 250 per cent. To in- 
 terpret these figures we must think not only of the 
 direct loss involved in fitting new men into the 
 place of the old a loss only now coming to be un- 
 derstood but also of the social loss due to thelack 
 of stability and direction in this drifting mass of 
 casual workers. This latter can of course never be 
 calculated, but wherever we find work casualized 
 we find men decivilized, aliens and sometimes even 
 "alien enemies" of society, losing all strength and 
 unity of purpose so that life degenerates into a 
 fumbling series of maladjustments to the more ele- 
 mentary and animal needs. From such a fate it 
 may sometimes be the best, and not the worst, who 
 seek a refuge in rebelliousness. And this too is
 
 WASTE OF THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 87 
 
 mere waste, the penalty of disorganization. Some 
 amount of labor turnover is of course inevitable; 
 a limited amount may even be regarded as desir- 
 able, as expressing the mobility due to opportunity, 
 but nothing can justify the figures already cited. 
 That much can be done to diminish labor- 
 turnover is revealed by the classic instance of the 
 Ford Works in Detroit, where the percentage in 
 1912-13, a normally good year, was over four 
 hundred, and in 1913-14 was only twenty-three. 
 It would not be fair to suggest that every manu- 
 facturer can or should emulate the methods possi- 
 ble to Ford, but there are sufficient cases already 
 on record such as those of the Dennison Manu- 
 facturing Company, the Plimpton Press, and the 
 Joseph Feiss Company to show that intelligent 
 consideration of the human factor can vastly re- 
 duce this waste. 
 
 Is there not something here worthy of deep 
 reflection, that no company could exist which com- 
 pletely changed its plant or its site or its manage- 
 ment two or three or more times in the year, 
 whereas a like change in respect of its body of 
 workers is not only possible, but actually happens
 
 68 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 without exciting, in most cases, any flicker of 
 attention or concern? 
 
 A profound source of waste is the lack of edu- 
 cational opportunity, from which the urgencies 
 of competitive livelihood shut off too soon the 
 great majority of the people. The extension of 
 educational opportunity would work for welfare, 
 in many ways. It would relieve the labor market 
 and thus help to solve an immediate problem of 
 the future. It would increase efficiency, and thusi 
 in due course the available wealth of the country. 
 It would evoke talent and genius where it lies un- 
 aroused or thwarted. It would help men to un- 
 derstand their common interests, and so to build 
 on that basis the unity of society. Finally for 
 the education of which I am thinking is social 
 as well as technical and vocational it would help 
 men to live, which is all that matters. 
 
 We are now beginning to see the national im- 
 portance of technical schools, trade schools, 
 schools for employment managers, supervisors, 
 foremen, and so on. It is all part of that pro- 
 gressive application of science which, the source 
 of wealth through power, is able, in a decently 
 ordered society, to raise human conditions above
 
 ; WASTE OF THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 89 
 
 the level of deadening necessity. Science unap- 
 plied is humanity wasted, though we must be sure 
 that it is true science we apply. There are indus- 
 trial spheres to which the application of science 
 is still only rudimentary, with corresponding loss. 
 There is, in particular, very little done to secure 
 a proper adjustment between worker and work. 
 More care and expense have in general been be- 
 stowed on the attainment of mechanical efficiency 
 than on the adaptation of industrial operations 
 to the particular aptitudes and needs of the opera- 
 tives. Here, as always, the loss is twofold, in 
 the worker and in the work, waste at once of 
 wealth and of humanity. 
 
 The waste due to evil working conditions, ex- 
 cessive toil and strain, unhealthy surroundings, 
 and unnecessary exposure to the risks of accident 
 and poisoning, great as it is in the case of men, 
 is more flagrant still and more pernicious in the 
 case of women and of children. America has an 
 unhappy distinction in the laxness of its factory 
 laws for the regulation of the industrial work of 
 children, that most wasteful of all immediate 
 economies. As for the labor of women, I shall 
 have occasion later to speak of it more especially.
 
 90 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 The squandering of the health and strength of 
 women is one of the great smirches on our civiliza- 
 tion. Their special needs are so little regarded 
 that their normal hours of work often impose on 
 them a heavy undermining strain; that rest-rooms, 
 rest-periods, and facilities for ceasing work in ac- 
 cord with physiological requirements are often 
 unprovided; and that they are allowed to (or 
 by poverty compelled to) toil in factories in the 
 periods before and after childbirth. 
 
 Finally there is the intolerable waste due to 
 the extreme disparity of the distribution of wealth. 
 The extreme poverty of masses of workers, with 
 its sordid and ceaseless harassment, cramping 
 and perverting and devitalizing all healthy hu- 
 man instincts, gains especial bitterness from the 
 contrast with the mere superfluity which their 
 labor helps to create for others. The attempt to 
 justify this disparity in terms of "natural selec- 
 tion" has now become vain and obsolete. One 
 of the most certain of economic (or psychologi- 
 cal) laws is the "principle of diminishing utility." 
 According to this principle, an additional dollar 
 or two a week means more, renders more service, 
 to the family whose income is twenty dollars,
 
 WASTE OF THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM 91 
 
 than to the family whose income is two hundred, 
 still more than to the family whose income is two 
 thousand. From which it follows that any redis- 
 tribution of wealth which, without disastrous dis- 
 turbance, rendered less unequal the shares of rich 
 and poor, would increase the total service of 
 wealth, that which alone justifies it or its pursuit, 
 the contribution it makes to welfare. If this prin- 
 ciple holds, how wasteful must a civilization be 
 which concentrates, as in America, 60 per cent of 
 the national wealth in the possession of 2 per cent 
 of the nation, while another 5 per cent of the 
 wealth is shared out in the poverty of 65 per cent 
 of the people ! 
 
 For there is after all only one kind of waste, 
 waste of well-being, of the opportunity really to 
 live. All else is waste only if it means a loss of 
 that. All achievement is vain if it does not also 
 achieve that. I have dwelt largely on the ma- 
 terial side, but this economic loss is simply an im- 
 perfect index of spiritual loss. Where you find 
 the one you may look for the other. Here is 
 found the true condemnation of the "unmeaning 
 taskwork" which fills the existence of multitudes, 
 of the kind of poverty which denies them alike
 
 92 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 the resources and the leisure to live. It is be- 
 cause science shows a way out of this waste, pro- 
 vided we have the will and the intelligence to take 
 it, that the future of industry which is after all 
 the future of the world gleams with hope 
 through the darkness of the present. It is that 
 prospect which demands and justifies all the efforts 
 we can make to achieve a real industrial recon- 
 struction. There has been too much sacrifice of 
 life and happiness in the horrible waste of war 
 for any of us to be indifferent to what remains or 
 to what may yet be restored or won.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 War and social instability. The appeal of radi- 
 cal programs in the revulsion after war. The 
 moral necessity of new labor conditions. The 
 great opportunity: grounds for hopes and 
 fears. The critical first period. 
 
 WARS have been deliberately planned so it is 
 said to break up the internal forces of radical- 
 ism by the strong counter-appeal of national agi 
 grandizement. If it be so, it is another instance 
 of the want of imagination and the misunderstand- 
 ing of history which are among the most marked 
 spiritual qualities of militarism. At the outset 
 war inevitably checks all radical movements and 
 even fosters the reactionary spirit. But its after- 
 effect seems often to be of the opposite charac- 
 ter. There are instances of this kind all through 
 history, since the time when the sailors of Salamis 
 changed the Athenian constitution. Waterloo 
 was followed by Peterloo and all the ferment that 
 
 93
 
 94 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 led toward the Reform Act. The Franco-Prus- 
 sian war gave birth to the Paris Commune and the 
 Third Republic. The Russo-Japanese war was 
 succeeded by the revolutionary movement of 
 1905, the forerunner of the immense Russian 
 revolution which the Great War made possible. 
 War on a grand scale always means a break with 
 the past. It often generates at the last a sense of 
 revulsion which, reenforced by the condition of 
 poverty and of war-indebtedness, gives a new oc- 
 casion to the forces that make for social upheaval. 
 Those who imagined that this war would break 
 up labor radicalism have by this time discovered 
 their mistake. The party of the left is rising 
 from its submergence in the war spirit. In Great 
 Britain, most notably, the Labor Party is seizing 
 the opportunity which the changing national mood 
 presents. 
 
 For one thing, a "labor party" is the only party 
 which professes a sweeping program of industrial 
 reconstruction. The Provisional Report on Re- 
 construction issued by a committee of the Brit- 
 ish Labor Party is a document deserving the 
 most careful study. It has a strength and assur- 
 ance, a clearness of statement and certainty of aim
 
 THE CRISIS 95 
 
 which all must acknowledge, whether or not we 
 accept its specific proposals. It is not, like many 
 previous manifestoes of labor, the proclamation 
 of principles in the void, with no expectation of 
 their fulfillment. So forthright a program has a 
 great advantage in a time of grave instability 
 like the present. Men who have seen and shared 
 in catastrophic changes realize in a new way the 
 possibility of the changes they themselves desire, 
 and are more disposed to seek them. Men who 
 have seen the world upturned are no longer de- 
 terred by the idea of revolution. The potentiali- 
 ties of good and evil, of reconstruction and of dis- 
 integration, herein revealed, call insistently for 
 the highest statesmanship we can find. 
 
 Further, there is a moral necessity in the new 
 situation which cannot be ignored. It is the State 
 which called from their ordinary employments 
 the myriads of munition and other war workers ; 
 it is the State which called to arms the myriads 
 of soldiers. Must not the State be responsible for 
 their complete replacement in industrial life ? The 
 soldiers who return to normal life do so in the 
 consciousness of having deserved well of the 
 country to which they offered up their lives. This
 
 gives a great moral backing to their demand for 
 industrial security. How, for example, can it be 
 any longer possible to justify their subjections to 
 the hazards of unemployment? The country 
 that dared to claim their lives must ensure that 
 they are not deprived of their livelihood. They 
 demand employment, security, and a "fair" return 
 for their toil, these at least, and they must some- 
 how or other be provided. Somehow or other 
 with waste and haste or with forethought and 
 productiveness, according to the blindness or the 
 vision of our governments. 
 
 I have tried in the preceding chapters to ex- 
 plain the new position and demands of labor. 
 These have not arisen out of the war situation; 
 they issue out of that secular process by which 
 men first come to understand and then endeavor 
 to control the systems in which their lives are 
 bound. The war has hastened the process only 
 as a storm shakes from the tree the ripening fruit. 
 There is no natural fruitfulness in calamity, but 
 it may shatter the clinging timidities which impede 
 the acceptance of new ideals. Then it becomes 
 dangerous to despise or to ignore them. I am 
 convinced that the first necessity of the industrial
 
 THE CRISIS 97 
 
 situation is the sympathetic understanding of these 
 demands and the attempt to meet them so far as 
 they make for the welfare of the whole commu- 
 nity. Merely to oppose them may turn a peaceful 
 into a catastrophic process. Only by facing the 
 facts can we escape this catastrophe. The major- 
 ity of those outside its ranks are strangely igno- 
 rant of the conditions of labor and this ignorance 
 is in fact another form of the exclusive class-con- 
 sciousness which in the workers we condemn. 
 Ignorance, on either side, in matters of this kind, 
 is never merely ignorance; it is also prejudice. 
 We must in this situation, those of us who do not 
 belong to its ranks in the narrower sense, take 
 common counsel with labor, understand its claims, 
 at least offer some other solution if we cannot 
 accept its own, and so endeavor to secure that 
 harmony of industrial life which was not attained 
 in the past, but will be more imperative than ever 
 in our war-impoverished future. 
 
 What are we doing towards that end? The 
 time for action has already come. What steps 
 are now being taken to turn this ferment into a 
 healthy process of restoration of the common- 
 wealth? We have talked so much of reconstruc-
 
 98 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 tion that the word has lost its sharpness, but have 
 we done anything to justify that word? A certain 
 amount of very necessary patching is being accom- 
 plished, for example in the training and "re-educa- 
 tion" of disabled soldiers. But what of reconstruc- 
 tion in the wider sense? Where are the architects 
 and the masons and the hodmen for this new build- 
 ing of which we speak? There is an accredited 
 story that the walls of Jericho fell at the blast of 
 trumpets, but these new walls will not rise to the 
 trumpeting of our orators. If they rise at all, it 
 will be in the sweat of our brows, through the 
 labor of our hands. 
 
 The time is ripe for thinking of these things. 
 The war has stimulated social and economic forces 
 of the most opposite character, some fraught with 
 the gravest danger for the coming era, others 
 bearing the promise of a fairer age. The finest 
 opportunity for constructive citizenship ever of- 
 fered to the world has now come. The end of 
 the war has shifted to another sphere the struggle 
 between the forces of reaction and of progress. 
 There is much ground for hope : the breaking of 
 the chains of tradition that bind men to evil lest
 
 THE CRISIS 99 
 
 their good be also disturbed; the widening of the 
 idea of service and responsibility so that the na- 
 tion has been revealed as a single great interde- 
 pendency, and the relation of nations as a vital 
 concern of the members of each; the awakening 
 of men, in the sight of an old order war-destroyed, 
 to the possibility and the urgency of building 
 anew; and even the sense of overwhelming war- 
 indebtedness which challenges men, by its insist- 
 ence, to face, to attack, and happily to overthrow 
 the institutionaf ca:.ses of poverty itself. But 
 there is also much roohi for fear. The habit of 
 despotic, practically uncontrolled, power which 
 governments acquire in war may persist perni- 
 ciously in peace. The federation of commercial 
 and industrial corporations into national unities 
 may lead, in the contest for world markets, to new 
 forms of competitive struggle at least as sinister 
 and demoralizing as the old, the plea of national 
 interest being effectively substituted for the in- 
 dividualistic arguments of older days. (Men may 
 still, for all their experience of war, cherish the 
 delusion that the vices of individuals may be the 
 virtues of nations.) Or these same giants, finan- 
 cial, commercial, and industrial, may, by their in-
 
 ioo LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 fluence over public opinion and their political as- 
 cendency, pervert the reconstruction to serve the 
 narrow ends of pride and power and possession, 
 aims merely cumulative and soulless. And there 
 are perils of the after-war spirit, of the reaction 
 from the exhausting strain, of the unnaturalness 
 of a world whose young men, at the age of gen- 
 erous enterprise and initiative so badly needed 
 now, have passed, those not consumed by the 
 flames, through the decivilizing furnace of war. 
 
 Never was it more necessary that men should 
 know what they seek, and the conditions under 
 which its attainment is possible. No man sets 
 about constructing a house or a ship or a ma- 
 chine without a clear plan and also a clear pur- 
 pose. But many men think they can "reconstruct" 
 society without either. There should in fact be 
 a reconstruction period as definitely as there was 
 a war period. Just as definitely as we devoted 
 ourselves to war, so should we devote ourselves 
 to reconstruction that the great lessons of the 
 former period may not fade away from our minds 
 and leave us where we were. 
 
 Is reconstruction, as some seem to think, merely 
 the provision of employment for those left
 
 THE CRISIS loi 
 
 stranded by the cessation of war? Is it merely 
 expansion, trade development, new markets? Is 
 it merely the increase of productivity and the pay- 
 ing of war debt? Is it merely the settling down, 
 with as little disturbance as possible, to the old 
 order which the war broke through? Shall all 
 that travail, all that sacrifice, all that heart-search- 
 ing move us to nothing more than the quickest 
 return to the old order of life? Besides busi- 
 ness as before, shall we have poverty as before, 
 insecurity as before, misery as before, inefficiency 
 as before, maleducation as before, and with these, 
 as not before, the growing temper of revolution? 
 
 There can be no reconstruction worth the name 
 unless we succeed in widening for all men, and 
 especially for the workers, the opportunity to live 
 a reasonable life: unless we can remove the in- 
 sistent economic menaces that embitter and de- 
 grade the existence of multitudes, and unless we 
 can also develop those wider interests, those cul- 
 tural and spiritual interests, without which life is 
 a mere scramble for material things. 
 
 Here is the standard by which we should judge 
 the variety of programs offered to us in the name 
 of reconstruction. Trade expansion? Assured-
 
 102 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 ly, but let not the plea be heard that just for the 
 sake of competing abroad we must submit to low 
 wages and excessive hours at home. That plea 
 will be raised in every land, and who then will 
 profit? Science in industry? Yes, that is abso- 
 lutely necessary to succeed but unless we add to 
 it the science of human relationship we shall de- 
 lude ourselves with specious gains. Increased pro- 
 ductivity? Yes, without greater productivity we 
 are wasting part of our strength, squandering our 
 resources, convicting ourselves of unintelligence. 
 But let us so increase productivity that we do not 
 in the process sacrifice the producer to the product. 
 In the first half of the nineteenth century during 
 and after the Napoleonic wars Britain increased 
 her productivity to an extraordinary degree, but 
 perhaps never was a great free people more im- 
 poverished, more disgracefully oppressed, more 
 endangered in morals and in health. The first 
 half of the twentieth century must not reflect that 
 tale. Technical education? Yes, we are still be- 
 hind in this respect. A great effort must be made 
 to improve it, but let us at the same time make it 
 the means to provide the leisure and the opportu-
 
 THE CRISIS 103 
 
 nity for the wide education which adds to the 
 meaning of life. 
 
 That is the test, the test of the common wel- 
 fare, which we must apply to the various pro- 
 grams so lavishly offered us today in the name of 
 reconstruction. Attempts are again being made to 
 divert attention from these issues by appealing to 
 mere external rivalries, to the economic forms 
 of that international competition which has been 
 so ruinous to the world. The blatant appeals 
 of false patriotism are again being put forward 
 to turn men's thoughts from what true patriotism 
 most demands, the internal reordering of our 
 economic life so as to provide the secure basis for 
 true national greatness in a civilization whose 
 ideals need no longer be perverted, or left un- 
 realized, because of the menace of external foes. 
 If such appeals succeed, if the patriotism of peace, 
 because of the weakness of the imaginations of 
 men, cannot evoke the will and courage devoted 
 to the patriotism of war, then the most auspicious- 
 ly pregnant hour of the industrial age must pass 
 without delivering its birth.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 INDUSTRIAL RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN : 
 PLANS AND PROPOSALS 
 
 The British Labor Party on the "New Social Or- 
 der." The national minimum wage. The 
 democratic control of industry. The -prob- 
 lem of taxation. The surplus for the com- 
 mon good. 
 
 The Whitley Report. Its origin. The 
 progress of joint industrial councils, national 
 and district, and workshop committees. Shall 
 the councils become lawmakers? The inade- 
 quacy of the "cash-nexus." Reception of the 
 plan. Reflection on the chances of success. 
 
 THE sense of the need of reconstruction is more 
 acute in the forward-looking circles of Great 
 Britain than in those of America. The sense of 
 the need not the need itself, which, as I shall try 
 to show later, is, with us, while different, no less 
 great. We are more complacent for the most 
 
 part, but needs are not to be measured by com- 
 
 104
 
 RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 105 
 
 placencies, which indeed may often be but an ag- 
 gravation of any problem or an additional ob- 
 stacle to its solution. Wherefore the plans and 
 proposals now being so actively forwarded in 
 Britain may well serve us, not necessarily as a 
 model, but at least as an incentive. In Britain, 
 plans are being laid on so great a scale, steps 
 are being taken of such a far-reaching kind, that, 
 whatever their ultimate success or fate, they must 
 assume a place in the history of civilization itself. 
 While numerous bodies, official and unofficial, 
 have been giving thought to the subject, two pro- 
 grams, that of the British Labor Party and that 
 of the Government, are of outstanding significance. 
 In this matter the lead has undoubtedly come from 
 labor naturally, because it is labor which suffers 
 most and first from lack of forethought. There 
 is, besides, a certain irony in the present situation 
 so far as labor is concerned. The time of its 
 power in the conflict of labor and capital was the 
 very time when the exercise of that power would 
 bring most danger to the common cause. Its 
 time of power is when labor is in most demand, 
 its time of weakness when labor is over-plentiful. 
 The former condition is found in time of war,
 
 io6 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 the latter is the natural immediate consequence 
 of the return of peace. Is it surprising that or- 
 ganized labor should have been looking forward 
 anxiously to the morrow? But the perils against 
 which it would guard and the provision which 
 it would make are things which concern us all. 
 
 The chief statement of the views of labor in 
 Great Britain is the manifesto entitled "Labor 
 and the New Social Order." As originally is- 
 sued, it was not the accepted program of the La- 
 bor Party, but a draft prepared by a sub-commit- 
 tee for submission to a general conference. But 
 there can be little doubt that in essentials it ex- 
 presses the general attitude of British labor. It 
 is a very remarkable document, alike in its spirit 
 and its specific proposals, and deserves the careful 
 consideration of all who really believe in recon- 
 struction. In what follows I shall try to illus- 
 trate its spirit and summarize its main proposals. 
 I am not here suggesting that the measures it ad- 
 vocates are suitable under our conditions what 
 these may be we shall reserve for later considera- 
 tion but I do firmly believe that the conviction 
 of the necessity of cooperative action and of in- 
 telligent daring which it displays is a spirit we
 
 RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 107 
 
 would do well to emulate in seeking a solution to 
 the problems which confront ourselves. These 
 qaulities have never been more finely displayed 
 than in this document. They are qualities which 
 even those who find most to differ from must 
 recognize and admire. 
 
 The manifesto begins by proclaiming a policy 
 of "Thorough." "What this war is consuming 
 is not merely the security, the homes, the liveli- 
 hood and the lives of millions of innocent fami- 
 lies, and an enormous proportion of all the ac- 
 cumulated wealth of the world, but also the very 
 basis of the peculiar order in which it has arisen. 
 The individualist system ofcapitalistic production 
 based on the private ownership and competitive 
 administration of land and capital, with its reck- 
 less 'profiteering' and wage-slavery; with its glori- 
 fication of the unhampered struggle for the means 
 of life, and its hypocritical pretense of the 'sur- 
 vival of the fittest' ; with the monstrous inequality 
 of circumstances which it produces and the degra- 
 dation and the brutalization, both moral and 
 spiritual, resulting therefrom, may, we hope, in- 
 deed have received a death blow." Unless we 
 beware, it will be the death-blow of Western civi-
 
 io8 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 lization, since it is easier to slip into ruin than 
 to progress into higher forms of organization. 
 The new social order cannot be built "in a year 
 or two of feverish 'Reconstruction','' but plans 
 can be drafted and foundations laid. "The four 
 pillars of the house that we propose to erect, 
 resting on the common foundation of the demo- 
 cratic control of society in all its activities, may 
 be termed: 
 
 (a) The Universal Enforcement of a National 
 
 Minimum ; 
 
 (b) The Democratic Control of Industry; 
 
 (c) The Revolution in National Finance; and 
 
 (d) The Surplus Wealth for the Common 
 
 Good." 
 
 Each of these principles is explained and de- 
 fended in turn. The argument for the first we 
 can perhaps summarize in the words of Bernard 
 Shaw: "Until the community is organized in 
 such a way that the fear of bodily want is forgot- 
 ten as completely as the fear of wolves already 
 is in civilized capitals, we shall never have a decent 
 social life." The minimum at the then existing 
 level of prices is suggested as not less than 307 a 
 week (about $7.50, but we must remember that the
 
 RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 109 
 
 purchasing power of money in England fell con- 
 siderably after the date at which the Report was 
 drafted. A minimum wage on so broad a scale 
 would of course disorganize the present system of 
 employment, and a short discussion of the whole 
 employment question follows. The proper method 
 of demobilization is suggested (it is fully discussed 
 in another labor document), and then the general 
 question of "securing employment for all" is taken 
 up. The principle is laid down uncompromisingly 
 that to provide suitable employment for the men 
 and women it called away to war-occupations rests 
 upon the Government, being a national obliga- 
 tion that should not be handed over either to pri- 
 vate benevolent societies or to the military authori- 
 ties. It is suggested that in this matter the ut- 
 most use should be made of the trade unions and 
 professional organizations. Should the demands 
 of ordinary industry be inadequate in the years 
 of transition, ways in which socially useful and 
 honorable employment may be provided are con- 
 sidered, including (a) rehousing on a very large 
 scale, (b) building of schools, training colleges, 
 technical colleges, &c, and the provision of ade- 
 quate staffs for these; (c) new roads, (d) light
 
 i io LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 railways, (e) unification and reorganization of 
 the railway and canal system, (f) afforestation, 
 (g) land reclamation, (h) harbor and port de- 
 velopment, (i) "the opening up of access to land 
 by cooperative small holdings and in other prac- 
 ticable ways." With these are coupled sugges- 
 tions on the lines, though going beyond them, of 
 the New English Education Act. Lastly a 
 scheme of social insurance against unemployment 
 is outlined. 
 
 The difficult question of the "democratic con- 
 trol of industry" is next taken up. It is through- 
 out a plea for cooperative organization as against 
 wasteful competitive disorganization. "What 
 the nation needs is undoubtedly a great bound on- 
 ward in its aggregate productivity." Let those 
 who think that labor obstinately and maliciously 
 prefers to diminish output reflect upon these 
 words. To this end a plea is made for the im- 
 mediate nationalization of the whole transporta- 
 tion system, in fact for a "united national service 
 of communication and transport," as well as of 
 mines and of electrical plants. The argument fof 
 the last-mentioned is of interest as showing the 
 attitude of British labor towards scientific develop-
 
 RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN in 
 
 ment. "What is called for immediately after 
 the war is the erection of a score of gigantic 
 'super-power stations,' which could generate, at 
 incredibly cheap rates, enough electricity for the 
 use of every industrial establishment and every 
 private household in Great Britain, the present 
 municipal and joint stock electrical plants being 
 universally linked up and used for local distribu- 
 tion. This is inevitably the future of electricity." 
 All this is put forward as only a first installment 
 of the "democratic control" at which the party 
 aims. What the report says under this heading 
 of the war-time control of industry is specially 
 significant. "The people will be extremely fool- 
 ish if they ever allow their indispensable indus- 
 tries to slip back into the unfettered control of 
 private capitalists, who are, actually at the instance 
 of the Government itself, now rapidly combining, 
 trade by trade, into monopolist trusts, which may 
 presently become as ruthless in their extortion 
 as the worst American examples. Standing as it 
 does for the Democratic Control of Industry, the 
 Labor Party would think twice before it sanc- 
 tioned any abandonment of the present profitable 
 centralization of purchase of raw material; of
 
 ii2 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 the present carefully organized 'rationing,' by 
 joint committees of the trades concerned, of the 
 several establishments with the materials they re- 
 quire ; of the present elaborate system of 'costing' 
 and public audit of manufacturers' accounts, so as 
 to stop the waste heretofore caused by the mechan- 
 ical inefficiency of the more backward firms; of 
 the present salutary publicity of manufacturing 
 processes and expenses thereby ensured; and, on 
 the information thus obtained (in order never 
 again to revert to the old-time profiteering) of 
 the present rigid fixing, for standardized prod- 
 ucts, of maximum prices at the factory, at the 
 warehouse of the wholesale trader, and in the re- 
 tail shop." 
 
 It is noticeable that this program leans further 
 to unqualified State socialism than one might have 
 expected from the growth in Great Britain of the 
 idea of "industrial autonomy." State control 
 should never be regarded as synonymous with 
 "industrial democracy," but, apart from one or 
 two very incidental references to joint control, 
 there is nothing in this section of the report to 
 suggest that they are not identical. The "effec- 
 tive personal freedom" for which it pleads is not
 
 RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 113 
 
 spontaneously generated in industry through gov- 
 ernment ownership and control; in fact the con- 
 trary is the case, unless, as never before, decen- 
 tralization and direct participation of the employe 
 in management is assured. How to attain these 
 necessary conditions of the "democratic control 
 of industry" is lightly passed over in this other- 
 wise so trenchant report. In this respect the re- 
 port bears witness to the draughtsmanship of a 
 distinguished "Fabian" author who has always 
 leaned more to centralization than to "effective 
 freedom." 
 
 Next the now tremendous problem of taxation 
 is envisaged. "For the raising of the greater part 
 of the revenue now required the Labor Party 
 looks to the direct taxation of the incomes above 
 the necessary cost of family maintenance; and, 
 for the requisite effort to pay off the national 
 debt, to the direct taxation of private fortunes 
 both during life and at death." It is claimed, 
 not without justification, that direct taxation as 
 against indirect is in accord with "the very defi- 
 nite teachings of economic science." It is here, 
 too, that the claim is made of the common inter-
 
 114 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 est which the artisan has with four-fifths of the 
 nation. 
 
 Finally, the Report deals with those forms of 
 economic "surplus" which long ago attracted the 
 attention of the economic theorist and have more 
 recently become at once the instigation and the 
 object of attack of the social reformer. "We 
 have allowed the riches of our mines, the rental 
 value of the lands superior to the margin of culti- 
 vation, the extra profits of the fortunate capital- 
 ists, even the material outcome of scientific dis- 
 coveries which ought by now to have made this 
 Britain of ours immune from class poverty or 
 from any widespread destitution to be absorbed 
 by individual proprietors; and then devoted very 
 largely to the senseless luxury of an idle rich 
 class." This surplus is to be secured for the com- 
 munity. Out of it comes as indeed it must come 
 the new capital which the community needs for 
 the carrying out of enterprises. From this also 
 must be directly defrayed the cost of the condi- 
 tions of communal welfare, education, recreation, 
 social insurance, public provision for the sick and 
 the infirm, the aged and the victims of accident 
 and disease. "From the same source must come
 
 RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 115 
 
 the greatly increased public provision that the 
 Labor Party will insist on being made for scien- 
 tific investigation and original research, in every 
 branch of knowledge, not to say also for the pro- 
 motion of music, literature and fine art, which 
 have been under capitalism so greatly neglected, 
 and upon which, so the Labor Party holds, any 
 real development of civilization fundamentally de- 
 pends. Society, like the individual, does not live 
 by bread alone." And the document concludes 
 with the remarkable words: "If law is the 
 mother of freedom, science, to the Labor Party, 
 must be the parent of law." 
 
 It is interesting to reflect how impossible it 
 would have been for such words to have emanated 
 from British labor, then outlawed and unorgan- 
 ized, a hundred years ago. While to many of 
 us, habituated to more near-thoughted courses and 
 restrained by attendant timidities and scruples, 
 these proposals may appear extreme, it is most 
 instructive to contrast them in this regard with 
 the destructive denunciations which emanate from 
 Marxian socialism. The comparison illumines 
 the distinction drawn in Chapter IV between the 
 narrowed and the widened views of labor. Here
 
 n6 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 is the first great triumph of the widened view. 
 The Marxist policy contemplates a reversed domi- 
 nation of class over class, but the policy of this 
 Labor Party is professedly national in the best 
 sense. It more than once repudiates the sugges- 
 tion that its program is a "class" program, and in- 
 deed no program can fairly be so described, though 
 inevitably it would alter class relations and modify 
 class privileges, if men are striving honestly there- 
 by for the "building up of the community as a 
 whole." 
 
 II 
 
 Not less significant, though naturally more re- 
 stricted in their sweep, are the new plans for in- 
 dustrial reform made or adopted by the British 
 Government. Where labor "gets busy" we may 
 expect government to "get busy," too. I do 
 not propose to describe here the various policies 
 projected to meet the crisis, but one of these is 
 so simple, so comprehensive, and, as a government 
 program, so novel, that it offers an experiment of 
 world-wide interest. It is designed to solve the 
 hardest industrial problem of all, the establish- 
 ment of a better system of relations between em-
 
 RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 117 
 
 ployers and employed. This is the already fa- 
 mous "Whitley plan." 
 
 A sub-committee of the Reconstruction Com- 
 mittee was appointed to consider the question of 
 better industrial relations. It was composed of 
 certain representatives of employers and em- 
 ployes respectively, some professed economists, 
 and a few others who were in touch with the situ- 
 ation, including two women. This body, in spite 
 of its mixed character, issued a unanimous report, 
 now named, after the chairman of the Commit- 
 tee, the WKitley Report. 1 It is delightfully 
 and strategically short, no more than an outline 
 of the general organization which must exist to 
 ensure the application of certain broad principles 
 to industry. These principles had already found 
 some advocacy. They had recently been put for- 
 ward explicitly by a master builder of London, 
 Mr. Malcolm Sparkes, under the form of an "in- 
 dustrial parliament" to regulate his own trade. 
 They had actually been put into application in the 
 Painters' and Decorators' branch of that trade, 
 with distinct success as it appeared. They had 
 
 1 More correctly, the First Interim Report, on Joint Stand- 
 ing Industrial Councils, of the Subcommittee on Relations be- 
 tween Employers and Employes.
 
 ii8 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 been recommended by the Commission on "Labor 
 Unrest in Great Britain," whose findings lay be- 
 fore the Whitley Committee. One of the general 
 conclusions of that Commission ran thus : "Labor 
 should take part in the affairs of the community as 
 partners rather than as servants." 
 
 The new plan is introduced as follows: "In 
 the interests of the community it is vital that after 
 the war the cooperation of all classes, established 
 during the war, should continue, and more es- 
 pecially with regard to the relations between em- 
 ployers and employed. For securing improve- 
 ment in the latter, it is essential that any proposals 
 put forward should offer to work people the means 
 of attaining improved conditions of employment 
 and a higher standard of comfort generally, and 
 involve the enlistment of their active and continu- 
 ous cooperation in the promotion of industry. 
 
 "To this end, the establishment for each indus- 
 try of an organization, representative of employ- 
 ers and workpeople, to have as its object the regu- 
 lar consideration of matters affecting the progress 
 and wellbeing of trade from the point of view of 
 all those engaged in it, so far as this is consist- 
 ent with the general interest of the community,
 
 appears to us necessary." The plan suggested 
 consists of a system of "joint standing industrial 
 councils in the several industries, composed of 
 representatives of employers and employed." 
 These national councils would have very wide 
 competence, not only in jrespect of immediate 
 questions of demobilization and the restoration 
 of industry, but also in respect of the permanent 
 problems of industrial welfare, conditions of em- 
 ployment, adjustment of wages, removal of dis- 
 putes, provision of technical training, of industrial 
 research, improvement of processes, protection 
 of workers in the matters of earnings and em- 
 ployment, safeguarding of their rights in the in- 
 ventions and improvements they may discover and 
 so on. The national councils would be supple- 
 mented by district councils and workshop com- 
 mittees, also composed of representatives of both 
 sides, to deal with subordinate questions and 
 special applications of general policy. 
 
 Two further paragraphs of the Report are very 
 significant. "It appears to us," say the Commit- 
 tee, "that it may be desirable at some later stage 
 for the State to give the sanction of law to agree- 
 ments made by the councils, but the initiative in
 
 120 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 this direction should come from the councils them- 
 selves." The importance of this statement has 
 scarcely been recognized. The industrial coun- 
 cils are conceived as potentially law-making bodies. 
 This goes right in the face of the accredited theory 
 of territorial sovereignty, indivisibly centered in 
 one all-competent (and therefore all-incompetent) 
 parliament. It is a direct approach to the princi- 
 ple of degrees and kinds of sovereignty, so ably 
 advocated by a rising school of political scientists, 
 and in particular applied to industry by the guild 
 socialists. (The latter, it is true, will have noth- 
 ing to do with the Whitley plan, having their rea- 
 sons for not believing that "half a loaf is better 
 than no bread".) The application of this idea 
 would be a wedge in the principle of centralized 
 government, and is in harmony with the growing 
 conviction that central parliaments and cabinets 
 are overworked and underspecialized, and inade- 
 quate to the enormous complexity of modern in- 
 dustry. 
 
 The other paragraph says: "We are con- 
 vinced that a permanent improvement in the rela- 
 tions between employers and employed must be 
 founded upon something other than a cash basis.
 
 RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 121 
 
 What is wanted is that the workpeople should 
 have a greater opportunity of participating in the 
 discussion about and adjustment of those parts of 
 industry by which they are most affected." The 
 "cash-nexus," as Carlyle called it, will never bring 
 peace between the warring parties, and it is well 
 for human nature that this is so. The general 
 failure of "profit-sharing" schemes bears out this 
 truth. The cash-nexus will never bring content- 
 edness to labor, so long as it is excluded from a 
 voice in the determination of its fate, so long as 
 it is merely a hireling. 
 
 The Whitley Report was adopted without de- 
 lay by the Government. It sent copies to the vari- 
 ous trade-unions and employers' associations, re- 
 questing their views, and the replies, from the 
 great majority on both sides, were very favor- 
 able. The British Minister of Labor issued a 
 circular on the subject, stating that the national 
 councils are to be recognized as "official standing 
 Consultative Committees on all future questions 
 affecting the industries which they represent," and 
 that they will constitute the "normal channel 
 through which the experience of an industry will 
 be sought on all questions with which the Indus-
 
 122 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 try is concerned." The Government is undoubt- 
 edly in earnest in its acceptance of the plan. 
 What seems to impress the Government most is the 
 advantage which accrues from its being able to 
 deal directly with a single organization represent- 
 ing a whole industry, instead of with a number of 
 crossing and conflicting authorities. The exist- 
 ence of these new organizations would have 
 greatly eased its problem of harnessing industry 
 for war, and it contemplates that their establish- 
 ment will greatly aid its work in the period of re- 
 adjustment. Accordingly it has set itself to pro- 
 mote the formation of these councils. At first 
 the process of establishment was slow, but 
 latterly considerable progress has been made. In 
 a number of industries, including the building 
 trades, the furniture trade, the heavy chemicals 
 industry, the rubber manufacturing industry, the 
 baking industry, and others, the councils are al* 
 ready in full operation. 
 
 A remarkable development along similar lines, 
 forming a crown to the Whitley plan, is the pro- 
 posed National Industrial Council unanimously 
 recommended by a most representative Joint Com- 
 mittee of English labor leaders and employers, to
 
 RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 123 
 
 be a general parliament for all industry, "to secure 
 the largest possible measure of joint action be- 
 tween the representative organizations of employ- 
 ers and workpeople, and to be the normal channel 
 through which the opinion and the experience of 
 industry will be sought by the Government on all 
 questions affecting industry as a whole." 
 
 The application of the Whitley plan is a crucial 
 experiment in industry. Its success or failure will 
 profoundly affect all future developments. It 
 proposes a via media between the existing auto- 
 cratic control and such revolutionary systems as 
 either the new or the older socialism advocates. 
 What then, on the brink of this experiment, can 
 we surmise about its chances of success? 
 
 The plan, though not revolutionary, is in con- 
 trast with the existing order radical. This at any 
 rate is the first condition of success. Whether 
 in fear from a forecast of the chaos that will 
 otherwise ensue, or in hope from a vision of a bet- 
 ter industrial order than we have known before, 
 all men with any claim to statesmanship perceive 
 the need of a new understanding, a new relation- 
 ship in industry. Of course there are always with 
 us the "practical men" who speak of all such
 
 124 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 plans as "ideal" and "visionary." The motto of 
 such people is that what has not been cannot be. 
 Every day something happens to give them the lie, 
 but they still repeat, with perfect composure, their 
 ancient f ormulas. They have been repeating them 
 since the Stone Age, and if other men had listened, 
 the world would still be in the Stone Age. Least 
 of all does it become the leaders of labor to echo 
 that parrot cry, for all that labor has so far gained 
 was first scouted as "impractical." 
 
 Again, the plan is definitely based upon the ex- 
 isting organization of labor as of capital. This is 
 made particularly explicit in the later explanatory 
 reports of the Committee, which refuse to recom- 
 mend the establishment of Whitley Councils for 
 industries lacking adequate union organization. 
 This important provision differentiates the Whit- 
 ley plan from such methods of organization as the 
 Rockefeller plan. It is a wise recognition of the 
 fact that labor organization is a necessary founda- 
 tion of industrial order, and that no scheme of 
 bringing labor and capital together can be expected 
 to succeed which cuts across or in any degree de- 
 flects the allegiance of the worker to unionism. 
 
 Such little experience as there is of the working
 
 RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 125 
 
 of a scheme of this kind appears so far to justify 
 the hopes of its promoters. Where it has been 
 already applied, as in the decorators' industry 
 in Great Britain, it is stated to have induced a 
 spirit of harmony and cooperation unknown be- 
 fore. The general favor which the plan has re- 
 ceived alike from employers and employes is a 
 good augury. We must bear in mind that em- 
 ployers and employes together are bound up in 
 a system for which neither can be held responsible, 
 that many of the former too would gladly break 
 its fetters, and that the waste, material and human, 
 of the system, is disadvantageous to the majority 
 of both classes. 
 
 It would, however, be unwise to expect too 
 much from this single scheme. Perhaps part of 
 the welcome accorded to the Report is due to its 
 generality. It is not difficult to discover causes 
 of disagreement which may appear within the 
 councils. The fundamental differences of inter- 
 est between capital and labor as at present consti- 
 tuted are not abolished by bringing them together 
 in permanent joint consultation, or even joint di- 
 rection. Over these fundamental differences the 
 Whitley scheme throws no bridge whatever. For
 
 126 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 we must always remember that the profounder 
 problem is not the relation of the management 
 as such to employes as such. That exists under 
 cooperative as much as under "capitalistic" pro- 
 duction. The profounder problem is one of dis- 
 tribution not of production. It is one, not of re- 
 lation of employer to employe, but of capital to 
 labor. It is the problem of the relation of profits, 
 interest, and rent to wages. So long as the capi- 
 talist regards labor as a necessary cost, so long 
 as the worker regards interest, rent, and profits as 
 deductions from the wealth which he creates, that 
 unsettled question is a flaming sword which cleaves 
 their interests apart. This is not a condemnation 
 of the Whitley plan, but a statement of its per- 
 haps inevitable limitations. 
 
 In this connection it is well to note that, while 
 the interim reports of the Whitley Committee 
 were unanimous, the final report reveals a distinct 
 cleavage of opinion on a fundamental issue. Five 
 members of the Committee, out of the fifteen who 
 sign the Report, do so subject to a certain reser- 
 vation. They say: "By attaching our signa- 
 tures to the general reports we desire to render 
 hearty support to the recommendations that In-
 
 RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 127 
 
 dustrial Councils or Trade Boards, according to 
 whichever are the more suitable in the circum- 
 stances, should be established for the several in- 
 dustries or businesses, and that these bodies, repre- 
 sentative of employers and employed, should con- 
 cern themselves with the establishment of mini- 
 mum conditions and the furtherance of the com- 
 mon interests of their trades. 
 
 "But while recognizing that the more amicable 
 relations thus established between capital and la- 
 bor will afford an atmosphere generally favorable 
 to industrial peace and progress, we desire to ex- 
 press our view that a complete identity of inter- 
 ests between capital and labor cannot be thus ef- 
 fected, and that such machinery cannot be expected 
 to furnish a settlement for the more serious con- 
 flicts or interest involved in the working of an 
 economic system primarily governed and directed 
 by motives of private profit." 
 
 There are numerous minor difficulties involved 
 in the constitution of the councils, in the selection 
 of representatives, in the determination of the 
 powers of the joint boards, and so on. It looks 
 as if the basis of national councils must first be 
 laid by the establishment of the "Works Com-
 
 128 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 mittee," and it is significant that the Whitley 
 Committee is turning its attention more especially 
 in that direction. The report recently issued on 
 "Works Committees" by the British Ministry of 
 Labor is most illuminating. It reveals the wide 
 variety and range, the great need and service, 
 but also the serious difficulties of these boards. 
 One of these difficulties is the relation of the 
 Works Committee to the trade-unions, which dare 
 not allow themselves to be weakened by this new 
 authority. Another is the assignment of powers 
 to them are they merely consultative or can 
 they have any direct share in the actual manage- 
 ment of works? "It would appear," says the re- 
 port in question, "that the functions of a Works 
 Committee are practically always consultative. 
 Usually a Works Committee can bring matters 
 before the management and discuss them with the 
 management; it can press its views about these 
 matters on the management ; in the last report, it 
 can induce the Trade Union organization to call 
 a strike. But the Works Committee cannot 
 usually, as such, carry its views into action, or 
 ensure that they shall be carried into action, by 
 any direct machinery. The management has the
 
 RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN 129 
 
 executive power, and unless the management is 
 impressed by the representations of the members 
 of the committee, or by the sanction that lies be- 
 hind them, those representations will not lead to 
 executive action. This would appear to be usual 
 even where the Works Committee is a Joint Com- 
 mittee. There are, indeed, certain cases in which 
 the decision of a majority of the members of such 
 a Joint Committee is carried into effect. This is 
 so in the Pit-head and certain other committees 
 which have the power to fine bad time-keepers; 
 and in certain engineering establishments the 
 question of prosecuting bad time-keepers before 
 the Munitions Tribunal is decided by Joint Works 
 Committees. But so far as can be discovered, 
 the general custom is to the contrary. Unanimity 
 must be attained; the management must be con- 
 vinced, and both sides must freely agree together, 
 before executive action is taken. The operation 
 of a Joint Committee is really in the nature of 
 consultation between two parties consultation 
 which, if it result in unanimity, results in action, 
 but not otherwise. It would be a mistake to think 
 in terms of voting, or to think that even if there 
 ia voting, its result is a formal decision by a ma-
 
 130 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 jority vote. What happens is rather discussion 
 by which misunderstanding is often removed and 
 upon which, if unanimity is attained between the 
 two sides, action will ensue. It follows, there- 
 fore, that generally we cannot speak of Joint Com- 
 mittees, if by Joint Committees we understand 
 joint executive councils acting by the vote of the 
 majority. On the other hand there are Joint 
 Committees, if by Joint Committees we under- 
 stand deliberate meetings of both sides, always 
 attended by both sides, though often accompanied 
 by separate meetings of the two sides" (pp. 27-8). 
 Another difficult question is the relation of the 
 joint committee to the workers' committees now 
 growing common in British industry which will 
 succeed better, a regular joint board or a commit- 
 tee of workers having regular access to the man- 
 agement? The latter is the general practice, and 
 seems to be more in accordance with the present 
 stage of industrial development. Perhaps the 
 most serious of all these practical difficulties is 
 the position and security of the chosen representa- 
 tives of the workers in their new relation to the 
 management. The Report on Works Commit- 
 tees contains a working miner's statement on the
 
 RECONSTRUCTION IN GREAT BRITAIN fti 
 
 subject which is worth quoting for the light it 
 throws upon the workers' own interpretation of 
 the difficulty in this particular industry. Refer- 
 ring to the work of the mining "output commit- 
 tees," he says: "The rules give the men a voice 
 in the management, but I am sorry to say there is 
 no Committee strong enough to administer the 
 rules as it relates to management : they go so far 
 but stop as they see an invisible pressure being 
 brought upon them which is going to affect the 
 security of their living, a kind of victimization 
 which you cannot prove. Your contracting place 
 is finished and you want another place, but the 
 management sends you 'odding'; you are middle- 
 aged and you cannot keep pace with the younger 
 element; and you look after a fresh place, but 
 everywhere is full up ; and when you come out of 
 the office you can see other men set on. This is 
 what is going on all around the district, and you 
 want to strengthen these men by having the rules 
 enacted by Act of Parliament to make them bind- 
 ing; and if cases like this happen, there wants to 
 be a Tribunal appointed by Government, repre- 
 sentative of all classes so that a man shall have 
 a fair hearing and equality of justice; this will
 
 132 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 give him a security and it will reduce this insecur- 
 ity of work." (Pp. 119-120.) 
 
 These serious difficulties may be, as already in 
 some cases they have been, overcome, where both 
 sides are in earnest in participating in the scheme. 
 What emerges most clearly is the necessity for 
 such committees under the new conditions of in- 
 dustry. It is noteworthy that as conditions grow 
 more complex, as, for example, piece-work in en- 
 gineering takes increasingly the place of time- 
 work, the establishment of Workers' Commit- 
 tees is found necessary. Here is one agency 
 whereby the rigor of trade-union uniformity may 
 be by consent and under safeguard mitigated, and 
 the ironic necessity dispelled which causes labor 
 to resist the increase, through the applications of 
 science, of the means whereby it lives. 
 
 This much appears to me to be certain, that 
 the Report is based on principles which must, in 
 this way or another, be applied if industrial rela- 
 tions are to be improved; and that, whatever its 
 later fate, the adoption of this scheme can be of 
 the greatest service in tiding over the first peril- 
 ous transition period after the war.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 LIONS IN THE PATH 
 
 Forces in the established order which oppose 
 beneficent change. The individualistic tradi- 
 tion of the law. Anachronistic attitude to- 
 wards competition. The courts in relation 
 to labor. 
 
 The entrenched power of consolidated 
 wealth. The economic oligarchy and the 
 economic system. Control over the political 
 machine and over the agencies of public 
 opinion. 
 
 ANY new order of industry, through which the 
 human wastefulness of the present order can be 
 removed, must involve a serious disturbance of es- 
 tablished interests. It is well to understand the 
 difficulties blocking the line of advance. In this 
 brief survey, these can be suggested rather than 
 described, and there is danger, in a summary re- 
 view, of wrong emphasis and too sweeping judg- 
 ments. But it is in full view of these difficulties 
 
 133
 
 134 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 that any successful efforts towards reconstruction 
 must be made. 
 
 There are certain assumptions underlying the 
 argument which it is well to make explicit. I 
 assume in the first place that any system which 
 gives to any class or section or interest, large or 
 small, uncontrolled power over others, is danger- 
 ous to the commonwealth. I assume that the 
 progress of civilization depends upon, and has al- 
 ways been marked by, the emancipation from arbi- 
 trary control of those hitherto subject to it, not 
 because the latter are superior in any sense, but 
 because a relation of servitude is inherently evil, 
 perverting the human quality of either side. I 
 assume that wealth and poverty are inter-related 
 and socially conditioned. I assume that irre- 
 sponsible wealth, in its upliftedness and superfluity, 
 is pernicious to the possessor and to those his 
 wealth commands; and that all essential poverty, 
 in its dejectedness and deprivation, in its denuda- 
 tion of opportunity, and in its diseaseful fecundity, 
 is an evil not only to the poor but to the whole 
 community. I assume that any reordering of so- 
 ciety which mitigated the extremes of inequality 
 would, if safeguarded from social reactions of
 
 LIONS IN THE PATH 135 
 
 a harmful nature, lead to a better utilization of 
 that wealth and to the greater happiness of man- 
 kind. I assume finally that in the present break- 
 ing system labor is in general a subject class, and 
 that many of the children of labor are deprived, 
 by economic necessity, of the opportunity to de- 
 velop, for their own and the common good, their 
 natural powers. 
 
 These assumptions imply no comparison, for 
 better or worse, of class with class, no condemna- 
 tion of one class nor exaltation of another. They 
 do imply the indictment of a system, in so far as, 
 in the growing consciousness of its character of 
 good and evil, it is seen to be not inevitable but 
 capable of reform. What is most clearly evil in 
 it, and I believe most amenable to change, is the 
 relation of dominance and subservience with all 
 the waste that this entails. There are naturally 
 certain strong influences in the established order 
 which act to maintain that relation. These are the 
 lions on the path. 
 
 Every established order seeks, though always in 
 the long run vainly, to immobilize itself. It 
 stereotypes customs into institutions, and fash- 
 ions supporting modes of thought into laws and
 
 136 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 precedents and forms of education. It subtly con- 
 verts to its service the most spiritual forces, 
 philosophy and religion, and enlists though these 
 are first to break away the most liberating and 
 creating forces, literature and art. By power it 
 wins prestige, then turns its prestige into the 
 foundation of its power. Thus alike for the good 
 and the evil in it, it bids for immortality. 
 
 The first bulwark of all order is the "law of 
 the land." It not only prescribes the form of 
 order which regulates society, it breathes a spirit. 
 In America that spirit is distinctly hostile to the 
 spirit which is shaping the new labor situation. 
 
 "The great and chief end of men's uniting 
 into commonwealths, and putting themselves un- 
 der government, is the preservation of their 
 property." So wrote Locke in his classical 
 treatise on government. It was an expression of 
 the frankly materialistic individualism of a bygone 
 age which yet lives on in the American courts and 
 most wonderfully in the American 'Constitution. 
 It is at war with the ideal of labor in two vital 
 respects, for it places property above persons* 
 and it venerates the competitive principle. A few 
 illustrations must here suffice by way of justifica-
 
 LIONS IN THE PATH 137 
 
 tion for these statements. The attitude of law 
 towards property is seen perhaps most luminously 
 in the principle and practice of the injunction, the 
 characteristic modern development of the old 
 legal doctrine of conspiracy. An injunction is ex- 
 pressly issued to protect property against threat- 
 ened danger. This danger may of course arise 
 from a strike, more especially as market expect- 
 ancies become recognized as "property," and the 
 courts have issued a vast number of injunctions 
 with reference to strikes, showing quite clearly 
 that they viewed these disputes solely from the 
 point of view of the property involved and not 
 at all as a conflict of claims by which some in- 
 direct property loss (often negligible compared 
 with the direct loss sustained by the non-proper- 
 tied) is merely an incidental consequence. The 
 tremendous range of the injunction was well illus- 
 trated in the Buck's Stove and Range case, which 
 enjoined "the officers of the American Federa- 
 tion of Labor, officers and members of affiliated 
 unions, agents, friends, sympathizers, counsel, 
 conspirators and co-conspirators from making any 
 reference whatever to the fact that the Buck's 
 Company had ever been in any dispute with labor,
 
 138 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 or to the fact that the Company had ever been re- 
 garded as unfair, had ever been on any unfair 
 list, or on a 'we don't patronize' list of the Ameri- 
 can Federation of Labor or of any other organiza- 
 tion, and also prohibited any person from either 
 directly or indirectly referring to any such con- 
 troversy by printed, written or spoken word." 
 The vast scope of the injunction in the "blanket" 
 form, its potency to arrest otherwise legitimate 
 activities during its continuance, the efficacy of 
 the punishment for "contempt" which follows its 
 violation, and the inability to obtain juries in such 
 cases, have combined to make the injunction, un- 
 der the present constitution of the courts, one of 
 the most formidable enemies of a new industrial 
 order. If further proof of this claim were 
 needed, it has been provided by the recent decision 
 of the Supreme Court in the case of the Hitchman 
 Coal and Coke Company. 
 
 The law would hold the industrial arena clear 
 for competition. Whatever is in restraint of 
 trade falls under its ban. Anachronistically it at- 
 tempts to stem the onward movement of combina- 
 tion. Capital laughs quietly at its Canute-like 
 attempts to stay the tide, and labor has in part
 
 LIONS IN THE PATH 139 
 
 been already liberated from its inclusion under 
 the ban of trade-restraining organizations. But 
 the attitude of the law towards competition affects 
 labor more profoundly than capital. Capital has 
 effective devices for evading anti-monopolistic 
 laws. On the whole these have changed the mode 
 and degree rather than the extent of capitalistic 
 concentration. Even if the force of the competi- 
 tive principle were applied equally all round, it 
 would be far more serious to labor than to capital. 
 For the weaker side and labor is weaker by rea- 
 son of numbers, it is weaker in prestige and in re- 
 sources no less than in representation on law-mak- 
 ing and law-adjudging bodies is always the loser 
 under "free" competition. "Free" competition is 
 death to the ends of labor. Under it the weakest 
 members of the stronger party set the pace for all. 
 The grinding "marginal" employer becomes the 
 most effective and determinant bargainer for his 
 side, being capable of lowering the wage-rate over 
 a whole industry. And on the other hand the 
 weakest members of the weaker party are the 
 least effective, but still determinant, bargainers 
 for their side, compelling all of the same status 
 to accept a lower rate. Here is the great irony
 
 i 4 o LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 of the much lauded competitive principle. Once 
 it is understood the tremendous disadvantage be- 
 comes plain which labor suffers under a system of 
 law rooted in the philosophy of competition. 
 
 The courts not only apply the law, they also in- 
 terpret it. They must exercise discretionary 
 power, they must determine motive in determin- 
 ing breach of law, and thereby inevitably reveal 
 their own natural bias, the bias of the code and 
 of the philosophy that underlies the code. It is 
 easy to see, and easy to illustrate, the disadvan- 
 tage labor has suffered from the exercise of this 
 discretion, in the interpretation of such phrases as, 
 for example, "wanton and malicious," "designed 
 mainly to injure the employer," "sufficient inter- 
 est," "intimidation," "conspiracy," and so on. 
 There is little doubt that if a system could be es- 
 tablished whereby the decision of labor cases was 
 entrusted to special industrial courts, withdrawn 
 from the operation of the common law and the 
 formulae and precedents of ordinary legal usage, 
 it would remove much of the infirmity which labor 
 feels in presence of the law. 
 
 The present situation is well expressed in the 
 words of one of the most fair-minded of economic
 
 LIONS IN THE PATH 141 
 
 investigators, the later Professor Hoxie. "The 
 law," he says, "in so far as it assumes to repre- 
 sent the essence of positive justice but reflects the 
 relations of handicraft industry, has no compre- 
 hension of modern industrial conditions, nor of 
 their inevitable consequences, and no modes of 
 dealing with them except by prohibition. It has 
 no comprehension of a machinery for dealing out 
 justice in a state of society changed and chang- 
 ing from that in which it was conceived. Being 
 actually unable to outlaw combination, for indus- 
 trial forces are more compelling than legal re- 
 straint, not being wholly uncognizant of the in- 
 justice worked by its arbitrary decrees, but unable 
 to give up its pre-evolutionary standpoint, it is 
 obliged to seek actual justice by shuffling, halting, 
 roundabout methods and disingenuous distinctions 
 which vary with the intelligence and bias of the 
 particular courts. As the law in spirit is indi- 
 vidualistic, as it makes the freedom and sacred- 
 ness of individual contract the touchstone of abso- 
 lute justice, and as the unions are formed to es- 
 cape the evils of individualism and individual 
 competition and contract, and all the union acts in 
 positive support of these purposes do involve co-
 
 142 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 ercion, the law cannot help being in spirit inimical 
 to unionism. Unionism is in its very essence a 
 lawless thing, in its very purpose and spirit a chal- 
 lenge to the law. Hence, even where the judges 
 are understanding and intend to be sympathetic 
 to unionism, if they are true to the law they must 
 tend to be unfair to unionism." 
 
 These inequities are in some degree inherent 
 in the slow process of legal evolution in every 
 land, but in America they are of course aggravated 
 by the peculiar authority of the judicature over 
 the legislature. The power of the highest State 
 courts and of the Supreme Court of the United 
 States to declare measures "unconstitutional" is 
 directly and indirectly a most formidable deterrent 
 of political adaptation to the needs of a chang- 
 ing order. This is now too obvious to require in- 
 sistence upon it. New illustrations, such as the re- 
 cent declaration of the "unconstitutionally" of the 
 Federal Child Labor Law are constantly being 
 offered to confirm the evidence of history. In the 
 great upheaval which to-day is undermining the 
 political traditions of the older lands it may well 
 be that America, for all its ostentation of De- 
 mocracy, will have fallen from the vanguard to
 
 LIONS IN THE PATH 143 
 
 the rearguard of political advance. For a compli- 
 cated mechanism may prove more inexpugnable 
 than a living caste, and a venerated document be 
 harder to dethrone than dynasts and emperors. 
 
 There is indeed a process of adaptation that 
 works even within the framework of antiquated 
 forms. I do not wish to exaggerate the imper- 
 meability of the law and the constitution. Not 
 even they are immune from the transforming 
 touch of time. Interpretations inspired by new 
 needs undermine the letter of the ancient law. The 
 wedge of collectivism, its thin edge the protection 
 of "minors" against industrial harm, pierces the 
 individualism of the code. The "police power" 
 of the State is successfully invoked to save many 
 needed measures from the constitutional guillo- 
 tine. Acts are passed expressly safeguarding anti- 
 competitive organizations, such as the trade- 
 unions, from outlawry. The Supreme Court it- 
 self is not so remote from changing public opin- 
 ion that it does not register its influence. One 
 significant indication is the confirmation by the 
 Supreme Court of the constitutionality of the Ore- 
 gon laws establishing a minimum wage and a ten- 
 hour day respectively. The latter decision is par-
 
 144 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 ticularly Interesting, since it is the first which has 
 expressly vindicated interference with the "right 
 of contract in a general and not a specific appli- 
 cation, and since also it is in contradiction to for- 
 mer decisions, such as that which declared "un- 
 constitutional" the ten-hour bakery law of New 
 York as "mere meddlesome interference with the 
 rights of the individual." "It is impossible," says 
 Mr. Lindley D. Clark in a review of these de- 
 cisions in the Monthly Review of the Bureau of 
 Labor Statistics, May, 1917, "to read this account 
 without recognizing that the law 'is to some extent 
 a progressive science,' and that changes may be 
 expected to continue in it as they have occurred 
 in the past." Nevertheless these movements are 
 like the awkward ever-impeded steps of a shack- 
 led prisoner, not the forward motions of a man 
 who freely pursues his course. It is hard enough 
 to meet unbound the conditions imposed by the 
 incessant technical change of modern capitalistic 
 industry, but bound by the formulations of past 
 centuries it becomes a Herculean task.
 
 LIONS IN THE PATH 145 
 
 II 
 
 In old mythologies they told of young gods, 
 strangely born, foreordained to compass the over- 
 throw of their parent deities. Gifted with simi- 
 lar parricidal power, new forces have arisen out 
 of the welter of American individualism, their 
 destined task the dethronement of the venerated 
 God of competition when the latter's work is done. 
 That destiny is already in process of accomplish- 
 ment. Every conquest within the competitive field 
 has narrowed that field. Every device learned 
 and practiced in the competitive struggle has been 
 a means to abrogate or to transform that strug- 
 gle. With wonderful success the victors have 
 gathered power, property, and prestige to shield 
 them from further assaults. The old warfare is, 
 for the greater victors, past. What remains for 
 them is consolidation, and the enjoyment of the 
 ripening spoils. To this end, having destroyed 
 competition within, they acclaim competition with- 
 out, and in particular they decry all "socialism" 
 (within which term they comprehend almost any 
 degree of State regulation) as the ruin of a free 
 Republic.
 
 146 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 The entrenched power of consolidated wealth 
 is exercised directly over industry, and indirectly 
 over government, over a multitude of voluntary 
 associations, and over public opinion. With this 
 power we are here concerned only in so far as it 
 is used to stay the process of industrial adaptation 
 to social needs. In one respect this power is itself 
 the revelation of consummate adaptation, for it 
 rests on combination and by its success shows how 
 much more capable to survive and flourish is conv 
 bination than its natural foes. But capitalistic 
 combination, like some savage potentate, would 
 secure by fratricide the throne it won by parricide. 
 That is, it would destroy or nullify those other 
 forms of combination which are also being shaped 
 within the new industrial world, and which are the 
 necessary safeguards against its own great power. 
 In particular, it attacks the more effective forms 
 of state supervision and regulation, and it deliber- 
 ately attempts to suppress the growth of its own 
 direct and proper counterpart, the organization of 
 labor in unions. These activities imperil the 
 needed reconstruction. Here indeed is the great- 
 est peril that lies in the path, the opposition of the 
 vast pervasive power of change-abhorring wealth.
 
 LIONS IN THE PATH 147 
 
 This power is both direct and indirect, and a 
 brief survey of both manifestations will indicate 
 its magnitude. Directly, it is the autocrat of the 
 whole world of business. In respect of wealth, 
 great as is the concentration of ownership, it is 
 little as compared with the concentration of con- 
 trol. This has been brought about not only by the 
 growth of industrial and commercial corporations 
 and their alliance through trusts, voting trusts, 
 combines, cartels, trade associations, interlocking 
 directorates, rings and understandings of all 
 kinds ; but still more through certain inner develop- 
 ments of modern finance. One of these is the 
 modern banking system, under which the banks, 
 the trust companies, insurance companies, and 
 other depositaries of the funds of the public, all 
 closely interlinked, determine the direction in 
 which new capital shall flow, the industrial soil 
 which it shall fructify. Another is the central con- 
 trol of values as recorded on the Stock Exchange. 
 Wealth is ceasing to mean ownership of concrete 
 means of production and becoming ownership of 
 claims upon production, in the form of interest- 
 bearing bonds and dividend-bearing shares of 
 stock. These have transformed capital into some-
 
 I 4 8 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 thing, for the ordinary man, uncannily abstract, 
 into something homogeneous and divisible, readily 
 transferable, wonderfully "sensitive" and "fluid." 
 The celerity and direction of its flow depends on 
 the ups and downs of the value barometer, and 
 the financial "weather men," who sit in inner 
 places, have prescience and partial control of these 
 fluctuations. This inside knowledge, combined with 
 such devices as majority holdings of common stock 
 and interlocking directorates, gives a small circle 
 of financial power a certain control over the com- 
 bined wealth of half the people. 
 
 This is the inmost circle of a wider oligarchy, 
 which, by its increasing control over prices, would 
 control, among other things, the wages of labor. 
 It is easy to see how this power over prices gives 
 capital a great advantage in the struggle with la- 
 bor. It may be able so to manipulate profits 
 that demands for better wages or conditions ap- 
 pear to spell disaster. Or, failing that, it can rep- 
 resent wage-increases as additional taxes upon the 
 consumer, and indeed ensure that they shall be 
 such, so starting a vicious (and profitable) cycle 
 of higher prices, which in time makes the seeming 
 gains of labor specious and vain.
 
 LIONS IN THE PATH 149 
 
 We must at the same time remember that the 
 economic oligarchy is itself the result of the eco- 
 nomic system which it in part controls. The sys- 
 tem is in fact more powerful than the oligarchy 
 a truth which is generally applicable to political 
 oligarchy as well. Just as the wage-system dom- 
 inates the life of the worker, so does the price- 
 system dominate the activity of the employer. The 
 employer is impelled to secure himself as far as 
 possible against the dangers of the speculative 
 method of production, against the constant risk of 
 rising costs or falling prices, against the loss of 
 his market through competition or changes in de- 
 mand, against the vagaries of the business cycle; 
 and in the process, unless he occupies a peculiarly 
 sheltered position, he is bound to exercise over 
 labor whatever control he can. Capital possesses 
 certain advantages over labor which by its very 
 nature it is bound to exploit and will continue to 
 exploit save as liberation comes through the devel- 
 opment of new forces strong enough to change the 
 system by which both capital and labor are for the 
 present bound. 
 
 Labor is hired by capital and not capital 
 by labor. There is nearly always a surplus of
 
 150 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 labor asking capital to give it employment. Labor 
 is "fired" by capital and never capital by labor. 
 The determination of processes as well as of 
 prices, of tasks as well as (though no longer 
 wholly) of payments, of responsibilities as well 
 as of rewards, belongs to capital. This economic 
 power, above all the power of dismissal, is a means 
 to influence the policy of labor. Just as the small 
 patriarchal employer of old times often applied 
 his economic power to ensure that his employe 
 attend church or voted according to direction, so 
 the great modern corporation attempts to check 
 what it regards as undesirable tendencies of 
 thought among its workers. It is inevitable that 
 power should establish its advantage in these ways, 
 by whatever class or party or interest the power 
 is possessed. But in the times of reconstruction 
 it is a lion in the path. 
 
 In respect of the less direct forms of control, 
 the power of wealth ramifies so far into every 
 nook and cranny of the social structure that a re- 
 view of this kind can but suggest the broader 
 channels of its exercise. The control of politics 
 is of course the first external aim of economic 
 power. In the preceding section of this chapter
 
 LIONS IN THE PATH 151 
 
 I have indicated how great is the advantage which 
 the law and constitution give to the upholders of 
 the status quo. This is reinforced by the party 
 system, with its secret machinery, its antiquated 
 cumbrousness, its chicanery, and its dependence for 
 funds on generosity, however motived. It is by 
 control of the mechanism of the party-system, 
 from the small wheels managed by ward-bosses up 
 to the great wheels which move silently in Wash- 
 ington, that the wealth of America has succeeded, 
 in such large measure, in translating a democrat- 
 ically-minded nation into an effective plutocracy. 
 In the United States, as also in Canada, wealth 
 has laid its hand with power on the helm of the 
 ship of State, not indeed with undisputed author- 
 ity, but sufficiently to deflect it far from its ap- 
 pointed democratic course. The plutocracy does 
 not enter politics merely to defend its gains ; to win 
 over, by fair means or foul, the opponents of its 
 interests, not excluding leaders of labor, to ac- 
 quire cheap franchises, exemptions and other 
 privileges ; it offers also, through its political serv- 
 ants, a national policy. It is a policy to divert at- 
 tention from national welfare to national bigness, 
 from the needs of a people to its ambitions, from
 
 152 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 intrinsic fulfillment to the vainglory of the race- 
 spirit. It is a policy of expansion, of combative 
 protection, a policy that makes appeal to the 
 coarser elemental passions which steal the name of 
 patriotism. 
 
 To control the mechanism of politics it is neces- 
 sary also in some degree to dominate public opin- 
 ion: and the various institutions and associations 
 which mold that opinion are thus subject to strong 
 persuasions. An institution which depends on the 
 endowments or contributions of the wealthy, be it 
 philanthropic association, church, or university, 
 is in some peril of losing its free spirit. I have 
 heard the director of a great philanthropic associ- 
 ation confess that its policy must not offend the 
 prejudices of wealthy donors. Even the univer- 
 sities have not lacked ominous signs of suppres- 
 sion or intolerance. Teachers have been dis- 
 charged or passed over, not for incompetence but 
 for opinions contrary to the sentiments of a gov- 
 erning board. The issue is clearly defined in the 
 Report on Academic Freedom and Academic Ten- 
 ure prepared by a committee of the American As- 
 sociation of University Professors. It contains 
 the significant statement : "In the early period of
 
 LIONS IN THE PATH 153 
 
 University development in America the chief men- 
 ace to academic freedom was ecclesiastical, and 
 the disciplines chiefly affected were philosophy 
 and the natural sciences. In more recent times 
 the danger zone has been shifted to the political 
 and social sciences." Happily the spirit of in- 
 tolerance does not prevail, for if it did, all the 
 dignity, all the inner worth and meaning of the 
 University would be lost, all the sustaining happi- 
 ness of the hard search for truth, which yet, to 
 those who know it, is more than compensation for 
 the greater material rewards of other professions, 
 would be destroyed. 
 
 But it is the more immediate agencies and stimu- 
 lants of opinion which organized wealth is most 
 anxious to control, the stage, the screen, the press 
 above all, the press. The significance of the 
 newspaper and periodical in making as distinct 
 from reflecting public opinion is well understood 
 by all the rulers of man. The effect of its ubiq- 
 uitous suggestion, poured with such facility 
 morning and afternoon, spread abroad with such 
 rapidity, finding its way into nearly every home, 
 is incalculable. Its double armor of irresponsi- 
 bility and anonymity renders it almost invulner-
 
 154 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 able, and conveys the idea of some impersonal 
 force as if it were the mouthpiece not of indi- 
 vidual men but of society itself. Even if the press 
 were inexorably truthful, it would still, if con- 
 trolled, be dangerous : for the power of selection 
 which it exercises is a more subtle determinant of 
 opinion. Any course whatever can be made to ap- 
 pear noble or base without one iota of direct falsi- 
 fication, according as the bias of the press selects 
 and omits and gives prominence to one or other set 
 of facts and opinions. By this means the press can 
 exercise an almost hypnotic influence on the minds 
 of men. Hence there is a vital danger to democ- 
 racy as the tendency to combination, under capital- 
 istic control, spreads to the newspaper world. This 
 applies to news agencies as well as to journals. 
 The former have a more pervasive and imper- 
 sonal influence, reaching out from the cheap "boi- 
 ler-plate" provided for country newspapers to the 
 special reports of current events. There have 
 been in the States certain cases which seem to sug- 
 gest that "the interests)' have a very direct influ- 
 ence on the news agencies. It is claimed, for exam- 
 ple, by labor that the press agency reports of 
 strikes and other labor disturbances, such as those
 
 LIONS IN THE PATH 155 
 
 of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Workers and the 
 West Virginia miners, are one-sided and mislead- 
 ing. A contrast is drawn between the publicity giv- 
 en to the McNamara case and the concerted silence 
 of the press on the Mooney case, where the vindi- 
 cation of labor instead of that of capital was in- 
 volved. If this is true, it becomes a public danger 
 of the gravest kind. It is easy to see that the con- 
 trol of opinion becomes a more vital concern the 
 more a country develops toward democracy. In- 
 terests which formerly could command have now 
 to persuade, to justify themselves, and they be- 
 come on that account eager to control the organ of 
 opinion. 
 
 Fortunately, this last lion in the path is, like the 
 lion of the child's story-book, unable to withstand 
 the "power of the human eye." To face it, to 
 perceive it, is to overcome it. Eternal vigilance 
 is here also the price of democracy and there are 
 always organs of opinion strong enough and fear- 
 less enough to withstand those influences and to 
 stimulate that necessary vigilance. To-day, when 
 the world is sick with longing for a new and bet- 
 ter order, it is more necessary than ever before.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD : A CONTRAST IN 
 LABOR CONDITIONS 
 
 The extent of labor organization in the United 
 Kingdom and in America respectively. Why 
 labor in America has been politically frus- 
 trate. Emigration versus Immigration. Other 
 contrasts. Differences in spirit between the 
 old world and the new, and their effects on the 
 situation of labor. 
 
 UP to the present there has not been, in the 
 United States or Canada, any activity, directed 
 towards the improvement of industrial relations, 
 at all comparable, in breadth and seriousness, with 
 that now manifested in Great Britain. One rea- 
 son is not far to seek. The spiritual disquietude 
 of the war was slow to reach these shores. There 
 has not been that shock to the sense of an estab- 
 lished order, that disturbance of all complacencies, 
 which swept the countries suddenly and completely 
 drawn into the maelstrom. But there are other 
 
 reasons besides this, reasons inherent in the great 
 
 156
 
 THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD > 157 
 
 differences between new-world and old-world con- 
 ditions. It is indeed sometimes thought that these 
 differences render unnecessary the more heroic 
 measures advocated or planned in older countries, 
 that we can get along without any great modifica- 
 tion of the existing haphazard relations of capi- 
 tal and labor. I do not read in this way the signs 
 of the times. I think it is very possible, on the 
 contrary, that unless adequate thought be given to 
 it and preparation made, the after-war industrial 
 situation in North America may grow at least as 
 acute as in Europe. The differences are real and 
 great, but some of them aggravate rather than 
 diminish the need for preparedness. They may 
 prevent the application by us of old-world solu- 
 tions, but they make more imperative the quest and 
 discovery of our own. 
 
 It is worth while, therefore, to review briefly 
 the chief differences in question. They are differ- 
 ences of organization and differences of spirit. 
 
 Of the former kind the most obvious is the 
 greater development of labor organization in 
 Great Britain. Taking the figures for the last 
 year before the war as affording the fairest basis 
 for comparison, we find that the United Kingdom
 
 158 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 had, in proportion to population, more than three 
 times as many trade unionists as America. Al- 
 lowance must of course be made for the greater 
 industrialization of Britain, but it is clear that the 
 organization of labor is particularly inadequate 
 in America. This failure stands in the way of all 
 constructiveness. It would be difficult to work 
 out, say, the Whitley plan in America, for that 
 plan depends on the representation of the work- 
 ers on industrial councils, and without organiza- 
 tion there can scarcely be true representation. 
 Another consequence is that in America there is 
 not the same complex system of established trade- 
 union rules which governed labor in British fac- 
 tories and workshops. These rules are double- 
 edged. Being motived by a distrust of capitalis- 
 tic management, a distrust born of past experi- 
 ence and too often confirmed by existing condi- 
 tions, they proved a serious obstacle to industrial 
 efficiency, but at the same time they gave to the 
 worker a certain protection here unattained. 
 
 The growth of the American Federation of 
 Labor during the last twenty years, under the in- 
 fluence of economic conditions which have gradu- 
 ally established here, as in Europe, a distinctive
 
 THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD 159 
 
 working class or series of classes, may point to- 
 wards a coming organization of labor in America 
 comparable with that already attained in Great 
 Britain. 
 
 One of the most significant differences between 
 American and English labor is found in their re- 
 spective attitudes towards political action. In 
 Great Britain, and generally in Western Europe, 
 the modern development of trade unionism has 
 gone hand in hand with the growth of a political 
 labor party, which, whatever its weaknesses and 
 divisions, has at any rate been strong enough to 
 influence the policies of the traditional parties. 
 Already in Great Britain it confidently aspires to 
 victory over the opposing political forces. Where- 
 as in America labor has been politically frustrate, 
 neither strong enough to create an enduring party 
 of its own, nor united enough to formulate a com- 
 mon platform, nor influential enough to affect very 
 seriously the policies and conflicts of the older 
 parties. In America no fierce protracted strug- 
 gle for the elementary right to vote rallied to the 
 cause of radicalism a whole disfranchised class; 
 no sacrosanct association of landownership and 
 political supremacy seemed to bind men fast to pre-
 
 160 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 established servitude. Again, the conflicting va- 
 riety of labor legislation enacted by forty-eight 
 autonomous states, the diversity of race-composi- 
 tion and also of economic and social development 
 over a continental area, the individualistic tradition 
 of a people awakened to the wealth of a still ex- 
 ploitable land, these have confused the political is- 
 sue between labor and capital; while the conserva- 
 tive mechanism of the American Constitution, so 
 generally lauded nevertheless as the very palla- 
 dium of liberty, has constituted a barrier between 
 labor and the fruits of whatever political victory 
 it might hope to achieve. For these reasons the 
 protests and struggles of labor have been more 
 narrowly economic, and only a socialist minority 
 has insisted on the correlation of political and 
 economic power. It is easy to explain the aloof- 
 ness from independent politics of the more con- 
 servative body of labor in America whether that 
 aloofness is to-day justified is much more dubious. 
 Labor in other lands has had no less formidable, 
 though different, obstacles to overcome in order to 
 achieve any real political weight, and the associa- 
 tion of economic and political power is ungainsay- 
 able. American labor has not developed the
 
 THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD 161 
 
 wider statesmanship, the constructive policy, that 
 political experience is beginning to bestow on la- 
 bor elsewhere. There is little sign that it can 
 seize, with decisive insight into the need not of a 
 class but of a people, an occasion so vast as that 
 now unrolling before the industrial world. There 
 is little sign that it can, for example, either pro- 
 duce or adopt a program of the strength and 
 quality of that enunciated in the manifestoes of the 
 British Labor Party. 1 
 
 Another vital difference springs from the cir- 
 cumstance that Britain is subject to emigra- 
 tion and America to immigration. Emigration 
 simplifies and immigration complicates the labor 
 problem. It is quite obvious that in any country 
 subject to large-scale immigration no stable or- 
 ganization of industry can be maintained apart 
 from a supporting policy in this regard. To this 
 difficult subject I shall later return. Here I need 
 
 1 Since the above was written there has begun, once again, 
 the formation of a political Labor Party, through the activity 
 of a number of State Labor Federations, commencing with 
 Illinois and New York. This means a new conflict between 
 the wider and the narrower idea of labor, between those who 
 discern the relation of economic and political power and the 
 hard-shelled doctrinaires of the Gompers regime. It is sig- 
 nificant that the new parties claim to consider "the good of 
 all who work by hand or brain."
 
 162 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 merely refer to the way in which immigration 
 creates cross-divisions within the sphere of labor. 
 In every country the distinction between skilled 
 and unskilled labor is an obstacle to solidarity, 
 but especially so in America, where unskilled labor 
 is largely immigrant, recruited from alien peoples 
 with different traditions and lower standards of 
 living. This creates a more determinate division 
 of economic class and economic interest than is 
 found in Europe, and it makes the common or- 
 ganization of labor harder to realize. In Britain 
 the general labor unions form an important, if not 
 yet integrated, part of the whole trade union move- 
 ment, while in America unskilled labor remains 
 a chaotic unorganized mass, save for the fragments 
 that are from time to time caught up by revolu- 
 tionary doctrines. It was this issue, the solidarity 
 of all labor versus the distinction of interest be- 
 tween skilled and unskilled, which was, for the 
 time being at least, decided in the historic con- 
 flict of the Knights of Labor and the American 
 Federation; and the triumph of the latter, in the 
 late eighties of last century, signally revealed the 
 reality and the extent of the cleavage. 
 Again, we suffer more violent transitions from
 
 THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD 163 
 
 prosperity to adversity, from boom to depression, 
 than do the older countries. These transitions 
 profoundly disturb the development of labor poli- 
 cies. In the boom periods, such as the sixties and 
 the early eighties, labor organizations have gener- 
 ally grown strong and aggressive, only to fall back 
 disorganizedly, in the ensuing depression, into 
 rarely tenable positions of defense. Further- 
 more, in the older industrial countries the relation 
 between agriculture and industry, though dis- 
 turbed by the exceptional stress of the war, ap- 
 proaches nearer a state of equilibrium than with 
 us. For these reasons we experience greater fluc- 
 tuations of employment and unemployment than a 
 country like Great Britain, while we have fewer 
 safeguards in the form of provision and insurance 
 against this and other industrial risks. Such con- 
 ditions undoubtedly make industrial reconstruc- 
 tion harder to achieve, but they certainly do not 
 lessen the likelihood of after-war crisis. 
 
 Along with these differences of organization 
 there are corresponding differences of spirit to be 
 reckoned. Differences in organization are easily 
 seen and described, but differences of spirit are 
 more elusive and hard to isolate in the confusing
 
 1 64 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 cross-currents of what we take to be the national 
 life. To suggest them in a phrase or two is to run 
 grave risk of simplifying, exaggerating, and dis- 
 torting them. Yet there seems to be a quality in 
 American civilization which has an immediate 
 bearing on the industrial situation. For one of 
 its main effects is to give a primacy, a simplicity, 
 and in fact a narrowness to the economic interest 
 less universal elsewhere. Elsewhere men are apt 
 to seek economic power as a means to position, 
 dignity, political and social dominance. Here 
 these superiorities are more often regarded, by the 
 men who acquire them at least, if not by their pri- 
 vileged families, as a means to economic power; 
 and wealth buys its gratifications more directly, 
 more ostentatiously, and also, to use the term with 
 no necessary implication of better or worse, more 
 materialistically. Similarly, where the struggle is 
 not for wealth but livelihood, the economic arena 
 more completely bounds men's aspirations. The 
 small circles which call out men's loyalties less 
 clearly connect with the great circle of the nation. 
 Cohesiveness, especially among immigrant groups, 
 may be even more intense than elsewhere, but it is 
 fragmentary. There is more opportunism, more
 
 THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD 165 
 
 economic ruthlessness, though the idealism which 
 does emerge is also less fettered by tradition. 
 Whence arise many of the peculiarities of our 
 social and political structure, many of its defects 
 and many of its potentialities. 
 
 The conditions of our growth as a continent 
 have left their impress, even where they no longer 
 manifestly operate. These conditions bred or at- 
 tracted the more individualistic and externally ad- 
 venturous types, the pioneer, the migrant, the 
 land-exploiter, the hunter after fortune. Theirs 
 was indeed the necessary spirit of an army of oc- 
 cupation, but the time of settlement follows, and 
 then that spirit proves a hindrance. More sta- 
 bility is demanded, a wider purpose, a deeper 
 sense of social responsibility. 
 
 This has been lacking in our industrial relations, 
 perhaps more obviously than in other lands. I 
 am speaking in general, well aware of numerous 
 exceptions, but the general statement seems true. 
 It applies as much to workers as employers, but, 
 by reason of his economic advantage, it is the em- 
 ployer who must first exhibit that change of atti- 
 tude without which harmonious relations will be 
 still less realized in the future than in the past.
 
 i66 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 On this point there is much need of insistence. If, 
 in the changed temper of labor and of the world, 
 industrial order, not to say human progress, is to 
 be assured after the war, the employer must every- 
 where unlearn the doctrine that human labor is 
 merely a commodity, so to be treated, so to be 
 bought, so to be used up, driven, or rejected, as 
 will conduce to the immediate maximum of pro- 
 ductivity or of profit. The very opportunities 
 afforded by a young land have contributed to foster 
 that attitude, men being so engrossed in its ex- 
 ploitation, in the control of its material resources, 
 that they have scarcely been able to stop and con- 
 sider its human costs. I remember talking to the 
 manager of a large packing plant, who told me en- 
 thusiastically how the introduction of a resident 
 doctor, along with some simple hygienic precau- 
 tions, had worked wonders in the health of his es- 
 tablishment. "Formerly," he said, "we had forty 
 cases of septic poisoning a month, now we have 
 scarcely three." I enquired why, if the provision 
 was so simple, inexpensive and effective, it had 
 never been introduced before. "We have been so 
 busy expanding," he replied, "that we had no time 
 to think about it before." A young country fur-
 
 THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD 167 
 
 nishes a particular temptation to think more in 
 terms of size than of welfare, of output than of 
 human utility. To grow big has naturally, perhaps 
 inevitably, seemed more urgent than to lay the 
 sound foundations of prosperity. But whatever 
 justifications may have been offered for that doc- 
 trine in the past they are ruled out by the neces- 
 sities of the present. 
 
 A good illustration of the kind of irresponsibil- 
 ity to which I refer is found in the attitude of the 
 majority of workers and the majority of employ- 
 ers towards unionism. But this is a subject of 
 such importance as to deserve a separate chapter.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 RECONSTRUCTION AND THE TRADE UNION 
 
 Indifference towards unionism of the majority 
 of wage-earners. Opposition on the part of 
 employers. Attitude of the general public. 
 The union as a sine qua non of industrial order 
 and progress. Objections to unionism consid- 
 ered. Probable developments. Equilibrium 
 versus harmony in industrial relations, and the 
 principles underlying both. Reflections on 
 unorganized labor. 
 
 THERE is nothing that to my mind more clearly 
 reveals our general failure to appreciate the con- 
 ditions of industrial progress than the prevailing 
 attitude towards trade-unionism. I have already 
 commented on the lack of interest on the side of 
 the workers. The only organization that stands 
 definitely for the wage-earner is the union, and yet 
 in America probably less than fifteen per cent of 
 the wage-earners are organized. For whatever 
 causes, indifference, timidity, lack of stability, dif- 
 ficulty of rural organization, and so on, the large 
 
 168
 
 RECONSTRUCTION AND THE UNION 169 
 
 majority of workers still remain outside the unions. 
 Even of those inside a large number have but the 
 feeblest hold on the union principle, as the great 
 fluctuations in membership from time to time re- 
 veal; while a still larger number are indifferent 
 to any but the immediate interests of their own 
 which unionism may serve. Except in a few 
 specially favorable industries the union itself re- 
 mains at a rudimentary stage of development. 
 The great problems of unionism, such as the rela- 
 tive merits of craft, trade, and industry as units 
 of organization ; the relation of unionism to politi- 
 cal activity; the adjustment of the interests of 
 skilled and unskilled workers ; the coordination of 
 conflicting jurisdictions have received far less 
 attention than they deserve. And union policy as 
 a whole is hand-to-mouth, haphazard, and frag- 
 mentary. 
 
 On the other side a great number of employers 
 exhibit, not mere indifference, but open or secret 
 hostility to unionism. Too often they regard the 
 union as a mere nuisance, a source of disturbance 
 and "agitation" which they refuse to recognize ex- 
 cept under force majeure. Every conceivable de- 
 vice black lists, white lists, employment books,
 
 1 70 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 card catalogues, "iron-clad" oaths, espionage, dis- 
 criminatory bonus and "welfare" schemes, subor- 
 nation, bribery, and all the rest has been used to 
 frustrate and discourage the union. Employers 
 great and small, from the directorate of the U. S. 
 Steel Corporation to the boss of the most wretched 
 New York sweating den, have discriminated 
 against unionists. In a country that calls itself 
 free beyond others the elementary right of or- 
 ganization has been denied more truculently than 
 perhaps anywhere else in the world. The union, 
 its opponents believe, make the worker less sub- 
 missive. Naturally they do not consider whether 
 there are not in industry conditions to which the 
 workers should not submit. It is not the union, 
 it is the condition under which so many workers 
 toil and exist, from which "unrest" springs. The 
 union voices that unrest, it does not create it. 
 Rather, the union gives it an orderly expression, 
 and helps to suppress its more violent and inef- 
 fective forms. The union cannot even be said 
 in general to foster strikes, as is evident from the 
 fact that the oldest established unions are gen- 
 erally the slowest to appeal to the strike, and that
 
 RECONSTRUCTION AND THE UNION 171 
 
 a large percentage of strikes take place contrary 
 to the ruling of the union executives. 
 
 Lastly, the "outside public," that large body 
 which rightly or wrongly regards itself as belong- 
 ing to the ranks neither of capitalists nor of wage- 
 earners, has tended to look with little favor on the 
 union, often condemning it as a mischief-making 
 association interfering with the ordinary business 
 of the community. I have heard professional 
 men denounce the union principle, never reflecting 
 that their own professional organizations, those of 
 law and medicine, for example, are just particu- 
 larly successful and privileged unions, pursuing in 
 their own sphere the same ends, and employing 
 many of the same methods, as industrial unions. 
 Those who really desire to see order take the place 
 of chaos in industrial relations should, instead of 
 discouraging, do what they can to encourage union- 
 ism. 
 
 The truth is that the "outside public," the rank 
 and file of the traditional political parties, the 
 small landlords, the farmers, the professional 
 men, the small business men, retailers, clerks, have 
 been rather blindly individualistic. Their not un- 
 warranted fear of the aggression of big associa-
 
 172 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 tions has led them to the quite unwarranted infer- 
 ence that the national interest is best secured where 
 industrial and commercial associations remain 
 small. They were always trying to push compe- 
 tition a little further from themselves and piously 
 hoping that it would nevertheless continue, for 
 their benefit, its unabated sway over others, par- 
 ticularly over the bigger amalgamations which in 
 fact are most able to control it. They did not 
 see that free competition is free disorganization, 
 that the predatory chaos of small business is ut- 
 terly wasteful and subjects employers and workers 
 alike to endless demoralizing hazards, whereas the 
 unification of large business, given intelligent 
 political control, prepares the way for an era of 
 security and constructiveness. There will be no 
 industrial order worth having until industry is or- 
 ganized as a whole, which means also until labor 
 is organized as a whole. Now the pendulum is 
 swinging back from the extreme of individualism, 
 and as it moves, the attitude of the public towards 
 unionism grows more sympathetic. 
 
 For we must come to see that in the modern in- 
 dustrial world the union is a necessary means to 
 the securing of order and progress. This is being
 
 RECONSTRUCTION AND THE UNION 173 
 
 realized in the older lands, where every plan for 
 the improvement of industrial relations, such as 
 the Whitley program, depends on the active par- 
 ticipation of the unions. Just as employers' asso- 
 ciations stand for the point of view of capital, so 
 trade unions must stand for the point of view of 
 labor. The union should stand for all those who 
 work, as they say in mining, "at the face," who 
 know its toil and expense of spirit, who alone can 
 appreciate its human costs, who are partners in all 
 production, and may claim as partners to have a 
 voice in the determination of its conditions and in 
 the apportionment of its products. To refuse 
 recognition to the union, or more generally, to re- 
 gard a business as existing merely for the sake 
 of its "owner" in the sense of those who contribute 
 its capital, is to treat partners in production as in- 
 struments only of production, it is to treat persons 
 as only mechanisms. 
 
 It is often objected that the unions impede in- 
 dustrial progress by prescribing limitation of out- 
 put, by opposing the introduction of labor-saving 
 devices, by insisting on uniformity of wage-rates, 
 and so on. There is truth in the indictment, 
 though it is a common and serious mistake to sup-
 
 174 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 pose that all the opposition to improved means of 
 production comes from the workers: capital also 
 is conservative and has vested interests which 
 sometimes block technical advance. Besides, the 
 truth of the indictment is subordinate to the deeper 
 truth that this opposition is a part of the penalty 
 we pay under a system which sharply divorces the 
 interest of labor from that of capital. Again 
 it is not unionism but the system which must finally 
 be held responsible. The remedy can be found 
 only in an industrial order wherein men can work 
 safe from the haunting tragic fear none the less 
 potent because it is sometimes illusory that their 
 very efficiency may be their undoing, that their 
 speed will bring unemployment or their skill be the 
 means of lowering their own or their fellow work- 
 ers' wages. 
 
 How can that be achieved apart from the trade 
 union? Without security in their work how can 
 the wage-earners have effective interest in their 
 work, and how can they have security without or- 
 ganization ? Without the union how can the more 
 cut-throat forms of competition, so fatal to the 
 workers' standard of life, ever be abolished? 
 How can that standing menace of civilization, un-
 
 RECONSTRUCTION AND THE UNION 175 
 
 employment, ever be mastered? Without the 
 union how can understandings be reached which 
 will permit of the full application of beneficent 
 science within industry? Without the union how 
 can the sense of impotence be overcome which 
 leads to violence, disintegration, and revolution- 
 aryism? Without the union how can the most ele- 
 mentary safe-guards of free men, in face of the 
 vast power of organized capital described in the 
 preceding chapter, be attained? It is the union 
 which has made possible the remarkable spells of 
 fruitful peace which have been witnessed in, for 
 example, the cotton industry of Lancashire and 
 the bituminous coal industry of America. It is 
 the trade union bargaining freely and strongly 
 with the employers' organization which has opened 
 up the new way of trade agreements, giving the 
 administration of a constitution to such industries 
 as transportation, mining in many of its branches, 
 the building trades, the pottery trade, the printing 
 trades, and the metal trades. It is the union, 
 through its national organization, which has made 
 possible during the crisis of war, the establishment 
 of machinery to prevent industrial disputes, the 
 redistribution of labor according to war needs,
 
 176 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 and the acceleration and increase of output. And 
 finally, beyond these beginnings and temporary 
 expedients, it is only by aid of the union that the 
 new order of industry can be achieved. 
 
 What precise form this evolution will take can 
 scarcely be foreseen. Any real harmony seems 
 still far off, must indeed be far off while the in- 
 terests of labor and capital remain so disparate. 
 Labor will have to cease to be mere servant and 
 capital mere owner before such harmony is realiz- 
 able. The cleavage of function which the indus- 
 trial age introduced must be redintegrated into 
 some form of community of function, so that the 
 terms "capital" and "labor" lose their present 
 day distinctiveness as applied to groups of men. 
 If that cooperative ideal is a vain dream, so also 
 is harmony. But in any case it lies in the remoter 
 future, towards which nevertheless it is necessary 
 to work. In the meantime, not harmony but only 
 equilibrium is possible, through the realization, 
 by these opposing and not unequally matched 
 forces, of their indispensibility to one another. 
 This realization will naturally create not so much 
 a common organization of employers and em- 
 ployed as a common meeting ground of their re-
 
 RECONSTRUCTION AND THE UNION 177 
 
 spective organizations. The direction of immedi- 
 ate progress is, in America at least, not common 
 or joint councils in the strict sense, but a system 
 giving the representatives of organized labor 
 regular access to the representatives of organized 
 capital. With the existing cleavage of interest 
 a common council would tend to be common merely 
 in name, the meeting together of two utterly dis- 
 tinct groups. The immediate establishment of 
 common industrial councils might also endanger, 
 in all except the best organized industries, the de- 
 velopment of unionism, which is the intermediate 
 step towards the new order. 
 
 But equilibrium is a thousand times better than 
 chaos. That it is practicable (though never se- 
 cure) many modern instances, such as that of the 
 bituminous coal industry above referred to, reveal. 
 But it is practicable only if certain principles, still 
 far from general acceptance, are conceded by both 
 sides. These principles involve the agreement: 
 
 ( i ) On the part of the employers, not to dismiss 
 or prejudice employes for union member- 
 ship or activity; to confer, on all matters di- 
 rectly affecting them, with the representatives
 
 178 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 of organized labor or generally of the em- 
 ployes concerned; to permit the reference of 
 grievances, appeals against "unfair" dis- 
 missal, &c., to the joint meeting of represen- 
 tatives or a special grievance committee 
 similarly constituted. 
 
 (2) On the part of the workers, to discounte- 
 anace deliberate limitation of output and 
 other hindrances to productivity, no longer 
 necessary to protect their working conditions, 
 and to insist on the fulfillment by all workers 
 of contracts and trade agreements entered 
 into with the employers. 
 
 What results can be attained by mutual accept- 
 ance of these principles the war-time experience 
 of many belligerent states has revealed. The war 
 made intensive and uninterrupted production im- 
 perative. Means had to be devised which would 
 ensure that the incessant conflict of labor and capi- 
 tal should not for the time being issue in strikes 
 and lockouts, particularly in plants working on 
 government orders. The most effective means 
 was found to be a direct contract between the gov- 
 ernment as ultimate employer and the labor or-
 
 RECONSTRUCTION AND THE UNION 179 
 
 ganizations, giving the latter both recognition and 
 the status of a partner, through representation in 
 the determination of policy. This was the plan 
 followed by the Navy Department, the Emerg- 
 ency Fleet Corporation and its Shipbuilding Labor 
 Adjustment Board, the fuel administration, the 
 railroad administration and one division of the 
 War Department. It was finally embodied in the 
 constitution of the National War Labor Board. 
 All this was an entirely new policy, so far as the 
 Government of the United States is concerned. 
 But it made possible the notable achievement of 
 nearly uninterrupted industrial activity on an enor- 
 mous scale, in the cantonment construction camps, 
 in the docks, shipyards, navy yards, and arsenals, 
 in the coal mines and on the railroads. That this 
 new policy, and not alone the favorable concomi- 
 tants of patriotic enthusiasm and relatively high 
 wages, was responsible for productive efficiency is 
 suggested by the contrasting conditions in branches 
 of industry, such as the lumber camps and copper 
 mines, where no such methods prevailed. It is 
 of course neither possible nor desirable to apply 
 under peace conditions the compulsions exercised 
 during the war, but the lesson of the dependence of
 
 i8o LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 efficiency on the active cooperation of both sides 
 should not be lost. 
 
 It may be in place to suggest here certain fur- 
 ther principles, which must be accepted before 
 common councils, in the strict sense of the term 
 "common," could be established with success. 
 They are as briefly as possible these two : 
 
 '( i ) That each workshop, occupation or industry 
 is a cooperative unity, in which all the mem- 
 bers, management and workers too, have a 
 vital interest, and where a vital interest, 
 should have also a voice in decisions that 
 affect it not subordinated to the claims of 
 any outside and merely passive ownership; 
 
 (2) That each workshop, occupation or indus- 
 try is but a specialized division of the com- 
 munity, cooperating with all others in sup- 
 plying a nation's needs; that it is therefore 
 fulfilling a national service and a service 
 that indeed goes often beyond the nation 
 united with all other services in national 
 obligation under the sanction of the State. 
 
 The distance we are from the acceptance of 
 such principles is the distance between us and real
 
 RECONSTRUCTION AND THE UNION 181 
 
 industrial harmony. Its greatness is the justifica- 
 tion for the opinion that meantime we must 
 look on equilibrium as the direct aim to be 
 achieved, not a static equilibrium, which is im- 
 possible in human affairs, but a "moving equi- 
 librium" leading by orderly process to a goal con- 
 jectured but unknown. 
 
 I have insisted on the necessity of organiza- 
 tion as the first condition of order and progress. 
 How needful it is a contrasting glance at the con- 
 dition of unorganized labor reveals. It is, taken 
 as a whole, the most depressed part of labor, the 
 most exploited, the most inefficient, the most un- 
 skilled, the most prone to the extremes of brutal 
 indifference and spasmodic violence. It is the 
 least socialized, the least able to achieve its own 
 salvation. For the more unorganized types of 
 labor the direct intervention of the State, by way 
 of Trade Boards charged with the task of assur- 
 ing minimum rates and decent conditions of work, 
 is the only immediate hope. And this is a make- 
 shift, an acknowledgment of the helplessness of 
 that class to secure its own deliverance, merely 
 a means of making its work tolerable and no
 
 1 82 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 longer a peril to the standards of the rest of the 
 community. 
 
 In a word, it is not organized labor that is the 
 peril the real peril to the nation is unorganized 
 labor, and the spirit that would keep labor un- 
 organized. The organization of labor is a basis 
 necessary for any permanent reconstruction in in- 
 dustry, for any creation of order out of our grow- 
 ing chaos.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 LABOR, IMMIGRATION AND THE BIRTH RATE 
 
 Why a surplus of labor? Is unemployment in- 
 evitable? Organized redirection of the de- 
 mand for labor the way to remove unemploy- 
 ment. The answer to the Malthusian chal- 
 lenge. The need for immigrational control. 
 The literary tests. A suggestion for a more 
 flexible mode of control. 
 
 "AT nature's mighty feast there is no vacant 
 cover" for every new comer in a world already 
 possessed. This was the substance of a famous 
 parable written by Malthus at the end of the i8th 
 century. Most significant changes have taken 
 place since then. Forces which he saw but did 
 not appreciate have assumed a new importance. 
 The principle of population which he formulated 
 and feared has been profoundly modified by the 
 psychological reactions of an age that no longer 
 fears the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Some 
 thinkers have in fact already passed to the con- 
 trary pessimism, forecasting a world of dwindling 
 
 183
 
 184 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 population and "race-suicide." Whether that 
 pessimism is not equally vain is a question I have 
 elsewhere discussed. 1 What I wish to insist on is 
 that, in spite of all this change, one corner-stone 
 of the argument of Malthus remains as solid as 
 ever. It is the permanent "surplus" of labor, the 
 over-supply of workers relative to the demand for 
 their services. This constitutes the crucial ques- 
 tion of the modern industrial order. 
 
 Why should there be chronic unemployment? 
 Why should the supply of labor in every indus- 
 trial country normally exceed the demand? Why 
 is there not "enough work to go round"? Why 
 should the fear of over-production characterize a 
 civilization beset by poverty? It is not that, abso- 
 lutely, too much of any good is produced to satisfy 
 the desire for it. The wants of the whole popula- 
 tion for any good have never been satisfied. It is 
 not that, absolutely, the population is already too 
 great for the land and its resources. There is more 
 unemployment, as a rule, in the United States and 
 Canada, with their unfilled fertile lands, than in 
 the United Kingdom. It is not that, absolutely, 
 the capital is lacking which can set labor profit- 
 *In my book Community, Bk. Ill, c. VI, i, and c. VII, $5.
 
 IMMIGRATION AND THE BIRTH RATE 185 
 
 ably to work. In the words of Mr. Beveridge, 
 "unemployment is a question not of the scale of 
 industry but of its organization." While capital, 
 relatively to population, has greatly increased in 
 industrial lands, unemployment has not propor- 
 tionately decreased. On this point the great war 
 has also a plain lesson to teach us. Its insatiate 
 demand for capital has tapped no less adequate 
 sources of supply, because there existed the will 
 and the organization to provide it. The capital 
 necessary so to organize industry as to set all the 
 genuine unemployed to work to work fruitful 
 in the production of further wealth, not, like war- 
 fare, destructive of the wealth that already exists 
 is but a trifle in comparison. If the will and 
 the organization were forthcoming, the problem 
 of unemployment would be solved forever. 
 
 What is the nature of this requisite organiza- 
 tion? The root of unemployment and of a hun- 
 dred economic maladjustments is the unregu- 
 lated relation of demand to supply. In respect 
 of labor, demand controls, not supply, but the 
 utilization and direction of the supply. "De- 
 mand," as a great English writer in another field 
 of thought has said, "is very imperious, and supply
 
 186 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 must be very suppliant." Demand is a function 
 of the existing distribution of wealth, and directs 
 the supply so as to maintain that distribution or 
 even to enhance its inequality. The poorer you 
 are, the less your demand (however great your 
 need) ; the less therefore the provision for satis- 
 fying your demand. The richer you are, the 
 greater your demand (however socially insig- 
 nificant your yet unsatisfied need) and therefore 
 the greater the diversion of labor to satisfy your 
 demand. From which it follows that superfluity 
 and poverty (and therefore unemployment) have 
 a common root. Every increase of capital and 
 in normal times there is an almost automatic in- 
 crease of capital from year to year makes greater 
 prosperity possible, but the general industrial dis- 
 organization, of which the competitive inferiority 
 of the labor supply has hitherto been an essential 
 quality, so defeats its beneficent working that the 
 great mass of poverty seems little if at all dimin- 
 ished. 
 
 If the preceding analysis, which is the merest 
 summary of the conclusions of the most compe- 
 tent investigations into the whole problem, is 
 true, it follows that a certain organized redirec-
 
 IMMIGRATION AND THE BIRTH RATE 187 
 
 tion of the demand for labor is the radical cure 
 for genuine unemployment. Valuable aids are 
 found in the systematization of labor, through pub- 
 lic employment exchanges, through industrial and 
 general training and guidance, through whatever 
 regularization of seasonal trades is feasible, 
 through the methods which reduce labor turn- 
 over, through the decasualization of casual labor, 
 and through the control of hours and conditions 
 of works. But these, important and necessary as 
 they are, rather prepare the way for than provide 
 the solution. The demand must adapt itself more 
 adequately to the supply than it is now doing if 
 ever the central evil of modern industry is to be 
 overcome. Or, in other words, the supply must 
 help to direct the demand no less than vice versa. 
 The first great step on this road will come through 
 the deliberate control of public work, its distribu- 
 tion, acceleration and retardation, according to 
 the changing conditions of the "labor market." 
 Now that governments, municipalities and other 
 public authorities are becoming ever greater em- 
 ployers of labor, their power over the distribu- 
 tion of labor is growing enormous. This gives 
 them a direct means of controlling the whole labor
 
 i88 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 market and thereby minimizing unemployment. 
 The necessities of the transition period will prob- 
 ably compel them to apply this means as never 
 before, and one may hope that the new insight 
 into industrial conditions which they have been 
 forced to acquire during the war will enable them 
 to apply it with resolution and intelligence. So a 
 great beneficent experiment may be set up which 
 others than public authorities will follow. 
 
 I have said nothing of unemployment insurance 
 as a remedy. It should be a last resort, and the 
 more intelligence is applied in the directions al- 
 ready indicated the less will it be necessary. It 
 should certainly be adopted in so far as other 
 measures fail to abolish genuine unemployment. 
 (Here, as elsewhere, it is necessary very clearly 
 to distinguish genuine unemployment from the 
 "out-of-workness" of the unhappily large mass of 
 the industrially disqualified, who require treatment 
 of a different order altogether.) But unemploy- 
 ment insurance is a confession of failure. The 
 funds devoted to this palliative would in a wiser 
 society be devoted to setting the recipients of in- 
 surance to fruitful work. 
 
 It is to be observed that a certain assumption
 
 IMMIGRATION AND THE BIRTH RATE 189 
 
 has underlain the argument of these last para- 
 graphs. Until quite recently all plans to abolish 
 unemployment awakened the Malthusian chal- 
 lenge. Your schemes are well enough, the objec- 
 tor would say, if it were not for the factor of 
 population. Control that if you can and dare, 
 but, until you do, don't think to control unemploy- 
 ment. You may absorb the existing surplus of 
 labor by industrial readjustment, but the very se- 
 curity you thus ensure will breed future surpluses 
 to break your newly established order. Your 
 Eden, he would say in the famous words of Hux- 
 ley, "would have its serpent, and a very subtle 
 beast, too. Man shares with the rest of the liv- 
 ing world the mighty instinct of reproduction and 
 its consequences, the tendency to multiply with 
 great rapidity. The better the measure of the ad- 
 ministrator achieved their object, the more com- 
 pletely the destructive agencies of the state of 
 nature were defeated, the less would that multi- 
 plication be checked." Here in fact, he would 
 tell us, is the real explanation of the peramnent 
 surplus of labor above the demand. 
 
 And until quite recently he would have been 
 well justified in his objections. But the answer
 
 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 has grown so convincing, is so luminous in the sta- 
 tistics of the declining birth-rates of all advancing 
 civilizations, that our Malthusian has retreated 
 from his main position, and now talks only of par- 
 ticular menaces such as spring from the relative 
 "fertility" of the poor as contrasted with the well- 
 to-do, and of the simpler as contrasted with the 
 more cultured races, not of the general menaces of 
 "over-population." Even on these remoter 
 grounds he is no longer safe from attack, and may 
 be assailed by other statistics which show the cor- 
 relation of high birth-rate and high death-rate, as 
 well as by considerations of the advance of knowl- 
 edge and the percolation of habit from "upper" 
 to "lower" social strata, and from advanced to 
 backward people. 
 
 The assumption then which has underlain the 
 argument is that in the more advanced countries 
 the development of industrial technique and the 
 exploitation of the resources of the earth is in 
 our age, and clearly promises to be in future, at 
 least sufficient to keep pace with the growth of 
 population. This fact is of the very first impor- 
 tance. If it were not a fact, all our plans to 
 create a new industrial order a better order of
 
 any kind would be vain, for every attempt to 
 check the more pernicious competition which low- 
 ers the standard of life would be defeated by the 
 operation of a baffling and inexorable law. The 
 "principle of diminishing returns" would frustrate 
 all efforts for human betterment and mock all 
 visions of future progress. Those who look with 
 fear on a falling birth-rate should bethink them- 
 selves also of these things. They should consider 
 whether this decline, apart from the incident per- 
 versions which accompany every human process, 
 is not the index of a new equilibrium of human 
 life, which is being established as a result of its 
 advance and is the very condition of any further? 
 advance. They should ask in the light of what- 
 ever philosophy of life they are able to attain, 
 whether the quality of humanity is not a supremer 
 consideration than its quantity. These questions 
 would indeed be easier to ask and to answer if 
 once the spirit of militarism were exorcised out of 
 our civilization. For it is one of the more abom- 
 inable characteristics of militarism that it holds 
 most in regard those quantitative properties of 
 men which can be massed as mere external power, 
 contemning all real values. While it rules in any
 
 192 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 nation, it compels all others that would worship 
 truer gods to sacrifice some of these values at its 
 shrine. 
 
 There remains for consideration one source of 
 over-supply which Malthus had no need to con- 
 sider in that regard, but which has caused much 
 doubt and questioning among ourselves. I refer 
 of course to immigration. It is a subject beset 
 by unusual difficulties. Here prejudice and inter- 
 est combine and cross most subtly and curiously to 
 warp our judgments, and the most opposite con- 
 siderations unite the advocates of restriction and 
 of the open door. If we confine ourselves, how- 
 ever, to the direct question of the effect of immi- 
 gration on labor, the main factors of the situation 
 seem fairly clear. 
 
 I believe that a carefully restrictive control of 
 immigration is absolutely necessary to the estab- 
 lishment of the kind of industrial order already 
 suggested. Not because there is no room or fruit- 
 ful work in America for all the myriads who 
 annually (in normal times) pass through its gates. 
 The vast resources of this continent could sustain, 
 given scientific cultivation of the land, and an 
 economic distribution of the people, we know not
 
 IMMIGRATION AND THE BIRTH RATE 193 
 
 how many times its present population. And not 
 because the newcomers, from Europe at any rate, 
 cannot be assimilated into American life and 
 raised where raising is in question to Ameri- 
 can standards. The response to the American 
 environment of the children of the foreign born, 
 even of those whom we remissly suffer to be in- 
 sulated in racial colonies, is a most remarkable 
 phenomenon. But the true reason for restrictive 
 control is an economic one. The Report of the 
 Immigration Commission provides much evidence 
 to show that the low-skilled occupations into which 
 the mass of immigrants enter are considerably 
 overstocked. Too cheap labor is, like all cheap 
 things, very expensive in the long run. Our so- 
 ciety as a whole, as well as those directly con- 
 cerned, suffers on account of the low standards, 
 the overcrowding and the infection, the disor- 
 ganization and the exploitation, which are the 
 other side of too cheap labor. These evils can- 
 not be avoided so long as unskilled myriads are 
 allowed to flood the labor market. No stand- 
 ards can be maintained, no order can be built up 
 in face of the competition of the immigrant-re-
 
 194 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 cruited reserves of unemployed. This indisput- 
 able fact is the true ground for restriction. 
 
 The literacy test recommended by the Immigra- 
 tion Commission and enacted by Congress should 
 prove a valuable safeguard. It affords the 
 simplest, most practicable, and least invidious 
 form of selection. Whether it is sufficient re- 
 mains of course to be seen. But a more flexible 
 method of control, working along the same lines, 
 would have obvious advantages if feasible. The 
 following plan is here suggested with this end in 
 view: 
 
 The whole question of employment and unem- 
 ployment is so central as to call for the undivided 
 consideration of a body (or a branch of the De- 
 partment of Labor) specially allocated to this task. 
 Such a body might be constituted as a Federal ad- 
 visory council in connection with a national bureau 
 of public employment offices. It would formulate 
 common standards for these offices and advise on 
 common policy. Maintaining close touch with 
 the whole demand-and-supply situation of labor, 
 it would be in an excellent position to suggest from 
 time to time a public works policy in harmony with 
 that situation. It would advise accordingly as
 
 IMMIGRATION AND THE BIRTH RATE 195 
 
 to the distribution, the acceleration or the retarda- 
 tion of works undertaken or projected by the Fed- 
 eral Government and also by such other public 
 authorities, state or local, as could be induced to 
 cooperate with it. 
 
 Would not such a body be better qualified than 
 any other to say, purely in terms of the employ- 
 ment situation, when and how far it was desirable 
 to relax or tighten the immigration tests? The 
 council would of course be able only to advise, and 
 considerations other than the condition of the 
 labor market might have to be weighed before 
 action were taken in any particular case. But 
 the paramount consideration is the condition of 
 employment, as viewed by those who understand 
 the prospective as well as the existing condition of 
 demand and supply. The raising or lowering of 
 the admission tests would not be a difficult matter. 
 Literacy is a question of degree, and simple 
 gradations could readily be determined, with the 
 rudimentary ability to read and write as the low- 
 est grade. These tests and standards, together 
 with the ordinary regulations affecting immigra- 
 tion, could be administered under direction of the 
 consular service in Europe and elsewhere, and thus
 
 196 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 the hardships, delays and disappointments of re- 
 jection and deportation on this side would be 
 avoided. A consular certificate would be the neces- 
 sary and sufficient permit of the intending immi- 
 grant. 
 
 There are of course real difficulties involved 
 in this plan, but we must bear in mind that we are 
 dealing with an extremely difficult problem. The 
 present time offers a most favorable opportunity 
 for judicious experimentation while the check 
 which the war and its aftermath have given to 
 immigration lasts. Finally, any general policy of 
 immigration should, if possible, be one concerted 
 between the United States and Canada, on account 
 of their common interest in the matter and of the 
 frontier difficulties and evasions arising from a 
 discrepancy of standards.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE LABOR OF WOMEN 
 
 The position of women in industry. The squat 
 pyramid. The influence of the war on the 
 sphere of women's work. The unequal com- 
 petition of men and women. The dilemma of 
 "equal pay for equal work" Is there a way 
 out? 
 
 THE famous declaration that a country cannot 
 endure half servile and half free may be directed 
 with peculiar force to the present relationship of 
 men and women in industry. Unless the woman 
 worker too is emancipated, the emancipation of 
 the man worker must always be hazardous and in- 
 complete. This is not the ultimate reason why 
 society should be concerned over the industrial 
 status of women, but it is that which is most likely 
 to appeal to those men workers whose too narrow 
 but quite natural fears have led them to oppose, 
 in the case of women, the claims on which they 
 
 have been most insistent for themselves. 
 
 197
 
 198 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 The lot of women in industry is, without quali- 
 fication, the most damning indictment of our pres- 
 ent system. Consider for a moment the general 
 character it presents. As an economic structure, 
 the work of women in industry, before the period 
 of the war, might be likened to a broad-based and 
 very squat pyramid. The lowest tier would in- 
 clude the multitudes of women in the "sweated in- 
 dustries," seamstresses, tailoresses, dressmakers, 
 lacemakers, flo.wermakers, boxmakers, and all 
 others engaged in that dismal survival of the old 
 in the new, the home finishing of factory goods; 
 with these must also be grouped many of the 
 workers in uncontrolled semi-domestic factories, 
 as for example in small canneries, bakeshops, and 
 laundries all these subject, between the intervals 
 of unemployment, to excessive hours of labor and 
 to conditions that undermine the health of body 
 and spirit. And by this labor, patient and persistent 
 beyond the labor of the scripturally commended 
 ant, they earn so poor a pittance that great num- 
 bers of them are permanently underfed, perma- 
 nently deprived of the comforts and decencies 
 of life. Arising out of that level, by fine grada- 
 tions, come the ranks of women who feed and
 
 THE LABOR OF WOMEN 199 
 
 tend machines, drudge labor badly paid; and 
 with these the majority of salesgirls in stores. 
 From that level there emerge the office-workers, 
 stenographers and secretaries; and above these, in 
 rapidly diminishing numbers towards the apex of 
 the pyramid, the women managers and entrepre- 
 neurs, the "business women" of modern days. 
 
 The youth of the nation's womanhood, in ever- 
 increasing multitudes, is thrust by economic forces 
 into the lowest tiers of this squat pyramid, with in 
 general no industrial training, no guidance, no 
 fit preparation in general education, no prospect 
 but that of escape by marriage. Before the war 
 nearly half the women workers of America were 
 under 25 years of age, and of those over 15 years 
 of age 80 per cent (according to the evidence of 
 the U. S. Census Bureau, 1905) received less than 
 what might have been roughly regarded as an 
 average subsistence-rate, i. e. $8 per week. 
 
 It is clear that here we have a situation deserv- 
 ing most earnest consideration, if by any means 
 the womankind of our civilization can be rescued 
 from the drift of those social-economic forces 
 which have brought about this result. Nowhere 
 is the need of persistent industrial rebuilding
 
 200 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 greater than here. Before we discuss it, however, 
 we must observe the significant changes occasioned 
 by the war, the further great influx of women into 
 wage-earning work, the direct replacement of men 
 by women, and the entry of women into occupa- 
 tions hitherto monopolized by men. 
 
 The process may be seen more clearly under 
 European conditions, where the pressure and the 
 displacement have been greater in proportion than 
 in America. Thus in the United Kingdom, by 
 January, 1918, the number of women and girls in 
 industrial occupations had increased, as compared 
 with July, 1914, from 2, 175, 500 to 2,708,500, and 
 in other occupations (commercial, agricultural, 
 transport, professional, and governmental) from 
 1,099,500 to 2,042,500, making a total increase of 
 44 per cent. The same authority (the British 
 Labor Gazette) places at 1,442,000 the instances 
 in which women have directly replaced men. In 
 the earlier period of the war the influx of women 
 was mainly into the unskilled occupations in which 
 they had previously been engaged, but the pressure 
 of military demands gradually broke through the 
 barriers of convention prejudice, and both real and 
 unreal sex-distinction which had made certain oc-
 
 THE LABOR OF WOMEN aoi 
 
 cupations, such as those of bank-clerk, ticket-col- 
 lector, conductor, chauffeur, switch-tender, and 
 many others, predominantly or entirely a male pre- 
 serve. 
 
 These changes, which have occurred to a greater 
 or less extent in all belligerent countries, make 
 more imperative the settlement of an old industrial 
 problem, the relation of women to men in economic 
 life. The pre-war position was most unsatisfac- 
 tory. Here, as elsewhere, the civilized world 
 had allowed itself to become the victim of its own 
 technological advance. There was perhaps never 
 a time when the working spheres of men and 
 women were quite distinct Eve delved as well as 
 span but there was certainly a time, before the 
 days of wagery and machinery, when the unequal 
 competition of women and men was unknown. 
 The industrial revolution put an end to that, and 
 its later developments, breaking ever more com- 
 pletely the system of apprenticeship and the de- 
 marcation of crafts, fostered a very direct an- 
 tagonism between the interests of men and of 
 women in industry. Economic necessity drove 
 women into industry, but under conditions which 
 ensured that, wherever they entered in numbers,
 
 202 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 the rate of wages fell below subsistence level. 
 (Even in occupations where men retained their 
 "monopoly," the fact that their womenfolk en- 
 tered into industry, and thus contributed to the 
 family wage, lowered their competitive limit and 
 probably tended to reduce their wages. This 
 conclusion is suggested at any rate by the lower 
 level of men's wages in "textile" towns, where 
 nearly all the adult members of working families 
 are engaged in industrial work, as compared with 
 the rates in the "steel" towns, where the men form 
 the majority of workers.) It was thus inevitable 
 that men should jealously guard from their in- 
 vasion whatever preserves they could. But, as 
 the workers have so often found, the industrial 
 process is too powerful to be stayed by conven- 
 tions, and the war has merely hastened an inevit- 
 able evolution. No restoration of old privileges 
 is likely to avail; no general withdrawal of women 
 from the newly occupied territory is probable 
 or even desirable. Another way out has to be 
 found. 
 
 The root of the trouble is of course the social- 
 economic distinction between the man and the 
 woman, the different relationship to the family
 
 THE LABOR OF WOMEN 203 
 
 unit which makes it possible for women, in spite of 
 various real handicaps of sex, to underbid men. 
 It is a peculiarly ironic situation, since it was his 
 sex-advantage, from the economic point of view, 
 which placed on man's shoulders the economic bur- 
 den of the family, thus enabling the woman, in 
 the turn of circumstance, so to outbid his labor as 
 to imperil the basis of their common welfare. 
 
 So little has been done to meet this situation, 
 so closely is it bound up with those sex prejudices 
 which still tangle our civilization, that only a first 
 approach to the solution of the problem seems 
 possible to-day. What is in the first place most 
 necessary and most feasible is the organization of 
 women workers. Most feasible, but still very 
 difficult, in view of their own apathy, of their gen- 
 eral transitoriness in industry, of the obstacles put 
 in the way not merely by employers but often by 
 male workers, and of the never-exhausted reserves 
 of employable women. Nevertheless, such re- 
 markable and fruitful examples of organization 
 among women as have been achieved in the cot- 
 ton industry of Lancashire and in the garment- 
 making industry of New York, Chicago, and other 
 cities, offer grounds for hope. It is also significant
 
 204 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 that some unions formerly limited to men have 
 opened their ranks to women and are furthering 
 their organization. The activity of the Women's 
 Trade Union Leagues of Great Britain and of the 
 United States respectively and of the British Na- 
 tional Federation of Women Workers has met 
 with a certain degree of success. What is most 
 obvious to all who have been in contact with this 
 work is the need for persistent education, a task 
 in which the male trade unionists, in the interest 
 of themselves as well as in that of the women 
 workers, should take the greatest share. 
 
 The phrase "equal pay for equal work" is often 
 taken as pointing the goal to be sought in the re- 
 lation of men and women in industry. But the 
 phrase, we ought clearly to realize, represents an 
 ideal still far distant, and one which, like some 
 other phrases expressing a common standard for 
 men and women, is by no means self-explanatory. 
 If all industry were on a piece-work basis, the ap- 
 plication would be simpler. But the real differ- 
 ences of strength, aptitude, and endurance, be- 
 tween men and women make its application to 
 time-work a matter of great difficulty. Here the 
 actual differences in economic efficiency, varying
 
 THE LABOR OF WOMEN 205 
 
 as they do for different types of work in ways 
 which only experience reveals, must first be de- 
 termined, and this should be the work of a joint 
 committee in each case, comprising, besides repre- 
 sentatives of the management, both women and 
 men workers. For that large group of occupa- 
 tions wherein the majority of workers are women 
 receiving below-subsistence wages, the only prac- 
 ticable method at present seems to be the estab- 
 lishment of Trade Boards, on the lines initiated 
 by the British Act of 1909, or of Minimum Wage 
 Boards, as adopted in principle by the legislation 
 of over a dozen American States and of a few 
 Canadian Provinces. 
 
 All this is of course but a fragment of that 
 greater organization which is needed to assure the 
 emancipation of women from their present eco- 
 nomic dependence and of men from its direct and 
 indirect reactions upon themselves. 
 
 For to reorganize the industrial position of 
 women on the lines just indicated, working to- 
 wards the attainment of virtual equality of re- 
 turn for equality of service, is to accept one horn 
 of an old dilemma, not to remove it. The dilem- 
 ma is simply this: if women receive unequal pay
 
 206 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 for equal work, it is unfair and injurious to them- 
 selves, and at the same time it creates a type of 
 competition which is unfair and injurious to men; 
 if on the other hand women receive equal pay for 
 equal work, is that, too, not unfair and injurious 
 to men who, as family "bread-winners," still bear 
 the heavier burden? If taxation is considered 
 fair when it is graduated in accordance with the 
 economic capacities of the payer, why not wage- 
 rates graduated in accordance with the economic 
 burdens of the payee ? Would not the very rem- 
 edy proposed against unfair competition, equality 
 of pay, operate to produce another and perhaps 
 more fatal inequality? And is not the disparity 
 of burden in question, establishing as it does dif- 
 ferential limits of competition for men and for 
 women respectively, one of the causes which 
 naturally produced the difference of rate? If 
 you abolish the difference, stemming competition 
 by decreeing equality of rates, what guarantee is 
 there that this equality is consistent with the neces- 
 sary level set as a minimum for the family bread- 
 winner? 
 
 The dilemma is real and not to be evaded. By 
 itself the alternative for which we have argued
 
 207 
 
 is no complete solution of our problem. So. far as 
 that can be found, it must be sought through the 
 development of the general economic independence 
 of women, not merely of their equality in wage- 
 earning. Here is a momentous enterprise that 
 civilization may some day undertake. It involves, 
 in especial, such a reorganization of society that 
 the task of raising children is itself accounted 
 an economic service (being also of course in- 
 finitely more) and not a cause of dependency. It 
 is the partial independence, economically, of 
 women which has created this fateful dilemma: 
 independence as receiving wages at all, partial as 
 receiving them on a different scale and only for 
 such service as lies without the peculiar function 
 of women. At one time all forms of work fell 
 within the wageless "household duties" of women 
 then there was no dilemma. This arose with 
 the displacement of home work which was a part 
 of what we call the Industrial Revolution. When 
 women followed their work to its new locus in fac- 
 tory or store, they broke, all unintentionally at 
 first, the circle of dependent domesticity. The 
 process goes on. Not only is the displacement of 
 home work proceeding as restaurant and bakeshop
 
 and laundry cater to needs once supplied within 
 the household, but there is besides a tendency to 
 the division of labor in household work itself, so 
 that wage-earners are being specialized to do the 
 cleaning and mending as well as the plumbing and 
 decorating. It may well be that some day only 
 the crowning occupation of motherhood will re- 
 main, so far as the majority of women are con- 
 cerned, outside the sphere of service which has a 
 direct economic valuation. If the suggestion that 
 the service of motherhood should also be included 
 within that sphere seems like sacrilege to some, 
 it is because of a false and itself degrading theory 
 of the dependence of other forms of service on 
 the economic return which they bring. It in no 
 way lessens the dignity or quality or social in- 
 commensurability of the service rendered by, say, 
 the statesman or, if you like, the priest that he 
 finds in his work the means of his support. At 
 present the most vital form of home service is an 
 alternative to wage-earning, and one result is, in 
 many cases, a disastrous dilemma. Many mar- 
 ried women and not these alone have to-day to 
 choose between home-duty and wage-earning, and 
 both themselves and their society must suffer
 
 THE LABOR OF WOMEN 209 
 
 whichever of these bitter alternatives they choose. 
 It is this truth which has led, in particular, to 
 schemes and systems of "mothers' allowances" or 
 "pensions," as a further step along the road lead- 
 ing to economic independence in return for service. 
 But this theme lies beyond the scope of our pres- 
 ent subject, beyond the compass of mere present- 
 day industrial reorganization. It must therefore 
 suffice to state the conviction that age-old social 
 forces, initiated long before the existing indus- 
 trial order was constituted, though particularly 
 active in our own times, are working towards the 
 consummation of that equality in difference of the 
 sexes which will bring, as one of its fruits, the 
 restoration of their economic harmony.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE DAY OF BIG THINGS 
 
 Reconstruction, not restoration. The three great 
 industrial problems of the day. One way of 
 solution for all three. Big industry and big 
 ideas. "More light but also more warmth." 
 Education, scientific and social. True and 
 false applications of science to industry. The 
 shortcomings of the Taylor plan. Experi- 
 ments in the garment industry. The need for 
 social education. The end behind the means. 
 Labor as also deliverer. 
 
 IT is a sound instinct that has prompted the 
 vogue of the word "reconstruction" in these days. 
 It is reconstruction, not restoration, that should 
 follow the war. Return is now impossible, across 
 the chasm of war, to the conditions that preceded 
 it. Return, were it possible, would in any case 
 be undesirable. Those who advocate it convict 
 themselves of the most fatal of inabilities, the 
 
 inability to profit by experience. Experience 
 
 210
 
 THE DAY OF BIG THINGS 211 
 
 teaches fools, runs the proverb: on the contrary, 
 the fools are just those whom experience does not 
 teach. 
 
 There are three great industrial problems that 
 now the war is ended demand our most earnest 
 thought, one of a temporary and two of a perma- 
 nent nature: 
 
 1 i ) How to absorb in the ordinary industries 
 of peace, with as little dislocation and discontent 
 as possible, the soldiers who have returned and the 
 workers who have been engaged on war work; 
 
 (2) How to remove the disintegrating con- 
 flict between labor and capital which was grow- 
 ing more and more bitter before the war; 
 
 (3) How to increase the efficiency and pro- 
 ductivity of industry, not only in order to make 
 good the material ravages of war, but to provide 
 those material resources on which though not on 
 them alone depend the removal of the existing 
 mass of poverty and the provision of that oppor- 
 tunity and leisure without which life remains 
 tragically unfulfilled. 
 
 These are tremendous problems. Taken to- 
 gether, they may well seem overwhelming. If 
 each had to find a separate solution, we might
 
 2U LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 well despair of the issue. But I hold that the 
 same solution can and must be found for all the 
 three. First let us face the surely obvious fact 
 that needs so great and so urgent cannot be met 
 without a drastic revision of the whole industrial 
 order. If we are not prepared for that we must 
 admit the alternative of drift and chaos. The 
 other alternative means the substitution of or- 
 ganized cooperation for industrial conflict and 
 disorganization. Some of the applications of this 
 principle we have already discussed a few out of 
 many. What these and other reforms can ac- 
 complish is, simply, the broadening of the common 
 interest. This involves, let us face it frankly, 
 the elimination of the mere wage-earner on the 
 one hand and consequently of the mere capitalist 
 on the other. The interests of these are inevit- 
 ably opposed. The opposing interests, if indeed 
 there is to be advance at all, must somehow be har- 
 monized, be assimilated. 
 
 This fact is being recognized by the more far- 
 sighted employers of labor. Thus Lord Lever- 
 hulme has said: "It is not only that the wage- 
 system, by precluding from a share of the fruits 
 of industry, is manifestly unfair, but it is also
 
 THE DAY OF BIG THINGS 213 
 
 apparent even to the least thoughtful that the 
 wage-system dulls and deadens the keenness of 
 even the best and most conscientious workers, and 
 produces a mob of 'ca' canny' shirkers and slack- 
 ers." 
 
 If this be true, what condemnation could be 
 more great? If it be true, is it not worth some 
 risk, some enterprise, some thought, some sacri- 
 fice, to establish a better system which will re- 
 place one so detrimental to human worth as well 
 as to material prosperity? And if that is possible 
 at all, it must be possible now, when the iron of 
 our customs has become malleable in the fire of 
 war. 
 
 It is the day of big things. We have witnessed 
 the biggest armed conflict of all history: we shall 
 miss its monstrous meaning unless we perceive it 
 as the clash of forces which our civilization had 
 engendered but was impotent to control. In the 
 face of the big forces, both material and spiritual, 
 which our age has brought to birth we have stood 
 like children possessed of a new engine whose 
 powers attract and frighten them or like the 
 magi of medieval story who raise a spirit so 
 mighty that they shrink back from its manifesta-
 
 214 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 tion. In industry, as elsewhere, bigness rules. 
 Economic forces unite and divide mankind over 
 all the earth, here bringing them together in one 
 vast network of production and exchange, there ; 
 in the apportionment of the spoils, cutting great 
 lines of cleavage between them. It is the day of 
 big things, but our ideas have been too narrow for 
 them. We have misunderstood bigness while we 
 admired and followed it. We have thought in 
 terms of size, of mere aggregation; of force, of 
 mere cumulation. But bigness is more than these. 
 Where it exists there must be a big order, too 
 or else the overgrown mass collapses of its own 
 mere weight. 
 
 Big industry demands big purpose. Big indus- 
 try has big problems, but it is thereby freed from 
 little problems. Small-scale business in a grow- 
 ing world is hand-to-mouth business, hazardously 
 competitive, unstable. No wide policy is here 
 possible, no statesmanship, no foundation of gen- 
 erous and secure relationship. Small business 
 must seek every immediate advantage, the profit 
 of the moment, lest another snatch it away. Life 
 becomes a struggle with little mercy, and the 
 worker in particular is never freed from grinding
 
 THE DAY OF BIG THINGS 215 
 
 exactions, the operation of the "iron law" which 
 pulls his wages to the subsistence level. Large- 
 scale business, in relation with the social and 
 economic conditions on which it depends, makes 
 possible a wider view, a more constructive policy. 
 By breaking the immediate insistence of the com- 
 petitive struggle it makes possible, could men only 
 shake off the habits of the passing age, the de- 
 liberate foundation of a more harmonious and en- 
 during order. 
 
 So men may come to build what, in comparison 
 with the present, may well be called the "great 
 society" not merely the great State, but that 
 manifold life of coordinated and yet spontaneous 
 activities which, instead of being dominated and 
 in part repressed by a State devoted to the pur- 
 suit of power, will find in the State one of its 
 essential organs. 
 
 To many such a project will appear the Uto- 
 pian dream of a new heaven and a new earth. 
 But every act of every man's life is a record of 
 his belief that the world can be changed for the 
 better so far as he is concerned and if his 
 action be a cooperative one, so far as that circle 
 can extend. Anyhow, it has now been made
 
 216 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 abundantly clear that men can make themselves a 
 new hell, which very fact may perhaps inspire 
 them to enhance their estimate of the possibility 
 of making a new heaven. In the order of social 
 causality there are upward and downward spirals. 
 Thus, in the labor field for instance, low efficiency 
 means low wages, which means low living stand- 
 ards, which react again on efficiency and on wages ; 
 high efficiency permits high wages, which in turn 
 make possible leisure and education, which make 
 possible higher efficiency, which makes possible 
 higher wages, and so on. Of course these spirals 
 of causality may be crossed and broken by social 
 forces of another kind. But they are nevertheless 
 real and most significant, and they justify at once 
 the hopes and the efforts of those who believe in 
 "reconstruction." 
 
 II 
 
 We have been concerned in these chapters 
 mainly with questions of organization. But or- 
 ganization is the embodiment of a spirit, and re* 
 organization requires in the first place a new spirit. 
 Science, though most needful, will not alone secure 
 the desired end. In the language of the British
 
 THE DAY OF BIG THINGS 217 
 
 Labor Manifesto there is needed "more light 
 but also more warmth." Science (in the nar- 
 rower sense of the term) must be supplemented 
 by fellowship. Only when these two link forces 
 can the battle be on. 
 
 We need, more than anything else, education. 
 All else depends upon that. We need a great de- 
 velopment of both technical and social education; 
 and the more attention we devote to the one the 
 more should we devote to the other. It is, quite 
 strictly, impossible to spend too much on education, 
 which is the soul of the progress of men and of na- 
 tions. Technical education is the source of power, 
 social education the source of understanding; and 
 power together with understanding has led man- 
 kind thus far on its untraveled road. It is a happy 
 sign that governments and peoples are awakening 
 to the immense value of scientific research and be- 
 ginning to make some proper provision for it, in- 
 stead of, as so often hitherto, regarding it as an 
 amiable luxury to be pursued by aid of such meager 
 resources as devoted scientists could muster. One 
 discovery of science may serve mankind better than 
 an age of unenlightened toil. But science is not
 
 218 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 enough. As the war has shown, it can either 
 destroy or fulfill. 
 
 It is when we come to the relationship of man 
 to man that this objective science proves inade- 
 quate. This may be illustrated by the fate of the 
 Taylor plan of "scientific management." Taylor 
 himself was particularly concerned with one kind 
 of industrial waste, that due to the maladjustment 
 of worker to work in the sphere of heavy un- 
 skilled labor. He wrote a famous little book to 
 demonstrate how the application of the simplest 
 scientific principles would save the worker from 
 overexertion and fatigue, and at the same time 
 effect a marvelous increase in his productivity. 
 The demonstration seemed complete. "Scientific 
 management" was acclaimed by many as a new 
 stage of the Industrial Revolution. Further ap- 
 plications of the principle were developed by Tay- 
 lor and his followers, such as Emerson and Gantt. 
 But the workers showed a particular hostility to 
 this method of saving them from strain and fa- 
 tigue, which disconcerted Taylor very much. It 
 was something more than the usual instinctive 
 fear of unemployment through efficiency. It was 
 also the not unjustified fear of economic degrada-
 
 THE DAY OF BIG THINGS 219 
 
 tion, of the loss of initiative, and of the destruc- 
 tion of those safeguards which they had painfully 
 built against internecine competition. Taylor had 
 thought and planned too much as if the worker 
 were merely a means to production, as if he were 
 to be treated like a machine, an automaton, a will- 
 less subject for stop-watch experimentation. His 
 not to reason why ; his to bend his back when he 
 was told, to rest when he was told, to start again 
 when he was told. And ^he worker, so strangely 
 objecting, spoiled many a. promising experiment. 
 Fundamentally, it was not that he preferred over- 
 exertion and fatigue; it was not that he preferred 
 to be less productive ; it was that, like the rest of 
 us, he was a human being first. 
 
 Yet the heart of Taylor's idea was sound. Inef- 
 ficiency is always evil, defeating our purposes, and 
 science is always right. What was wrong in Tay- 
 lor's scheme was, in a sense, that it was not scien- 
 tific enough. He did not realize how efficiency de- 
 pends on cooperation, and cooperation on common 
 interest. His science was inadequate because it 
 left out of account the most important factor of 
 all. His plan was no remedy against the condi- 
 tions which breed listlessness and slacking. It
 
 220 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 contained no answer, for example, to the unhappily 
 common argument, "What's the use? If we drive 
 too many rivets to-day, to-morrow we'll get hell 
 for letting up." On the contrary, it was calculated 
 to foster that spirit, by still further reducing the 
 interest of the worker in his work. It was not 
 scientific enough, because it ignored psychology. 
 It is there that the science of autocracy always 
 fails. 
 
 Inefficiency is always evil. There can be no 
 general gain from deliberate limitation of output, 
 whether adopted by labor with a view to prolong- 
 ing employment, or by capital with a view to in- 
 creasing profits. "What the nation needs," says 
 the British labor manifesto already quoted, "is 
 undoubtedly a great bound onward in its aggregate 
 productivity." That is a necessary condition of 
 our release from the heavy burden of poverty. 
 
 What then is the solution? It is instructive to 
 compar/e Taylor's method of applying science with 
 another which not long ago was adopted in that 
 home of significant experimentation, the dress and 
 waist industry of New York City. Here too 
 science has been invoked to redeem the loss due to 
 the ordinary haphazard methods of working. This
 
 THE DAY OF BIG THINGS 221 
 
 is being achieved, however, not through the fiat 
 of the management but by a joint board of em- 
 ployers and workers, with in addition some repre- 
 sentatives of the public. Employers and workers 
 have in fact cooperated to investigate the best con- 
 ditions of work, to make a real scientific study 
 of the nature of the materials and the skill of 
 the operators in their relation, to the various 
 results desired. The workers entered whole- 
 heartedly into this scheme of "work-analysis," as 
 being their own plan also, and they in fact share 
 in the expense as well as in the deliberation it 
 involves. It promises consequences of far-reach- 
 ing importance, an efficiency and a productivity 
 beneficial to all concerned. And it is more, not 
 less, scientific than the Taylor plan, because it takes 
 into consideration the psychology of the worker 
 as well as the technology of the work. Partial 
 and limited as it is, it does suggest the union of 
 science and fellowship. It is at least an attempt to 
 reconcile these two factors which must somehow 
 be reconciled, self-government and science, the one 
 the condition and the other the means of the 
 realization of all for which men live. 
 
 I have not cited this case as revealing any com-
 
 222 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 plete solution of the problem of industrial rela- 
 tions. It is far from that, but it is nevertheless 
 one of those experiments which reveal a step far- 
 ther on the road. The goal of science joined to 
 fellowship is still far ahead a thousand obstacles 
 of self-interest, ignorance, and misunderstanding 
 lie between but every step that brings it nearer 
 makes more clear that vision of the goal without 
 which nothing can be attained at all. 
 
 Science provides the means, but we badly need 
 enlightenment as to the ends they serve. Science 
 shows the road to productivity, but productivity 
 for what? If by our social indifference and lack 
 of direction we increase productivity by means 
 which wear or degrade the producer, what good 
 is that to society? If productivity is increased 
 by the labor of children, thus debarred from edu- 
 cation and subject to toil that rubs the bloom off 
 youth, does the country gain or lose ? What good 
 is it, at that price, to sell, let us say, more textiles 
 in the South American market? Productivity is 
 essential, but it must not be at the cost of the 
 producer. Productivity is justified only by the 
 welfare it makes actual. It is no idol to be 
 worshiped nor any justification of those specious
 
 THE DAY OF BIG THINGS 223 
 
 arguments which bid us acquiesce in evil condi- 
 tions for its sake, arguments which are cal- 
 culated to support our mental inertia and to main- 
 tain our mental comfort undisturbed. This is in- 
 deed the ugliest thing in human nature, that men 
 can come to value their comfort and serenity about 
 the life and happiness of multitudes. 
 
 Against this the only hope lies in social educa- 
 tion; education in the character and needs of our 
 society and in the real conditions on which its 
 greatness depends; education which makes plain 
 the end behind the means, the idea and the forms 
 of social welfare to which all economic activity 
 should be subservient; education which, in short, 
 can help men to live together as well as to work 
 together. For no more in living well than in 
 working well do our unguided instincts serve. 
 
 Education may not engender the spirit of hu- 
 manity, but it directs it, justifies it, and thereby 
 stimulates it. Education shows the economy of 
 cooperation. It discovers connection and mutual 
 dependence in what seemed unrelated. It alone 
 can destroy the basis in ignorance on which the 
 whole spirit of caste, which denies likeness and
 
 224 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 draws apart from that of which it is a part, is 
 founded. 
 
 If this avails not, nothing avails. You may 
 deny the old definition of man, which distinguished 
 him as the rational among animals. On the con- 
 trary, you may say, a bundle of prejudices and 
 habits, affinities and antipathies (which is merely 
 to insist that he is animal as well as rational). 
 But you cannot deny that he is, if not always 
 rational, still always reasoning, for he makes his 
 prejudices the grounds of his too simple conclu- 
 sions. The most irrational types, as, for example, 
 the jingo militarist, are often the most rigorous 
 in their logic. Now the prejudices of men de- 
 pend on their environment present and past, on 
 their social conditions, largely on their education. 
 r And no one denies that these may be in a measure 
 changed. This is, in a word, the case for social 
 education. The knowledge of the actual condi- 
 tions under which men live, of the causes and con- 
 sequences of their modes of life and of work, of 
 the ways in which institutions advance or retard 
 their ends this, most imperfect as it is, consti- 
 tutes the best means available for dispelling prej-
 
 THE DAY OF BIG THINGS 225 
 
 udices and so helping to convert reasoning into 
 rational creatures. 
 
 Labor may thus, in seeking deliverance, prove 
 also a deliverer. The "labor movement" in the 
 world of to-day, in so far as it insistently brings 
 to our attention the maladjustments of our social 
 order, is helping, and if wisely directed can help 
 still more, to break that bondage of custom and 
 complacency which robs ideals of their power.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 SOME PRACTICAL CONCLUSIONS 
 
 IF the argument set out in the preceding pages 
 holds, there are certain large policies which need 
 to be carried into effect that the great cleavage of 
 labor and capital may be narrowed to a normal 
 conflict of orderly social forces, instead of being 
 widened into the gulf of anarchy. These may be 
 summarized as : 
 
 I. The establishment of specific minima and 
 maxima to ensure a basic standard of well- 
 being, and 
 
 II. The assurance to the worker of his so- 
 cial position as finally not a cost of but a part- 
 ner in production. 
 
 The minima and maxima referred to in I would 
 include : 
 
 (a) maximum hours of work for every class 
 of worker in every industry (subject, of 
 course, to special arrangements for voluntary 
 
 overtime under certain circumstances) ; 
 226
 
 SOME PRACTICAL CONCLUSIONS 227 
 
 (b) minimum wage-rates for unskilled and 
 unorganized labor based on the principle 
 that no one who serves the community shall 
 receive for that service less than suffices to 
 ensure for him or her the material conditions 
 of healthy living; 
 
 (c) minimum wage-rates for every grade 
 and kind of worker above the classes included 
 under (b), determined periodically by joint 
 agreement of all parties directly concerned, 
 it being stipulated, as a necessary condition, 
 that all shall have free access to every form 
 of technical and occupational training and 
 thereby free entrance into any skilled trade; 
 
 (d) minimum age regulations so as to pre- 
 vent the exploitation of children and young 
 
 persons in industry, and to ensure the proper 
 education of all young persons; 
 
 (e) minimum requirements in each industry 
 to ensure the protection of the worker, male 
 and female, against all avoidable fatigue, ac- 
 cident, ill-health, poisoning and disease; to- 
 gether with insurance against the economic 
 consequences of these evils.
 
 228 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 Certain of these conditions can best be secured 
 by international agreement. The wider the area 
 over which uniformity in respect to minimal re- 
 quirements is attained, the better. Others are or 
 can be attained by independent legislative enact- 
 ment. But in nearly all cases such measures find 
 their strongest and best support in the organiza- 
 tion of the industries concerned as, within limits 
 prescribed by the State, self-determining bodies. 
 
 The minima referred to under (b) and (c) 
 are particularly hard to apply, and the develop- 
 ment of the principles involved will call for a 
 special subdivision of economic science. An 
 initial difficulty often raised may here be briefly 
 dismissed, viz. that a rise of wages means a rise 
 of prices, and so merely creates a vicious circle at 
 the end of which the worker is no better off than 
 before. This prima-fade view ignores the rela- 
 tion between prices and the currency-basis. The 
 employer who resists the demand for higher wages 
 knows better. In general it is not possible to 
 raise prices at will. No more is it possible to raise 
 wages at will, but only where the industry does or 
 can produce a surplus, a further portion of which 
 can be diverted to wages. (But the minimum
 
 SOME PRACTICAL CONCLUSIONS 229 
 
 wage should in every case be regarded as a first 
 lien on industry. Unless it can support that, it is 
 insolvent and an encumbrance to the general in- 
 dustrial life.) Under conditions of monopoly or 
 quasi-monopoly the control of prices by capital 
 may be such as to create the vicious circle alluded 
 to : and under these conditions special regulations 
 are necessary, nationalization being always possi- 
 ble as a last resort. 
 
 The assurances referred to in II must insure 
 the principle that labor is, from the social stand- 
 point, not a cost of but a partner in production, 
 and the following conditions are necessary: 
 
 (a) Security against unemployment and in 
 the last resort, wherever that proves impos- 
 sible, security (through insurance) against 
 the consequences of unemployment; 
 
 (b) Security against arbitrary dismissal, un- 
 fair treatment, and exploitation of any kind. 
 
 These assurances, however, cannot be attained, 
 nor in any case would they suffice, without a fur- 
 ther provision of the first importance, viz. that 
 the organizations of the workers, where they 
 exist, be brought into direct relation to the manage-
 
 230 LABOR IN THE CHANGING WORLD 
 
 ment, being fully informed of the condition and 
 progress of the industry in the particular work- 
 shop and in general, and that the workers, in so 
 far as organized, be admitted to any council which 
 has to do with determining the conditions of their 
 work. 
 
 A complementary condition is the recognition, 
 on the part of labor, that all organization creates 
 in some sense a monopoly, and that therefore, if 
 it receives these assurances against capitalistic 
 monopoly, the community is in turn entitled to a 
 still wider assurance, viz. that it shall have, 
 through freely constituted government, the final 
 voice, when that becomes necessary, in the co- 
 ordination of all the conflicting interests within it. 
 If labor is given these assurances that its own 
 special needs shall not be over-ridden, it must in 
 turn offer assurances that it shall not, in pursuit of 
 its own interests, disregard or break its obliga- 
 tions under law to the community at large. The 
 establishment of special industrial courts, advo- 
 cated in c. VII, would make vastly easier this co- 
 ordination of interests. 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LIBRARt
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 Santa Barbara 
 
 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW. 
 
 Series 9482
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 A 000712590 9 
 
 N9 1480 
 
 AGO