JOHN MITCHELL
 
 The Wage Earner 
 
 and His Problems 
 
 By 
 
 JOHN MITCHELL 
 
 WASHINGTON, D. C. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY P. S. RIDSDALE 
 
 1913
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY 
 
 P. S. RIDSDALE 
 
 FOR JOHN MITCHELL 
 
 PRINTED BY 
 
 NATIONAL CAPITAL PRESS, INC. 
 WASHINGTON, D. C.
 
 : 
 SANTA BAUUARA 
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 No one can doubt but that the reading habit is 
 firmly established among the American people. 
 We read and we read at home, on the street, in 
 the street car, on the train, in places of work ; we 
 read as we eat, as we talk, as we walk, as we wait. 
 Daily we consume tons and tons of printed matter. 
 
 This reading habit of ours is of vital signifi- 
 cance and effect in determining what we are and 
 what we would be. ,When first we enter the world 
 of books by the road of the a, b, c's, we come into 
 a wider and greater world of realities and a realm 
 of imagery. Beginning in childhood with the 
 fairy-land and the make-believe, we may go fur- 
 ther and further into the world of books and 
 thought, and may there find and know men and 
 women all that they were or dreamed, or strove 
 and agonized to be. In that world mind calls 
 unto mind across all ages, the great and noble of 
 all times speak simply and clearly to anyone who 
 will hear, truths of life and work, truths born 
 of experience and wisdom ; and yet do all Ameri- 
 cans realize that this reading habit is the talisman 
 that admits them to communion and companion- 
 ship with the immortals ? Or is the talisman pros- 
 tituted to less worthy purposes f 
 
 They tell us that Americans read more news-
 
 4 THE WAGE EARNEKS 
 
 papers than any other form of literature, and 
 that periodicals rank next in popularity. The 
 modern American newspaper is something which 
 is generally looked upon as an achievement 
 morning editions, noon editions, evening editions, 
 Sunday paper, and extra editions whenever nec- 
 essary to inform the public of the latest happen- 
 ings. These do indeed serve a purpose, and, as a 
 rule, serve it well. Daily they bring to the read- 
 ers, whether in the city or in the remotest habita- 
 tions, such happenings of the whole world as 
 editors and reporters deem of greatest moment. 
 They reflect the outward manifestation of the 
 sweep and scope of world action. The papers and 
 the periodicals not only chronicle events, but com- 
 ment on the force and the trend of related move- 
 ments. Valuable as is the function of this read- 
 ing matter, yet it is, and is intended to be, only 
 ephemeral. It deals largely with the superficial 
 aspects and phases of life, with that which is sen- 
 sational, adventitious and abnormal, and not with 
 the underlying, fundamental forces of life, thought 
 and action. Those whose reading is confined to 
 this sort of material miss the treasures of liter- 
 ature, the great books which tell of life with its 
 suffering and its joy, its pain and its hope, its 
 struggles and its visions of greater things beyond. 
 There are books written in red blood, books that 
 bring you close to the throbbing heart of all 
 humanity and reveal to you the imperishable force
 
 FOREWORD 5 
 
 of personality, books that bring you into tune with 
 the music of the universe and the soul-life and 
 purposes that shape and mold the course of human 
 development. These are the books of inspiration 
 and life, these are what should be read and re- 
 read, these are they which live and bring their 
 message to men of all ages. 
 
 Not many of us realize how much we owe to 
 the books that we read they constitute our chief 
 source from which to acquire information. 
 Largely from what we read we build up our 
 mental world which determines or is the self and 
 the will to action, we fashion our precepts and 
 concepts, our mental tools and our ideals. What- 
 ever it is our custom to read is that which fixes 
 the tone of our mental existence, determines our 
 sympathies and our interpretations of men and 
 life. 
 
 Centuries ago it was written "of making 
 many books there is no end.'* Today as then, 
 there are books written by the vain and the 
 foolish, by those of little understanding. These 
 last but a brief while and then vanish into the 
 void of time. There are others written by men 
 who told of things which were lasting and funda- 
 mental, and who dealt with bed-rock truths and 
 the eternal verities. These were men who had 
 been fired by life's dreams and purposes, whose 
 suffering and experiences made them more keenly 
 sensitive to the passions of humanity. They were
 
 6 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 seers who could interpret life, who could enrich 
 others by the wealth of their experiences and 
 enter into every mind and life, and inspire by 
 their coming. Through their books we are granted 
 the privilege of communion with these leaders of 
 all ages, of sensing their personalities and under- 
 standing their characters, of grasping the mean- 
 ing and import of that imperishable personality 
 which is gathered from the forces of all the ages 
 that have gone before, and shall live in all the 
 ages that are to come. These are the books that 
 shall live and never die; they deal with human 
 life, its depths and its shallows. Those which tell 
 of life, human efforts and aspirations are what 
 may with profit constitute the reading matter of 
 all our people that they may understand and 
 appreciate the world in which they live and the 
 lives of all among whom they dwell that the com- 
 mon life may be uplifted to a thing of joy and un- 
 limited development. 
 
 When we see in the common life the joy and the 
 purpose of living, when all can find there the 
 opportunity for the realization of the best and the 
 greatest in each individual, then there will come 
 into the life of the whole nation an understanding 
 that will bless and glorify the work that is done 
 by each and all. A book that interprets the 
 motives and the purpose of a movement that meets 
 a vital human need, that in familiar terms tells the
 
 FOREWORD 7 
 
 ignorant, the heedless and the isolated, why that 
 movement is what it is, is a book that will do a 
 part in creating and fashioning the forces of na- 
 tional thought and action. Of such a character 
 is this book by John Mitchell. 
 
 Washington, D. C., 
 
 February 21st, 1913. 
 
 SAMUEL GOMPERS 
 President, American Federation of Labor
 
 CONTENTS. 
 FOBEWOED By Samuel Gompers 
 
 CHAPTER Page 
 I. THE WAGE EARNERS AND LABOR ORGAN- 
 IZATIONS 11 
 
 II. THE WAGE EARNERS AND IMMIGRATION 29 
 
 III. THE WAGE EARNERS AND COMPENSA- 
 
 TION FOR INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENTS- 42 
 
 IV. THE WAGE EARNERS AND INDUSTRIAL 
 
 EFFICIENCY 59 
 
 V. THE WAGE EARNERS AND THE JU- 
 DICIARY 74 
 
 VT. THE WAGE EARNERS AND THE MINIMUM 
 
 WAGE FOR WOMEN AND CHILDREN 90 
 
 VII. THE WAGE EARNERS AND THE TRUSTS. 105 
 VIII. THE WAGE EARNERS AND UNEMPLOY- 
 MENT 117 
 
 IX. THE WAGE EARNERS AND PRISON 
 
 LABOR 132 
 
 X. THE WAGE EARNERS UNION AND 
 
 NON-UNION 146 
 
 XL THE WAGE EARNERS AND THE SOCIAL 
 
 UPLIFT 158 
 
 XII. THE WAGE EARNERS AND THE EM- 
 PLOYERS _ . 172
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE WAGE EAKNEBS AND LABOR ORGANIZATIONS. 
 
 In November of each year, at some one of the 
 large cities, the convention of the American Fed- 
 eration of Labor is held, continuing in session for 
 about two weeks. The press dispatches from day 
 to day relative to the transactions of the delegates 
 to these conventions may be expected to contain 
 news so varied in character, if we are to judge by 
 the past, that the general reader will be puzzled by 
 them, or perhaps pleased or vexed, accordingly as 
 he may be imperfectly informed as to what it is 
 all about, or shall have his prepossessions con- 
 firmed or his prejudices aroused. Our friends the 
 reporters present will seize the points which in 
 their judgment may interest their respective news- 
 papers. Hence, in the pictures certain of them 
 will paint, there may be, once in a while, a pre- 
 ponderance of black color, if the taste of their 
 readers is for black, and contrariwise as to white. 
 In either case, or even when colorless news matter 
 is sent out perfunctorily day by day, the news- 
 paper reports are usually fragmentary. Besides, 
 seeing a new set of facts just as they are, uncol- 
 ored by one's own eyes, is a point in efficiency not 
 always developed even among observers drilled by 
 the most modern scientific reportorial methods.
 
 12 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 Hence, the reader is often left uncertain on many 
 matters relating to convention legislation as well 
 as to trade union aims and tendencies. 
 
 For such reasons, on the suggestion of various 
 sympathizers with the truth for the employer as 
 well as for the wage earner, I am going to offer in 
 these pages something of fact and something of 
 opinion bearing on labor questions of the day. I 
 may help readers in general to familiarize them- 
 selves with the work of organized labor, not only 
 at conventions but all the year round. These 
 observations are not to relate to any of the purely 
 organization questions at present in controversy, 
 but rather to the larger social problems which the 
 trade unions are having their share in trying to 
 solve and on which the majority of active union 
 men are in accord. These discussions are not to 
 be attempts at formal essays or treatises, are not 
 in the least to be in the form of systematized 
 statistical and doctrinal statement. They are 
 merely to be talks, from one citizen of our big 
 republic, on a subject which he has at heart, to 
 such of its citizens as may care to hear what he 
 has to say thereon. 
 
 First, then, as to organization. Union men, on 
 meeting people of those branches of society not 
 organizable as are wage earners, are frequently 
 surprised at the latter 's want of knowledge of the 
 methods, forms and mechanism of trade unions.
 
 With regard to labor organization they are in the 
 mental state of the boy who is accustomed to 
 seeing his mother frequently sewing on his but- 
 tons, or the girl who lets her mother do the 
 kitchen work, without further inquiry. Children 
 sympathize with mother, certainly, but they are 
 engrossed in their own important affairs and let 
 her sweat. To-day, perhaps the majority of our 
 people may understand how a trade union is put 
 together, held intact by a system of dues and 
 assessments, and engineered by officers who have 
 been instructed by the members which way to 
 head. But there is a minority, by no means small, 
 who have not mastered that elementary chapter 
 in trade unionism and who because of ignorance 
 on this point cannot see the why or the where- 
 fore of much that occurs in labor agitation and 
 trade-union procedure. 
 
 To summarize the major points needed in the 
 instruction of anyone in this minority, I invite him 
 to look with me at the established routine of the 
 proceedings of one of these great congresses of 
 labor. The American Federation of Labor is an 
 organization of organizations. Federated, it is to 
 be noted, not amalgamated. That is to say, each 
 of its affiliated organizations is autonomous with 
 respect to the affairs of its own jurisdiction. This 
 lies either within a single occupation or within the 
 several closely related occupations of an industry,
 
 14 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 or, in case of the subsidiary central union, within 
 a State or a city. 
 
 Last year, in Rochester, N. Y., the convention 
 was made up of 355 delegates, of whom 231 were 
 sent by 90 national unions (or international, which 
 signifies that they include Canada), 30 State Fed- 
 erations, 67 city central unions, 18 trade and fed- 
 eral unions, and 7 fraternal organizations, includ- 
 ing the British Trades Union Congress, the Cana- 
 dian Trades and Labor Congress, the National 
 Women's Trade Union League, the Women's 
 International Union Label League, the Federal 
 Council of the Churches of Christ in America, the 
 American Federation of Catholic Societies, and 
 the Church Association for the Advancement of 
 Labor. 
 
 The number of votes allotted these various 
 classifications, however, tells a story not suggested 
 by the mere enumeration of the delegates. The 
 231 national (and international) representatives 
 took 17,202 votes and all the others only 141. 
 This signifies that while the Federation accords 
 equality in debate to all organizations, it rarely 
 gives the non-international bodies an effective 
 voice on critical questions, when the votes are 
 counted. This point is worth while explaining 
 here, because a certain active political party has 
 cried out to those nations of the earth in which 
 the workers as a class are in political revolt that
 
 the American Federation of Labor is undemo- 
 cratic, and therefore tyrannical and unjust, in its 
 apportionment of the voting power at its conven- 
 tions. By these representatives, the cities of New 
 York and Chicago, both with hundreds of thou- 
 sands of union members, have each only a single 
 vote, while, for example, the Shingle Weavers ' 
 International Union, with perhaps a few thousand 
 members, has 15 votes, and the Typographical 
 Union, with fifty-four thousand seven hundred 
 members, has 547 votes. Truly, on first glance a 
 glaring anomaly falling into the class of facts 
 which are important if true. This is the explana- 
 tion: All the members of the various unions of 
 New York, Chicago, and the other cities sending 
 delegates from their Central Labor Unions, as 
 well as all the members of the State Federations, 
 are already duly represented in the convention 
 through the delegates of their respective national 
 (or international) unions. Proof here, therefore, 
 of how a half truth may be a whole error. 
 
 As thus seen, the convention becomes really a 
 delegate meeting of the national (or international) 
 unions, which, however, through both generosity 
 and policy, invite the State and city central organ- 
 izations, which are made up of members of the 
 all-encompassing international (let us call them) 
 bodies, to participate in that forum, school of 
 instruction in unionism, and common ground for 
 promoting acquaintanceship which is termed a
 
 16 THE WAGE EAENEES 
 
 convention. In the debates, and in the viva voce 
 voting, the State and city delegates play an eqnal 
 part with the others, but on a formal count they 
 fall away quite to ciphers. The Federation thus 
 permits the territorial organizations to contribute 
 the force of their ideas, but lodges in the occupa- 
 tional organizations the power of decisive yea and 
 nay. 
 
 A feature of the international unions is that 
 each covers America. In the British Trades 
 Union Congress there may be represented six 
 national unions of laborers, or two or three of 
 hatters, or tailors, every one having its own set 
 of officials, but under the American Federation 
 there can be no dual organization in city, State, 
 or nation, or of any trade or calling whatsoever. 
 
 Attempts have been made in America to pro- 
 mote organization by entire industries "indus- 
 trial organization'* in which distinctly separated 
 crafts should be merged. The theory advanced 
 here is that in case of a strike "an injury to one 
 should be the concern of all," and the query is 
 therefore put to unionists, "Why should only a 
 single trade go on strike against a corporation, 
 perhaps to sure defeat, whereas if all its employes 
 were consolidated into one union they would be 
 irresistible?" 
 
 The practice which comes from experience, how- 
 ever, has in the notable case of the Typographical 
 Union shown the value of separating crafts in the
 
 AND LABOR ORGANIZATIONS 17 
 
 printing industry, even after they had once been 
 amalgamated. In a few other unions in which the 
 unity of all could be endangered by the independ- 
 ent action of a small percentage, as, for illustra- 
 tion, in the United Mine Workers of America, the 
 cook is counted a member of the family, and all 
 men employed in the mining industry are wisely 
 organized as members of the same union. The 
 American Federation has within a few years set 
 up * ' departments ' ' of the building trades, of the 
 metal trades, of several railway men's organiza- 
 tions intended to give recognition to whatever is 
 valuable in "industrial unionism." 
 
 An international union is made up of "local" 
 unions of its calling, each local union covering a 
 town or city, or, in cases, a district. Some of the 
 international unions have four, five, or even as 
 many as twenty-five hundred local unions in as 
 many places. Headquarters of the international 
 bodies are located to suit the convenience of the 
 trade. This brings many of them to the cities of 
 the Middle West. The Federation headquarters 
 are in Washington. 
 
 The visitor who sits in the gallery of the 
 convention hall, watching the proceedings, soon 
 absorbs a volume of facts that corrects false im- 
 pressions held by many persons among the gen- 
 eral public who might through inquiry easily know 
 better. Day by day the sessions are public ; repre- 
 sentatives of the press are in constant attendance,
 
 18 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 and the general public is cordially invited to 
 witness the deliberations of the delegates, yet 
 the idea that they are secret still lingers in the 
 minds of some readers of daily papers who need 
 only the word "labor" in a heading to make them 
 skip on to the next column. As an evidence of the 
 gullibility of men who should know better, it 
 might be stated that some time ago a detective 
 agency circularized employers proposing to sell to 
 them information concerning the daily proceed- 
 ings of the American Federation of Labor conven- 
 tion, the impression being conveyed that these ses- 
 sions were held in secret and the proceedings 
 were difficult to obtain. 
 
 The reference to dues and assessments by the 
 speakers gives proof that the number of members 
 in the unions is reckoned by book accounts repre- 
 senting dollars and cents paid in, and not simply 
 by the number of people who may say, "I am a 
 trade unionist," as one would say, "I am a Demo- 
 crat." It costs hard cash to be a union member, 
 while to be an enthusiastic shouter for a political 
 party nothing more is needed than patriotism. 
 
 The one fact commented upon in the gallery is 
 usually the absence of speechifying on the floor. 
 Elocution, spell-binding, impassioned appeals to 
 responsive emotionalism there is little of all 
 that. The big convention as a machine moves 
 somewhat slowly. Every man can have a hear- 
 ing if he gets down to business. In fact, the
 
 AND LABOR ORGANIZATIONS 19 
 
 directness, simplicity, and relevancy of the points 
 commonly made by men taking the floor is a dis- 
 appointment both to observers who have looked 
 for "the talking for one's constituents" so much 
 heard in legislative halls and to sentimentalists 
 who yearn for burning words from inspired mis- 
 sionaries proclaiming a paradise on earth soon 
 to come through the magic of a universal panacea. 
 The man in the gallery hears officers' annual 
 reports read, motions made and referred to com- 
 mittees, and then committee reports on these 
 motions debated. Of course, there are now and 
 then brought up on the platform, especially during 
 the early days, prominent men and women who 
 have something to say. If any of these froth, they 
 discover their error. The delegates are cordial, 
 but being mostly "old stagers" themselves, they 
 know substance from slather. The fraternal dele- 
 gates trade unionists from Great Britain and 
 Canada, clergymen representing various denom- 
 inations, farmers from the national agricultural 
 organizations, women from the international 
 leagues are heard with special attention. What 
 each of them has to say marks off the advance 
 made for trade unionism in some direction in 
 American society or in some other part of the 
 world. All attempts to commit the Federation to 
 partisan politics the delegates watch narrowly. It 
 dawns upon the spectator at length that among 
 the delegates a sufficient number have had expe-
 
 20 THE WAGE EAENEES 
 
 rience with all the social movements that have had 
 their day, or are now affecting the public, to pre- 
 vent trade unionism leaving its own track and 
 switching off on other roads. The spectator also 
 perceives that the trade union principles and 
 policies of this country are pretty well settled. 
 There is not very much probability of sudden 
 change in them soon. The faith of the delegates 
 is seen to be in the movement itself and as a 
 whole. They are not awaiting the sky-rocket rise 
 and marvelous achievements of a Napoleonic 
 leader with a new sociological invention to work 
 wonders for the wage earners. They are here in 
 a practical turn of mind, patiently engaged in a 
 piece of business. Have they sentiment! Aye, 
 in its place. Hope? Certainly, to its definite 
 limits. Idealism? Truly, as toned down to expe- 
 rience. But emotional inspirations to action are 
 rarely worked up on the convention floor. An 
 assumption that governs the speakers is that their 
 fellow-delegates have all passed through the pri- 
 mary stages of "conviction," "conversion," 
 "change of heart from sin," and "determination 
 to live up to bounden duty. ' ' Therefore the argu- 
 ments are mostly musterings of fact germane to 
 the pending question. Now and again, naturally, 
 a misplaced reformer declares his radicalism, or 
 a fresh recruit displays his awkwardness in the 
 drill, or a brashy youth talks as wildly as a one- 
 term member of a legislature, but toward the per-
 
 formances of these irregulars the attitude of the 
 convention is that of the giant to the child. There 
 may be a wave of amused laughter, and the inci- 
 dent is over. 
 
 The gallery spectator may have the usual run 
 of initial inquiries regarding trade unionism 
 answered in the development of the proceedings 
 on the floor. Why, he will ask, organized labor? 
 
 Why organized labor? After two days in the 
 gallery, the spectator may well be inclined to ask, 
 Why not organized labor? In the absence of the 
 union, who could speak with any force to the indi- 
 vidual employer or the employing class on behalf 
 of the employed, as these delegates do by reason 
 of their office? Who could render labor laws 
 effective ? Who could ever present the complaints 
 of the non-unionists, either to employers or 
 society? Who could tell the world that there is 
 a labor question? In the statements of delegates, 
 from any of the occupations represented in the 
 convention, made not necessarily for justification 
 of unionism, but rather in explaining every-day 
 work, is convincing testimony that in the conduct 
 of industry in general labor is treated as a com- 
 modity in the market. The item of " labor" in 
 the bookkeeping of an employer runs along in the 
 column with the items of raw materials or other 
 supplies. All things equal, the business man buys 
 in the cheapest market. He exercises his choice in 
 buying from one dealer or another in coal or ore,
 
 22 THE WAGE EAENERS 
 
 lumber or leather. Similarly, he plays off labor 
 against labor the stock of unemployed labor 
 against his own employed labor. Notwithstand- 
 ing the waste of this process, as a general thing 
 the dealers in materials survive through their 
 foresight, management, judgment of the average 
 market prices, and their being able to wait. But 
 the wage worker, as a seller of labor, usually can- 
 not wait. Standing alone, his labor is usually on 
 a forced market, he competes for employment 
 with his fellows, his wages tend to fall, and if the 
 conditions under which he works are bad he can- 
 not afford to remonstrate. In this situation, where 
 can he find succor? In reply to this question the 
 genius of this age has offered two solutions. The 
 first is, to reform or revolutionize social condi- 
 tions. Unhappily, the multiplicity of doctors and 
 doctrines in the offer of this solution baffle the 
 masses. "Put me in office," the doctors say, "so 
 that I may compel society to take my medicine." 
 Verily, the result, thus far, has not remedied that 
 defect in the labor market whereby the excess of 
 the seekers for work over places for them puts in 
 jeopardy the security of the wage earners at work. 
 Clearly, then, the workers must try the other solu- 
 tion, which modern times have developed the 
 mastering of the labor market by the wage 
 workers managing the sale of their labor in com- 
 bination. The New York Labor Bureau reports 
 from year to year six per cent, or three, or per-
 
 AND LABOR ORGANIZATIONS 23 
 
 haps eight, of the organized workers as unem- 
 ployed. When insured by the solidarity of their 
 labor organizations against low wages when their 
 time shall come to get work, the idle union mem- 
 bers refuse to sell their labor in the market at the 
 buyers' first bid. Besides, in a progressive 
 degree, the years see the trade union membership 
 insured also against sickness, accident, death, and 
 unemployment. Further, the union not only 
 enforces the making of law prescribing conditions 
 conservative of the health and comfort of the 
 workers, but injects life into such laws. That all 
 these statements are facts not to be contradicted, 
 affecting intimately and vitally the daily existence 
 of the toilers and that, awaiting the dawn of the 
 millennium, they describe the practical solution of 
 the immediate problems of the wage system, 
 enters the mind of the spectator who sits, with the 
 judgment of a juryman, in the convention gallery. 
 
 Once convinced that some kind of a wage 
 earners' union is today essential, the interested 
 inquirer may have two subsequent questions 
 answered the more easily. 
 
 Why the present form of organization? Time 
 has worked it out. It is not secret, with rites of 
 initiation, regalia, grips, signs and sounding titles 
 for officials, and foretokenage of social transfor- 
 mation, for the reason that, by the present gener- 
 ation of workers, mystery, symbolism, stage 
 heroics, and lodge-room theatricals are not
 
 24 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 regarded as appropriate to the directness of the 
 character of trade unionism. Today's trade 
 unionists are through with the lost motions which 
 took up the time of their fathers in the noble and 
 holy orders of knighthood that were wrecked on 
 wind-mills. They want in their prosaic daily work 
 of dealing with employers no aid from tinseled and 
 gowned prestidigitateurs juggling tinted glass 
 globes. They are accustomed to seeing a solid 
 leather-covered ball flying straight from pitcher 
 to batter and thence, whack, to the field, all in the 
 open. From the little local union to the American 
 Federation of Labor the pyramid of organization 
 is simple, symmetrical, solid parts of a well- 
 planned machine, constructed for smooth-running, 
 co-operative work. 
 
 Why not in politics? Well, which party? A 
 new party? Or one of the old parties? Political 
 action requires unity upon demands sufficiently 
 important to induce men to break their usual 
 party connections. Up to the present, trade 
 unionists have not reached agreement on prob- 
 lematical social remedies only remotely possible 
 of application. As for projects falling within the 
 limits of practicability, they exert a force favor- 
 able to the working-classes. That the labor laws 
 now on the statute books are there through union 
 effort is shown by the fact that in States where 
 labor organization is weak the laws are few or 
 quite a dead letter, labor bureaus are non-existent
 
 AND LABOR ORGANIZATIONS 25 
 
 or feeble, and legislators are not well convinced 
 by labor committees that labor has a big vote and 
 wants at least a small voice in legislation. How- 
 ever sad it may be to contemplate the masses not 
 ruling, as they should in their majority, the un- 
 budgeable fact stands that they, like the pro- 
 fessors of economics, the statesmen who impose 
 tariffs, the idealists who construct Utopias, do not 
 agree on how and what to rule. 
 
 Why strike ? Otherwise, the reply must be, the 
 question of mastery of the market cannot be com- 
 pletely settled. Why boycott? When the workers 
 shall be the only offending party in this regard, 
 they alone may be called upon to defend the pro- 
 cedure. But practice of the boycott is common to 
 all groups of society. Why violence in the case 
 of strikes? We tell you that unionists are rarely 
 as violent as are non-unionists, that oganization 
 generally develops discipline, that an unorganized 
 community is less lawful during labor disputes 
 than one in which the unions are strong. Why 
 refuse to work with the non-unionist? Because 
 he offers a standing low bid for a job to the buyer 
 of labor if for no other reason. 
 
 So run the usual questions, and so the replies. 
 The one and the other have formed the basis of 
 volumes. Only an index to them can be outlined 
 here. 
 
 The reader has in these lines been invited as a 
 spectator to the convention gallery. He has had
 
 26 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 described to him the body of labor delegates as 
 one sitting with them has for years seen them. 
 He has observed them at their task of legislating 
 for the membership of the Federation in matters 
 lying beyond the jurisdiction of the various 
 separate unions. He has learned that the labor 
 organization is a great modern institution, as last- 
 ing as the social conditions by which it has been 
 produced. Its attitude toward other institutions 
 of the time, its policies and practices, its future 
 these are topics with which I shall attempt to deal 
 in subsequent chapters.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE WAGE EARNERS AND IMMIGRATION. 
 
 The spectator in the gallery who follows the 
 proceedings of a convention of the American Fed- 
 eration of Labor, or any of the great national or 
 international trade unions, thus obtaining from 
 the discussions direct information on live labor 
 problems, has opportunity for hearing first-hand 
 testimony as to some of the far-reaching economic 
 effects of immigration. 
 
 This subject, he may observe, on mentally look- 
 ing back over the debates when the convention is 
 ended, has been treated by the delegates as first 
 of all a wage earners' question. At the present 
 time the incoming millions from Europe do not by 
 any means enter at once into the various levels of 
 the American industries and professions. Their 
 America is our labor market, in fact almost invar- 
 iably our unskilled labor market. They do not 
 start in buying a business, taking up a farm, or 
 selecting a location where they may practice as 
 lawyer, doctor, minister, or writer. From the 
 newly arrived immigrants, therefore, the man- 
 agers of affairs, the leaders in commercial life, 
 the politicians and lawmakers, the editorial fra- 
 ternity, the landowners, all are in no immediate 
 danger of competition. Hence these classes but
 
 28 THE WAGE EAENEBS 
 
 remotely feel any of the effects of immigration 
 other than such as are apparently beneficial to 
 themselves through the cheapness of labor and the 
 submissiveness of the laborers. It is otherwise 
 with the wage worker. The sole avenue of 
 entrance to America for perhaps ninety-nine per 
 cent, of the immigrants being through the un- 
 skilled labor market, this, to wage earners, is the 
 fact of all facts relative to immigration. This 
 truth sets aside as irrelevant and misleading the 
 mere statistician's consideration that in propor- 
 tion to population a million and a quarter of immi- 
 grants in 1910 is less than the 427,000 of 1854. 
 Sixty years ago, fifty, forty yes, thirty years 
 ago the main volume of immigration poured west- 
 ward. In that direction lay the open land oppor- 
 tunity. Moreover, only once in the succeeding 
 twenty years was the tide of 1854 equaled. At 
 one time it fell to one-sixth of that year, and 
 usually it was less than one-half. But for nearly 
 a decade now the gross arrivals yearly have aver- 
 aged a million. 
 
 The wage workers of America know full well 
 that "opportunity" in the old sense of the public 
 lands no longer exists in this country. They know 
 that the immigrants now coming are not on arrival 
 so fully qualified to be Americans, to be independ- 
 ent wage earners to be soon candidates for every 
 walk of our national life, as were the immigrants 
 generally even so late as twenty years ago. They
 
 AND IMMIGRATION 29 
 
 are less qualified through their illiteracy, their 
 speaking languages not akin to English, their 
 undevelopment in the skilled trades, their tradi- 
 tions of dependence upon masters and paternal 
 institutions, through even their methods of work. 
 They must begin building themselves up as citi- 
 zens with little more foundation than their bodily 
 strength. If the true definition of * * an American ' ' 
 is "one who is the product of American institu- 
 tions," our old-time immigrants were generally 
 familiar in their home countries with a goodly 
 part of those institutions, especially their spirit, 
 while the present-day immigrants have usually 
 toward them merely the position of untaught chil- 
 dren handicapped by the temporary deafness and 
 dumbness of not understanding the English 
 language. 
 
 The spectator may learn from his seat in the 
 gallery the attitude of the delegates on the immi- 
 gration question. It is a logical attitude with 
 reference to events. It is shown, not so much in 
 the discussions of immigration in itself, as in 
 statements made regarding the pressure of the 
 freshly arrived immigrants into the fields of com- 
 petition in the various occupations. A point to 
 be noticed is the absence of prejudice against the 
 immigrants ; the adverse judgment pronounced is 
 upon the men who bring them here. The note that 
 is sounded most frequently in the words of the
 
 30 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 speakers is sympathy with the immigrants in their 
 poverty and helplessness. 
 
 A majority of the delegates, if not themselves 
 foreign born, are the sons or grandsons of men 
 who crossed the sea to get to this country. Most 
 numerous and active are those having Irish 
 names. Next come Germans. Then men of other 
 northern European nationalities. Delegates of 
 the Latin races are making their appearance in 
 recent years. The English names common to that 
 part of the American population which predomi- 
 nated in this country to so great an extent prior 
 to 1850 are rare. These facts in themselves reveal 
 certain social developments. The old families of 
 New England, the Middle and the Middle Western 
 States now put comparatively few of their sons 
 at a trade. Those old families were on the spot 
 when the cream of the country was to be taken 
 for the gathering. Rough work hence gradually 
 went out of fashion with them. To-day the well- 
 off among them give their poor relations the gen- 
 teel indoor jobs, which enable the holders at least 
 to get along, many of them holding aloof from 
 the wage-working classes. The Irish-American 
 wage earners have two prominent characteristics ; 
 among the most skilful of mechanics, they are ever 
 sent to the front as standard bearers for their 
 fellow- workmen. In certain of the out-door trades, 
 such as railroading and the erection of build- 
 ings, men of Irish- American blood are in a large
 
 AND IMMIGRATION 31 
 
 majority, a fact significant of racial hardihood. 
 Germans or German-Americans come out strong 
 as brewers, bakers, cigarmakers, garment cutters, 
 butchers, tailors callings in general requiring 
 patience, study and persistence, or to be traced to 
 a training in their home land. 
 
 The complaints of the inroads of the ever- 
 arriving immigrants on their labor markets come 
 from the men of lesser skill among the miners, 
 metal workers, street laborers, or in the building 
 trades, although some of the indoor workers such 
 as those employed in the textile industry and the 
 garment trades, in both of which a very large per- 
 centage of the wage earners are foreign born, 
 suffer in their unionism which means their scale 
 of wages and other union conditions through the 
 competition of the multitudinous hungry and 
 humble strangers who, once here, must get their 
 living here. 
 
 These points are plainly made in the testimony 
 of delegates representing occupations in which the 
 new immigrants have displaced, or are displacing, 
 those who have been here long enough to sniff 
 liberty and aspire to American standards, who 
 themselves only a few years ago displaced Ameri- 
 cans or Europeans of other races than their own. 
 As such delegates, standing on the floor of the 
 convention, describe conditions among the unor- 
 ganized immigrants who are crowding out the 
 organized in their occupations, or privately
 
 32 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 between sessions give information on the subject 
 from experience covering many parts of the 
 country, the inquiring visitor is impressed that 
 here he is face to face with the immigration prob- 
 lem in its vitally important social phase that of 
 its direct results upon America as the land of the 
 independent wage-working citizen, to whom all the 
 possibilities of a high civilization should remain 
 open. 
 
 The delegates of the occupations most closely 
 interested can with truth tell the inquirer that, 
 simply through the inability of the helpless, 
 ignorant, newly-arrived immigrants, our laws pro- 
 tective of life and health are frequently a dead 
 letter, in mine or manufactory, among the trans- 
 port workers or the building trades men. Upon 
 the labor unions falls mainly the burden of 
 enforcing protective enactments, a fact true in Eu- 
 rope as well as in this country. Where the unions 
 are weak, the mere maintenance of their scale of 
 wages requiring most of their energies, these laws 
 are often neglected, and where no unions exist 
 they pass to nothingness. It is a certainty that 
 where factory girls are burned to death by the 
 score or the lives of miners are lost by the hun- 
 dreds, the question may be asked: Why were 
 they not duly protected by the existing laws ? And 
 the answer is quite sure to be : Because the union 
 was not strong enough to cope with a law-break- 
 ing employer. Where there are no unions, vig-
 
 AND IMMIGRATION 33 
 
 ilant and systematic defense of the workers is 
 well-nigh at an end. 
 
 Poverty is the weakness, the undoing of the 
 poor, ever the one ample explanation for their 
 defenselessness. How numerous are the poor, 
 how their deprivations at times unman them, 
 how unrequited their labors, how heroic their 
 struggles can be told by the labor repre- 
 sentatives, speaking for their own callings 
 at a convention. Begin with the bakers. Why are 
 bakers in New York forever striking? A decade 
 ago, twenty years ago, a quarter of a century ago 
 New York striking bakers put up their plea to the 
 State lawgivers, invoked public opinion in their 
 favor, called upon organized labor for help, some 
 union members even committed acts of violence 
 that they might be jailed as martyrs in the hope of 
 making known the necessity of improving condi- 
 tions in the baking industry. Yet today in the 
 New York cellar bakeries still toils poverty in 
 mortal pain. It took thirty years of agitation to 
 obtain a few effective statutes governing bakery 
 sanitation, passed only a few years ago. How 
 long are these laws to be enforced? The employ- 
 ing bakers carried the bake-shop ten-hour law up 
 to the United States Supreme Court to have it 
 declared unconstitutional, and succeeded. Within 
 the past two years New York journeymen bakers 
 in large numbers were striking against working 
 unlimited hours and against compulsory boarding
 
 34 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 in the shop in the dark over-heated and inade- 
 quately ventilated underground bake-room in 
 which they worked. "Withal, their wages were 
 among the lowest. The bakers ' unions are difficult 
 to maintain ; the better conditions gained through 
 successful strikes alternate with the worse condi- 
 tions thereafter gradually enforced by employers. 
 Why this state of things in the baking trade? 
 Poverty, of course. The poverty of the penniless, 
 hungry immigrant of today competing with the 
 but slightly less pitiable poverty of the toilsome 
 immigrant of yesterday, engaged in the task of 
 Sisyphus his merely elementary needs forming 
 both the hill to be overcome and the stone that he 
 fails to get to the top. 
 
 The reservoir of labor on which the bakery 
 employers make constant drafts is the mass of 
 unemployed in New York, continually fed by the 
 stream of immigrants arriving from Europe. As 
 with the baking, so with the clothing industry. 
 For years in every strike lost by the garment 
 workers or lockout won by their employers, the 
 determining factor has been the shiploads of 
 people arriving at the landing place at the Battery, 
 with less per head in their pockets than two weeks' 
 purchase on life. About seven years ago, conse- 
 quently, the executive board of the garment 
 workers' union, themselves nearly all foreign 
 born, passed resolutions calling for restricted 
 immigration.
 
 AND IMMIGRATION 35 
 
 If an examination be made of one occupation 
 after another in New York, it will be found that 
 in all those which, like baking and garment mak- 
 ing, may be followed in this country by persons 
 not speaking English, the immediate cause of dire 
 poverty is unemployment. This simply means 
 that the arriving immigrants are not needed in 
 the labor market, except to be used by employers 
 in enforced competition with the wage-earners 
 already here. 
 
 But, it will be asked, is really the encom- 
 passing direct cause of dependent poverty today 
 in America unemployment? Eecent reports are: 
 The cases of 5,000 families applying to the Charity 
 Organization Society for aid being duly recorded 
 with reference to the sources of deprivation, ten 
 specific causes were set down as those to which 
 disability to make a living were attributable. In 
 more than 69 per cent, a factor was unemploy- 
 ment, though, naturally, associated with other 
 factors chronic physical ailments, widowhood, 
 etc. Intemperance was a concomitant in less than 
 17 per cent, of all these cases. In 4,325 families 
 applying to the United Hebrew Charities for aid, 
 there were 1,348 cases of unemployment on the 
 part of the bread-winners. Of 62,851 unoccupied 
 members of labor unions in the State of New 
 York at the end of March, 1910, 42,010 were out 
 because of lack of employment. The State Com- 
 mission on unemployment reports that the records
 
 36 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 of charitable organizations show that a large pro- 
 portion of cases of destitution is due primarily to 
 lack of work. The Bowery Mission in two and 
 one-half years found work for only 9,000 out of 
 about 40,000 applicants; the National Employ- 
 ment Exchange in 1910 for only 4,600 out of 24,600 
 applicants; the Division of Information, United 
 States Bureau of Immigration, only 3,812 out of 
 24,000. 
 
 There may have been a time when New York 
 statistics for unemployment were not accurately 
 suggestive as a gauge for the country as a whole. 
 But the investigator, as a preliminary step, might 
 profitably inquire in November at a convention of 
 the American Federation of Labor as to whether 
 the delegates can give evidence that New York 
 conditions in this respect are typical or not for the 
 industrial centers in general of the United States 
 today. What would necessarily be the reply of 
 the miners, the steel workers, the building trades 
 laborers, the freight handlers, the railroad main- 
 tenance of way employes, the seamen, the labor- 
 ers for roadway and similar contractors? What 
 the reply of the indoor occupations the needle 
 workers, the mill operatives, the light metal shop 
 hands, the factory workers in a score of national 
 industries T The answer is to be found in the long 
 contested strikes of the last few years. The mere 
 mention of geographical names calls up heart- 
 rending accounts of the sufferings of wage earners
 
 AND IMMIGRATION 37 
 
 who have had their bitter choice between uncom- 
 plaining insufficiency while at work and desperate 
 straits while on strike Westmoreland county and 
 Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Grand Kapids, Michi- 
 gan; the mining fields of West Virginia. Every 
 year New York and Chicago and other large cities 
 show the possibilities of labor disputes involving 
 men and women by the tens of thousands. With 
 the successive investigations of labor conditions, 
 by the unions, by labor bureaus, by social workers, 
 the industrial and mining centers of the country 
 are seen to present the same general features of 
 masses of immigrant workmen, employed and 
 unemployed, at times weakening trade unions 
 through competition, at times, whether organized 
 or unorganized, breaking out in strikes, and 
 astonishing the public with their recklessness, or 
 their stubborn resistance, or their patient, dogged 
 suffering. 
 
 The rapidity with which the new immigrant is 
 penetrating classes of workmen other than those 
 ranking lowest in skill, into which he usually 
 enters on arriving in America, is becoming 
 noticeable. The youth five years in this country, 
 learning with his English some of the ways of 
 young America, makes for a better paying grade 
 of work than his father's. The little boy or girl 
 of ten years of age on arrival is in four years 
 legally a factory hand. The control of the market 
 for rough labor by the new immigration is thus
 
 38 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 followed by a pressure upon higher forms of work 
 that Americans or the older immigrants and their 
 sons have assumed must remain their own. Ele- 
 vator and hotel boys, street car conductors, musi- 
 cians, skilled building trades workmen, salesmen, 
 semi-skilled benchmen in workshops the physiog- 
 nomies of these classes of work-people no longer in- 
 variably suggest American or northern European 
 birthplaces. The possibilities of the competition 
 embodied in the unparalleled migration of the 
 European masses to America is beginning to be 
 keenly felt in the ranks of the lesser commercial 
 men and even in the professions in parts of the 
 country which a few years ago had not been made 
 aware of an immigration question. The self-con- 
 tained established small gentry who composedly 
 moved along in fancied security in their several 
 genteel occupations are awakening to economic 
 troubles of their own. They are finding out what 
 competition for opportunity to gain a livelihood 
 for small capitalists and propertyless men of lib- 
 eral education means and are learning that all 
 social problems are not to be settled by shrewd- 
 ness or shirking in dealing with questions of mar- 
 riage and the family. 
 
 While the movement of the new immigrant and 
 his quickly assimilated children upward in the 
 hierarchy of occupations is thus proceeding apace, 
 his spread in masses over the area of the country 
 in the last few years has been marvelous. A recent
 
 AND IMMIGRATION 39 
 
 study in labor circles of this phase of the immigra- 
 tion problem has brought before the public the 
 picture of a network of variously named agencies 
 having in view finding work for immigrants and 
 assisting them to any point in the United States 
 where it is to be had. No similar aid exists for 
 American workmen. The headquarters of these 
 agencies invariably connect with points close to 
 the landing place of the immigrants in New York. 
 Blind indeed must be the investigator on this sub- 
 ject who cannot or will not see the power of the 
 steamship lines behind the work being carried on 
 so extensively by some of these agencies to take 
 care of the arriving immigrants. 
 
 All these facts bearing on the subject of immi- 
 gration have come home to many of the delegates 
 to the convention of the American Federation of 
 Labor. Probably not one of them, and indeed 
 not one prominent labor man in the entire country, 
 but has passed through the same series of impres- 
 sions and sentiments regarding immigration. 
 Where once was acquiescence, if not approval, 
 there is now opposition. Labor's sympathy with 
 labor reaches from America to Europe. Pity, a 
 desire to help, hope for a better future for all 
 labor, a faith in human nature in its lowliest estate 
 these are sentiments usually aroused in the 
 breast of the American workingman in contem- 
 plating the hard fate of his brother in Europe. 
 Aye, and on that string has the cunning hand of
 
 40 THE WAGE EAENEES 
 
 master manipulators of labor long played. Great 
 wealth has been absorbed by the steamship lines 
 carrying the millions of immigrants to America; 
 great wealth is being produced by the help of 
 the immigrants for the men getting far more than 
 their share of production. It is the first business 
 of steamship companies, big manufacturers, and 
 great corporations to procure dividends. Their 
 concern for the workmen, for a just society, for 
 permanency of the democratic institutions of 
 America is secondary. But since, as we have seen, 
 immigration is to the American workingmen 
 first of all a wages question, the organized wago 
 earners have been obliged to study it closely, have 
 hence moved beyond the merely sentimental stage 
 in contemplating it, have many a time soberly dis- 
 cussed it in their unions and at their conventions, 
 and finally have decided how duty to themselves 
 and their country requires them to act. 
 
 The annual convention of the American Feder- 
 ation of Labor held at Toronto, Canada, Novem- 
 ber, 1909, voted for restriction; it resolved to 
 demand an illiteracy test, a money in pocket test, 
 an increased head tax, and the abolition of the 
 Government Distribution Bureau. Since that time 
 the policy of organized labor then adopted has 
 been strengthened by the findings of the United 
 States Immigration Commission. The most strik- 
 ing passage in the commission's report was:
 
 AND IMMIGRATION 41 
 
 "The investigations of the commission show an 
 oversupply of unskilled labor in basic industries 
 to an extent which indicates an oversupply of 
 unskilled labor in the industries of the country as 
 a whole, and therefore demands legislation which 
 will at the present time restrict the further admis- 
 sion of such unskilled labor." 
 
 The commission held it to be desirable that "a 
 sufficient number be debarred to produce a marked 
 effect upon the present supply of unskilled labor. ' ' 
 It recognized as possible the first three of the four 
 methods of exclusion recommended by organized 
 labor, with others, the most significant of which 
 was "the limitation of the number of each race 
 arriving each year to a certain percentage of the 
 average of that race arriving during a given 
 period of years." 
 
 Of what avail are "commissions on congestion" 
 in our cities, "State labor exchanges," "commit- 
 tees of investigation into the condition of the 
 poor," "surveys of industrial centers," and sim- 
 ilar social reform agencies or movements, if they 
 do not result in emphasizing properly the real 
 menace to the American working classes and to all 
 American society? That menace, clearly, lies in 
 the many millions of the victims of poverty and 
 ignorance, of wretched government and backward 
 civilization, in southern and eastern Europe. To 
 European steamship companies and great Ameri- 
 can capitalists their exploitation has been as 
 mines of gold and quarries of diamonds.
 
 CHAPTEE III. 
 
 THE WAGE EABNEKS AND COMPENSATION FOB INDUS- 
 TBIAL, ACCIDENTS. 
 
 The foremost national economic issue that bears 
 directly on the labor market, as we have seen in 
 the preceding chapter, is immigration. However, 
 the most urgent practical measure to provide by 
 legislation for the protection of wage earners 
 against the want and suffering resulting from, mis- 
 fortunes to which they are peculiarly liable, is 
 1 ' compensation. ' ' 
 
 In this one word compensation are comprised 
 the possible methods not only of compensating 
 wage workers or their families in case of indus- 
 trial accidents but of preventing such accidents. 
 Where compensation has been established, pre- 
 vention has followed. Also, wherever enforced, 
 the two measures together have brought about a 
 marked decrease in the fatalities and other cas- 
 ualties proportionate to the number of persons at 
 work. 
 
 Statistical statements as to the industrial acci- 
 dents occurring in America seem incredible to the 
 casual reader who glances at the subject superfi- 
 cially. Significance of the extent or the social 
 import of the facts behind their tabular present- 
 ment usually fails to settle itself clearly in such a
 
 AND COMPENSATION FOB ACCIDENTS 43 
 
 person's mind. He has never stopped mentally to 
 digest the proportions or the relations of the facts, 
 or the suggested conditions or implied conse- 
 quences embodied in the figures. Just as, to his 
 mind, falling from a precipice of the height of 300 
 feet is sure death, and from the top of the wall of 
 the Yosemite, with its 3,000 feet, is no more, the 
 horror of 300 or 3,000 deaths is to his feelings 
 much the same. A single fatal accident occurring 
 under his eye is more shocking to him than read- 
 ing a sketchy account in a newspaper of a thou- 
 sand violent deaths in the antipodes. Large fig- 
 ures standing for indefinite ideas fail to stir his 
 emotions deeply. Hence, when told that in Ameri- 
 can industries a certain number of thousands are 
 killed in the course of a year, a reader of this 
 description may dimly doubt that it is wholly true, 
 or read with the impression that a year is a long 
 span of measurement, or, in his skimming of 
 points not touching himself and his concentration 
 on points regarding his own interests, he may be 
 in no mental state of receptivity as to the entire 
 subject. Industrial risks may be far from his per- 
 sonal experiences. The enormous indictment of 
 society contained in the abstract statistics passing 
 before his perhaps inattentive eyes escapes his 
 discernment. 
 
 But let us look for a moment at this deplorable 
 matter of death and maiming in our industries in 
 a light apart from its every-day presentation in
 
 44 THE WAGE EABNERS 
 
 unmethodical print, as most of us see it. Let us 
 suppose that in the course of the last twelve 
 months, by a marvelous mastery of certain forces 
 of nature through new mechanical devices, indus- 
 trial production has received a ten-fold stimulus. 
 Imagine, then, how the world would stand aghast 
 if tomorrow morning the daily papers were to be 
 taken up, as they would be to the extent of pages 
 and pages, with an account of a frightful accident 
 in New York City by which more than two thou- 
 sand workingmen had lost their lives and more 
 than twenty thousand had been badly injured 
 the occurrence due to forces operating the 
 newly invented machinery to the full extent of 
 its enormous power, and to the absence of protec- 
 tion to the workers against its complicated parts. 
 The calamity would, indeed, "stagger humanity.*' 
 For a month, at least, harrowing particulars as 
 to the causes of the accident, its social effects, the 
 experiences of the wounded, the sad plight of the 
 families of the killed would in word and picture 
 continue to pack the columns of the press. But, 
 imagine now the intense horror, the woe, the con- 
 sternation throughout the country, and indeed all 
 countries, if at the end of a month Chicago were 
 to become the scene of a similar disaster, in which 
 the loss in killed and wounded should equal that 
 accompanying the accident in New York. Then, 
 if in another month San Francisco were to tele- 
 graph the news of a like catastrophe in that city
 
 AND COMPENSATION FOE ACCIDENTS 45 
 
 what would all civilized mankind begin saying? 
 Would intelligent men any longer tolerate calling 
 such an occurrence an "accident" 1 ? And if the 
 horrid thing went on, now in one city and now in 
 another, monthly for a year, would not the uni- 
 versal cry go up, "Stop this slaughter by any 
 means possible, however costly to society!" 
 Everywhere, in every church, club, business asso- 
 ciation, chamber of commerce, in every assem- 
 blage of men and women, for any social purpose, 
 this recurrent destruction of men by the thou- 
 sands, each event resembling in its bloodiness the 
 most sickening battle-fields of history, would be 
 denounced as a national infamy. Should any 
 hypocrite refer to these frightful occurrences 
 as "acts of God," he would be denounced as 
 blasphemous. Should an apologist refer to them 
 as "the natural price of our industrial pre- 
 eminence," he would be told indignantly that life 
 must be held sacred though industry should 
 perish. Should it be clearly shown that the origin 
 of much of the slaughter lay in causes for the most 
 part easily removable that, in fact, they had been 
 actually done away with largely by other nations 
 sentiments of patriotism would promptly rein- 
 force the instincts of humanity in our people. 
 Every legislative body, every court, every public 
 man speedily would be constrained to lend a hand 
 in the reforms necessary to cut down to a mini- 
 mum the risks in this respect to human life. No
 
 46 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 doubt, too, the call would be general to alleviate, 
 through appropriate methods of insurance, the 
 suffering consequent upon whatever casualties, in 
 spite of the best of human care, should thenceforth 
 occur in our industries. 
 
 Now, what part does imagination play in this 
 nightmare of a picture? It has merely focussed 
 the actually distributed elements of time and 
 place. Instead of the wonderful devices of the 
 new mechanics having been suddenly applied 
 within a year, they have been the gradual growth 
 of a century. Instead of one concentrated mass 
 accident a month in a particular city, thousands 
 of separate accidents occur in the course of every 
 month all over the United States. 
 
 What is more, the real number of killings and 
 serious injuries outnumber by far the two thou- 
 sand and the twenty thousand that we have set 
 down for our imaginary monthly total. No one 
 can present absolutely accurate statistics on this 
 subject. Our government makes no census of the 
 victims of accidents in industries. Statisticians 
 disagree in estimating their number. There is no 
 common agreement as to what degree of hurt to a 
 workman should be termed "an injury." There 
 is a border line of time between an outright 
 fatality and a death after a period in which other 
 causes than the accident may have supervened. 
 But if we take the most moderate figures on the 
 question we have those of Dr. Frederick L. Hoff-
 
 AND COMPENSATION FOB ACCIDENTS 47 
 
 man, of the Prudential Company, the specialty of 
 which is working-class insurance, whose estimate 
 is 30,000 to 35,000 fatal industrial accidents in the 
 United States annually, while several other statis- 
 ticians have estimated that the lowest number of 
 persons injured at their work sufficiently to 
 occasion an average loss of two weeks is at least 
 250,000 to 300,000. Thus the actual facts of indus- 
 trial slaughter outrun by twenty per cent, or more 
 what we have imagined. Yet there are estimates 
 in print, from men qualified to form them, which 
 are nearly double those here quoted. 
 
 Some comparisons may be drawn to show how 
 the United States has stood still, or worse, in deal- 
 ing with this national problem. For the twenty- 
 one years 1888-1908, the proportion of railway 
 employes killed outright in this country remained 
 nearly constant at about a quarter of one per cent, 
 each year. The proportion of injuries, however, 
 increased. With the expansion of the industry the 
 number should have about doubled, as a fact it 
 quadrupled. For British railway employes, 
 fatalities per 1,000 annually average seven-tenths 
 of one per cent., for American, 2.41 per cent. For 
 miners we have Europe, 1.45 ; United States, 3.60 
 in other words, for each 10,000 miners em- 
 ployed, Europe has 14 to 15 killed every year ; the 
 United States 36. In all the industries together, 
 the proportion killed here is three times the num- 
 ber for any other country.
 
 48 THE WAGE EAENEBS 
 
 Compensation undeniably is followed by pre- 
 vention. It is unnecessary to restate here in any 
 detail the experiences on this point of Germany 
 and Great Britain. They may be summed up in 
 the words of Dr. Hoffman, who, pleading that "a 
 most earnest effort should be made to profit by 
 the industrial methods of European countries," 
 says that "it should not be impossible to save at 
 least one-third, and perhaps one half [of our total 
 mortality], by intelligent and rational methods of 
 factory inspection, legislation, and control." He 
 further states that the non-fatal accidents, which 
 he computes as numbering in all - two millions 
 annually, "not only involve a vast amount of 
 human suffering and sorrow, but materially cur- 
 tail the normal longevity among those exposed to 
 the often needless risk of industrial casualties." 
 
 Not only have the two other great industrial 
 countries of the world, England and Germany, 
 shown us the way to prevent fully 50 per cent, of 
 the average of our industrial killings and maim- 
 ings, but they have carried compensation to a 
 science sufficiently advanced to permit us to profit 
 by their example. With us, in this matter, the main 
 practical problems at present relate, first, to 
 adapting the best foreign methods and practice 
 to our dual system of government, and, second, to 
 bringing compensation within constitutional limi- 
 tations. 
 
 It has been far from enough in the United
 
 AND COMPENSATION FOE ACCIDENTS 49 
 
 States in this work of substituting compensation 
 for traditional employers' liability, to shock and 
 reshock the country with the startling facts of 
 our delinquency. The task of exposition and pro- 
 test, while it has been fulfilled sufficiently to stir 
 to action groups of men of advanced opinions and 
 patriotic and benevolent sentiments, seems to 
 have failed to work the truth, at once disgraceful 
 and terrible, into the very hearts and minds of 
 the general masses, as must be done before our 
 people fully realize the duty thereby imposed 
 upon them. This stage of arousing public senti- 
 ment it seems to be necessary to go over again 
 and again by repetition of oft-printed statistics, 
 by quotation of authorities on the subject, by 
 turning the picture to every angle of fact and 
 every angle of the imagination. To accumulate 
 a proper momentum in favor of compensation, 
 however, at the present stage in the progress of 
 the movement, seems to be the least baffling part 
 of the work. Support of the people is to be a 
 certainty, some time, we may be assured, but 
 what as to the law necessary to establish a system 
 of uniform and general indemnity? 
 
 In Germany and England, procedure after con- 
 viction as to the social necessity of relieving the 
 working-classes of the burden incident to indus- 
 trial accidents was by an open road. Germany 
 chose one method, England another. In Germany, 
 State, employer, and employed contribute by pre-
 
 50 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 scribed methods to the compensation funds of 
 the industries. In England, employes make no 
 direct payment, the employers generally acquit- 
 ting themselves of their part of the duty by 
 bringing into service the insurance companies. 
 But in our country, except in a few States, it 
 has not been made certain that the fundamental 
 law is adaptable to either of these two methods 
 or to any other yet proposed, if the relief of in- 
 dustry in general be contemplated. The actual 
 problem of compensation in this country is how 
 to obviate a decision by the Court of Appeals of 
 New York, possibly to be followed in other States, 
 rendered March 24, 1911, by which a tentative 
 law affecting dangerous trades, passed the previ- 
 ous year, was declared to be unconstitutional. 
 The court regarded the law as violating private 
 right "by taking the property of one and giving 
 it to another without due process of law." Here 
 is not the place to try to argue down the long 
 series of legal points made against the statute by 
 the court in its opinion of ten thousand words. 
 Nor can we dwell on the outcry of surprise and 
 indignation which, when the court gave out its 
 decision, went up throughout the land from all 
 the social agencies promotive of the welfare of 
 the masses. The court seemed to repudiate what 
 in the light of accepted advanced teachings are 
 imperative duties of the State toward the work- 
 ing-classes. Nor is it worth while here to do
 
 AND COMPENSATION FOR ACCIDENTS 51 
 
 more than merely call attention to the fact that 
 the New York law was the result of patient study, 
 research, and labor on the part of representative 
 committees of citizens, many of them accustomed 
 to deal with matters of law and legislation. The 
 court settled the question for New York in its 
 way by its lights. To what extent its decision 
 stands as precedent for courts in other States 
 remains to be seen. 
 
 A proposition so to amend the New York con- 
 stitution that it may authorize a compulsory com- 
 pensation law has since been under consideration 
 by the Legislature. Undoubtedly it is a fact that 
 working-class opinion in the United States is at 
 present strongly in favor of automatic compen- 
 sation and opposed to its alternative, State in- 
 surance, as usually presented up to this time. 
 The workers feel, first, that any compulsory pay- 
 ment by them for insurance would be a deduction 
 from wages, and second, that their customary 
 share in the risks and losses in any and all occu- 
 pations have never obtained from society due 
 consideration. In countless ways the health of 
 the wage workers while they are at work is under- 
 mined and their lives shortened, and there is no 
 indemnity. For all minor accidents, by which 
 only a few days' work and pay are lost, no com- 
 pensation can be forthcoming. No life-insurance 
 can adequately reimburse the widow and orphan 
 for the loss of the bread-winner. While on the
 
 52 THE WAGE EAENEES 
 
 side of the employers there may come a financial 
 loss of a small percentage through compensation, 
 sure to be minimized and generalized by them 
 through a system of insurance, on the side of the 
 workingman the injuries which do not disable 
 him permanently, even when compensated up to 
 any possible legal limit, may leave the individual 
 a loser to the extent of an undermined consti- 
 tution or displacement in his grade as a work- 
 man. Such considerations, which could be en- 
 larged upon, lead the wage earners to assert that 
 compensation is not justly a burden of labor. 
 
 That certain fictions of the present-day legal 
 theories lingering in the statutes and judicial in- 
 terpretations of the common law, regarding in- 
 demnity to workmen for injuries, are in time to 
 be wholly displaced by living truths there can be 
 little doubt. Those fictions had their origin in 
 the facts of the old days of production on a small 
 scale, with the employer a shopmate ; we now live 
 in the era of production on the trust scale, with 
 the employer an impersonality. Times have 
 changed ; circumstances of employment have com- 
 pletely changed; the dicta of the law must con- 
 sequently change with the facts. Exempting an 
 employer from responsibility because an injury 
 to an employe has been caused by the act of one 
 out of perhaps twenty thousand fellow-workmen 
 is clearly injustice. To blame an employe for 
 alleged neglect of precautions against dangers of
 
 AND COMPENSATION FOB ACCIDENTS 53 
 
 which he could not be aware as existing in the 
 maze of machinery in a huge workshop is sheer 
 nonsense and cruelty. To say that the employe 
 assumed the risks in an occupation which is to- 
 day entirely made up of risks is mere empty talk. 
 These decayed relics of the so-called wisdom of 
 the law are of a certainty to be thrown aside. 
 To the social conscience of today, as foundations 
 for unjust dealings with employes, they are in- 
 tolerable. 
 
 That workmen can on the average collect 
 damages in only eleven cases in a hundred 
 brought in the courts indicates the legal chicanery 
 of counsel hairsplitting over antiquated notions, 
 and not the prevalent American sense of fair 
 dealing. What an exhibition of squandering 
 energy and money is made in the hundred million 
 dollars paid by employers in the eleven years 
 1894-1905 as premiums to liability insurance com- 
 panies, of which only 43 per cent, was awarded 
 to injured workmen, to be further diminished by 
 a large percentage through costs and attorneys' 
 fees. The trial of liability cases in the courts is 
 a national burden. Governor Hadley of Missouri 
 has asserted that the taxes going to the support 
 of the judges engaged upon them form a sum 
 greater than the total recovered by the injured 
 workmen. The president of the Travelers' In- 
 surance Company says that more than one-half 
 the time of the courts is taken up in settling con-
 
 54 THE WAGE EAENEES 
 
 troversies between employers and employed. 
 Systematic compensation would wipe out this 
 social waste. 
 
 The New York Commission which reported 
 favorably the bill which as a law was subsequently 
 killed by the Court of Appeals, thus summarized 
 the reasons for proposing to rescind the present 
 laws relating to liability for accidents and sub- 
 stitute compensation: 
 
 "1 The present system in New York rests on 
 a basis that is economically unwise and unfair ; in 
 operation it is wasteful, uncertain, and productive 
 of antagonisms between workmen and employers. 
 
 "2 It is satisfactory to none and tolerable 
 only to those employers and workmen who practi- 
 cally disregard their legal rights and obligations 
 and fairly share the burden of accidents in in- 
 dustries. 
 
 "3 The evils of the system are most marked 
 in hazardous employments, where the trade risk is 
 high and serious accidents frequent. 
 
 "4 As a matter of fact, workmen in the 
 dangerous trades do not, and practically cannot, 
 provide for themselves adequate accident insur- 
 ance, and therefore the burden of serious acci- 
 dents falls on the workmen least able to bear it, 
 and brings many of them and their families to 
 want." 
 
 Within the last four years, after official investi- 
 gation of the subject, either through special com- 
 missions or committees of the legislatures, a 
 number of our States, including most of those
 
 AND COMPENSATION FOB ACCIDENTS 55 
 
 in the lead in industry, have, by what amount to 
 tentative laws, considered and set up one form or 
 another of either direct compensation or State 
 insurance, usually, however, of very restricted 
 application. Compensation laws, in most in- 
 stances elective, have been passed in California, 
 Kansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York 
 (decided to be unconstitutional), Wisconsin, Illi- 
 nois, Maryland, Montana, Ohio, Massachusetts, 
 Nevada, Michigan, Arizona, Rhode Island, and 
 Washington. In California and Wisconsin the 
 compensation laws are compulsory as to work- 
 men for the State and the municipalities. Iowa, 
 Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Connecticut, Dela- 
 ware, Colorado, Nebraska, West Virginia, and 
 Texas have commissions studying the question. 
 There is considerable variation in the provisions 
 of the laws as passed. By most of them only 
 "hazardous" or "dangerous" occupations are 
 affected. A uniform law for all the States, pro- 
 posed in a draft for compulsory compensation in 
 dangerous occupations, has been prepared by the 
 American Federation of Labor. Another sub- 
 mitted by the National Civic Federation, contains 
 unessential differences on points of phraseology 
 and provision. A draft has also been issued for 
 "Compulsory State insurance if practical, other- 
 wise compulsory compensation," by what is 
 known as the "Chicago Conference," in which 
 the American Association for Labor Legislation
 
 56 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 was a prime mover, and the American Bar Asso- 
 ciation has declared in favor of the enactment of 
 "uniform laws for compensation for industrial 
 accidents" by "all the States and by the United 
 States within its jurisdiction." 
 
 Space permits of no discussion here of the 
 merits of these various laws and bills. Difficulties 
 in the whole problem are suggested by their 
 variety and their inapplicability to industry in 
 general. The steps thus far made in the different 
 States taking action, and the failure of the other 
 States to take any action, together with the diver- 
 gences in principles, methods, application, and 
 possible effectiveness of the laws adopted, all 
 leave the situation far from satisfactory. 
 
 Among other propositions before the country, 
 there is one for a Federal insurance tax, to be 
 collected and disbursed by mutual associations, 
 divided by trades, as in Germany. The iron and 
 steel trades, for example, would by this method 
 have employers and employes in one association, 
 paying each year a tax equaling what would be 
 necessary to meet the benefits, plus a reasonable 
 amount for reserve, continuously, as long as li- 
 ability lasts, and during widowhood of wives and 
 orphanage of children. Among the supporters of 
 this system are lawyers and insurance men who 
 assert their belief in its constitutionality. It 
 would fall under that provision of the Federal 
 constitution which authorizes the collection of
 
 AND COMPENSATION FOB ACCIDENTS 57 
 
 taxes "to promote the general welfare." This 
 proposition is worthy of serious consideration. 
 Its. advocates affirm that it is framed on a study 
 of the results to date of the German system. There 
 is pending in Congress a bill establishing compen- 
 sation for workmen employed on interstate rail- 
 roads. This bill was recommended as a result of 
 exhaustive investigation made by a Federal com- 
 mission. 
 
 Meantime, while the States are proceeding 
 separately, tentatively, and in uncertainty, the 
 United States remains, for example, the only in- 
 dustrial nation on earth that maintains, as it does 
 in perhaps 90 per cent, of its accident cases, the 
 old system of liability based on negligence! 
 
 Our wage earners in general hold that industry 
 should bear the burden of the pecuniary loss sus- 
 tained by workmen through industrial accidents. 
 Associated with many men of altruistic character 
 who are not wage workers, representative labor 
 men are discussing the subject, their expectation 
 being that finally a law, or a set of laws, will be 
 evolved which will constitutionally afford to the 
 victims of industrial accidents, or in case of death 
 their dependent survivors, if not automatic com- 
 pensation without cost, a system of insurance 
 yielding all the benefits of such compensation and 
 adding nothing to the burdens of the wage 
 earners. Every good citizen would naturally de-
 
 58 THE WAGE EAENEES 
 
 sire to see the United States removed from the 
 unenviable position it holds among the nations in 
 this respect today. The task ought not to be 
 beyond American ingenuity and statesmanship.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE WAGE EABNEBS AND INDUSTRIAL EFFICIENCY. 
 
 "Efficiency," within the last year or two, has 
 had "its day in court." Bather, it has been made 
 one of those sensational topics which from time 
 to time get a hearing in that big forum of the 
 American press to which, while the discussion 
 is novel, are admitted pleaders pro and con. 
 Whether the live subject in the public eye relates 
 to politics, economics, ethics, or mechanics, the 
 spectators (the great public) take up with it 
 awhile, permit the orators to have their say on it, 
 and then turn their attention to the next "film." 
 However, with respect to any one of the causes 
 thus brought forward, there is usually a part of 
 the great mass directly interested. This, a group 
 of itself, continues to study its particular subject 
 after the first flurry over it, and, subdividing in 
 the debate, sets to work the one section to pro- 
 mote and the other to defeat an advance of the 
 disputed idea. Finally, society adopts the idea 
 or its principle, in part or as a whole, in accor- 
 dance with what in it is sound and useful, or else, 
 persisting in looking upon it as a dead issue, or 
 a past fashion, stands impervious. 
 
 "Efficiency" has quickly dropped off quite to 
 the limits of group discussion. Already the body
 
 60 THE WAGE EAENEES 
 
 of spectators in the big auditorium demand for 
 the arena fresh thrillers, new voices, novel acts, 
 or show themselves eager for a sight of the grand 
 old gladiators performing time-honored plays, 
 especially the political. 
 
 But, for its brief hour, " Efficiency" had a 
 great run. It was unexpectedly set out on the 
 stage in the national coliseum in a single day. A 
 very distinguished and amiable lover of mankind, 
 who temporarily obtained place at the megaphone, 
 proclaimed that he knew how the nation could 
 save a million dollars a day in but one branch of 
 its multifarious concerns. That startling an- 
 nouncement was sufficient to cause the mighty 
 audience to demand a demonstration. It is true, 
 a goodly number of the spectators had already 
 seen the unexpectedly heralded industrial playlet 
 in a freak side-show, were familiar with its ex- 
 aggerations on the boards, and more than suspect- 
 ed its true purpose. In its "try-out" on a large 
 scale, which followed, its original managers were 
 joined by many volunteer coadjutors, not wholly 
 welcome to them, not recognized by them as 
 staunchly orthodox, and who, perhaps, distorted 
 their plot or misapplied or magnified its moral. 
 
 Quite within the expectations of reason, the 
 great public soon had before it volumes of propo- 
 sitions to re-form, re-adjust, and re-lubricate the 
 wheels which run any and all of our social insti- 
 tutions the law-making mills, the courts, the
 
 AND INDUSTRIAL EFFICIENCY 61 
 
 professions, the administrations of city, State, 
 and nation. Before long, little old-fashioned 
 points in efficiency gave way before comprehen- 
 sive theories for attaining universal perfection. 
 What was mere shop management to the read- 
 justment of all the systems of construction and 
 transportation ? What was mere good housekeep- 
 ing to the science of city planning? What petty 
 individual thrift to collective co-operation? What 
 ordinary parental duties to race-elevating eugen- 
 ics? 
 
 It was thus the fate of pure and simple "ef- 
 ficiency" to be swamped in a stream of fact and 
 fiction itself had started running. When Mr. 
 Stimson, chief engineer of the Universal Audit 
 Company of New York, before a Congressional 
 committee investigating the subject, slightingly 
 referred to "the Taylor system" of scientific 
 management as "only one little bit of detail" of 
 "the whole subject of industrial efficiency," the 
 country apparently deemed him hardly any more 
 absurd than Mr. Taylor. When Mr. Brandeis, 
 speaking to the great captains of the railway in- 
 terests, told them he had experts at command 
 willing to show them, in their inexpertness, the 
 way to save yearly hundreds of millions, the 
 small subject of shop economics dropped down 
 beyond the horizon. When efficiency engineers 
 in business as individuals, firms, and corporations 
 started up all over the land, with suggestions
 
 62 THE WAGE EAENEBS 
 
 for legerdemain in every mode of human proce- 
 dure, the voluminous extolling of Mr. Taylor and 
 his system of " scientific management" by his 
 "write-up" journalists seemed a waste of print- 
 er's ink. 
 
 Certainly it is true that at many points our 
 civilization is but half-baked. Nothing, yet, goes 
 just right. Perfection is far off. Draw close to 
 any one of the professions teaching, for instance 
 and you find a confusion of critics' voices cry- 
 ing chaos. Medicine has a dozen variant schools ; 
 surely most of them must teach more or less of 
 error. Supreme courts divide five to four. As 
 for religion, let us here maintain a respectful 
 silence. It is to be granted, measurement of in- 
 accuracies, of method or movement, in these 
 spheres cannot be taken with geometrical preci- 
 sion. Nevertheless, when efficiency is the theme, 
 unbiased inquirers are warranted in objecting to 
 being shown only the comparatively small area 
 in which the stop-watch is the supreme test. 
 Especially is the wage worker justified in calling 
 out to the audience that it is unfair that "effi- 
 ciency" should select him as the one horrible ex- 
 ample while sinners in so many other social 
 categories must be worse than he, since he, of all 
 others, truly is a worker, the one performing the 
 tasks essential to society. 
 
 Now, that's the point in the wage worker's ob- 
 jection to Mr. Taylor's playlet, "Efficiency." In
 
 AND INDUSTRIAL EFFICIENCY 63 
 
 its scenes Mr. Taylor has made his caricature of 
 the workingman the villain, has the limelight full 
 upon him without cease, and, professing for him 
 a saintly benevolence, has the other leading char- 
 acter, Big Capital, sweat him, cheat him, deceive 
 him, and on the whole exploit his time, his mus- 
 cles, his nerves, his whole bodily mechanism in- 
 humanly. The real workingman, in the audience, 
 resents the falsification of his character. He 
 thinks it fair that the limelight should be turned 
 on the other classes of men engaged in manufac- 
 ture, business, commerce, or in any social role 
 whatever, and the stop-watch or the microscope 
 used on them. Let them be seen publicly, in full, 
 just as they are, their demerits unexaggerated. 
 The wage earner believes he would issue from 
 such a "try-out," level with the best. 
 
 The wage earner, as the most deeply interested 
 man in the industrial group engaged in discussing 
 Mr. Taylor's "Efficiency," with its Emerson- 
 Gantt-Gilbreth & Co. additions and corrections, is 
 prepared to submit to the public some views of 
 his own regarding its alleged facts and undoubted 
 teachings. These views may thus be summarized : 
 It is libelously untrue that "soldiering" to any- 
 thing like the extent described by Mr. Taylor, is 
 characteristic of American workmen. There is 
 no available statistical basis for the statement 
 that 50,000 employes are today working under 
 the Taylor scheme. The system is not rapidly
 
 64 THE WAGE EAENERS 
 
 spreading; it has been dropped in some large 
 works where it was once in practice. Its use in 
 government arsenals has been in large measure 
 condemned by a Congressional commission, after 
 careful investigation. It has, where tried, been 
 far from a uniform success. In no case has there 
 been more than a half-truth in the statement 
 made by its promoters that "the system raises 
 wages." The higher wages to be earned by the 
 small proportion of workmen speeded up to its 
 requirements are inevitably subject eventually to 
 that law of economics by which competition in an 
 over-stocked market lowers prices ; hence the per- 
 sistent professions of the promoters of efficiency, 
 that they intend to raise wages, must count as 
 naught. What it has done, as to wages, has been 
 to raise them temporarily for a small proportion 
 of a force and lower them for mechanics in gen- 
 eral, while depriving a portion, through unem- 
 ployment, of any wage at all. The system un- 
 doubtedly found origin in socially unreputable 
 sources the Midvale and Bethlehem companies. 
 It is rarely, if ever, practicable in small shops. 
 Its applications are chiefly to be found in con- 
 nection with operations which are uniform and 
 repeated indefinitely, and together represent but 
 a few simple phases of the machinist's trade, 
 which is characterized by a multiplicity of prac- 
 tical problems involving intricate movements. 
 Efficiency scientific management as a compre-
 
 AND INDUSTRIAL EFFICIENCY 65 
 
 hensive industrial and social proposition has been 
 absurdly overtrumpeted, Mr. Taylor's own claims 
 frequently being the basis. It obviously is inap- 
 plicable to most of the work measured only by 
 time, the unit in a large percentage of all industry 
 and other service. It is not a fact, as its sup- 
 porters assert, that efficiency has proceeded with- 
 out occasioning strikes. It is a fact that efficiency 
 is interwoven with the piece and bonus and con- 
 tract and fining systems, with their burdens and 
 abuses. 
 
 Let us review this summary and cite facts bear- 
 ing upon its points. As to the industrial disease 
 of "soldiering," Mr. Taylor, writing of the Mid- 
 vale works, says: "The workmen together had 
 carefully planned just how fast each job should 
 be done, and they had set a pace for each machine, 
 which amounted to about one-third of a good 
 day's work." In his edition of "Shop Manage- 
 ment," Mr. Taylor writes of "most of the men in 
 the shop" that they "will 'soldier' " to the ex- 
 tent of three or four hundred per cent, if allowed 
 to do so. This charge against the American 
 workingman, it is to be clearly understood, is the 
 starting point of Mr. Taylor's system. He de- 
 picts, in a vivid coloring, a sort of detestable 
 cancer, with intent to follow up his diagnosis with 
 his cure-all. He thus presents to us the played- 
 out methods of the magic soap advertiser. His 
 exaggerations are apparent to all employers and
 
 66 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 employes of average experience ; as they must be 
 also to all persons of common sense. As a matter 
 of fact, if a force of workmen should loaf away 
 only one-half their time, it would pay to employ 
 one supervising taskmaster to every three men, 
 to do nothing but watch that the workers each 
 should do a fair day's work. This indictment of 
 the wage-earning classes by Mr. Taylor has been 
 demonstrated by Mr. Gompers to be a stupid 
 libel. Its complete refutation being of the first 
 importance, Mr. Gompers' treatment of the point 
 is here quoted. 
 
 "It would offend the common sense of even the 
 casual observer to maintain that piecework rates 
 usually lead to 'soldiering.' It is the universal 
 testimony of men who have earned their wages 
 at piecework that the tendency to speeding up 
 comes from the man himself. He wants the high- 
 est amount of wages possible on Saturday night. 
 Now, what proportion of the wage earners in this 
 nation are engaged in TDiecework? Here is a list 
 of occupations in which it is more or less common : 
 
 "Bakers, barbers, blacksmiths, boilermakers, 
 bookbinders, boot and shoe workers, broom and 
 whisk makers, brushmakers, car workers, chain- 
 makers, cigarmakers, cloth hat and cap makers, 
 coopers, lace curtain operatives, watch case en- 
 gravers, fur workers, garment workers, glass bot- 
 tle^ blowers, glove workers, pocket knife blade 
 grinders and finishers, table knife grinders, hat- 
 ters, iron, steel, and tin workers ; jewelry workers, 
 lathers, leather workers, lithographic pressfeed- 
 ers, longshoremen, metal polishers, coal and 
 metalliferous miners, molders, plate printers, pot-
 
 AND INDUSTRIAL EFFICIENCY 67 
 
 ters; pulp, sulphite, and paper mill workers; 
 shingle weavers, stove mounters, tailors, textile 
 workers, tin workers, printers, upholsterers, 
 elastic goring weavers, wire weavers, wood work- 
 ers, and other minor callings too numerous to 
 mention. 
 
 1 'When this list is studied, the reader sees at 
 once a direct contradiction in this considerable 
 proportion of industry of Doctor Taylor's asser- 
 tion as to the extent of the plague of 'soldiering' 
 or deliberate inefficiency. 
 
 "What as to the large class of occupations 
 which move by time-table? Take as an example 
 the passenger trains or the electric street-car 
 systems throughout the United States. We have 
 in view in this category many other occupations, 
 including elevator running, all forms of police 
 work, the officials great and small engaged in 
 steamship transportation. In the same class fall 
 cooks, waiters, hotel and restaurant help in gen- 
 eral. In fact, we have, further, actors, stationary 
 engineers and firemen, musicians, postoffice clerks, 
 carriers, telegraphers, salesmen, and many stage 
 employes. Is it possible for men in these occu- 
 pations to deliver a third of a day's work for a 
 full day's work? 
 
 "Another classification is of wage earners on 
 timework whose output may be measured. Among 
 these, as examples, are bakery and confectionery 
 workers, barbers, bill posters, blacksmiths, boot 
 and shoe workers, garment cutters, bottle blowers, 
 glove workers, hatters, much work done by litho- 
 graphers and printers, especially those in the com- 
 posing-room."
 
 68 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 If " soldiering" were as common as Mr. Taylor 
 describes it, his thirty years of crusading against 
 it might reasonably have brought five million 
 wage earners under his system. He claims fifty 
 thousand. Former president James O'Connell, 
 International Association of Machinists, testify- 
 ing before the Congressional committee of in- 
 quiry on the subject, said that at the Watertown 
 Arsenal, where the system had been in use for a 
 couple of years, it had only reached a very small 
 percentage of the employes, but he supposed it 
 would be claimed that all were under the Taylor 
 system ; possibly by this method of calculation the 
 total of fifty thousand had been made out. Mr. 
 Taylor's book gives no census of his forced con- 
 verts or list of the places where they work. So 
 far as may be judged by press accounts, Mr. 
 Taylor's list is suffering losses. Of his system, 
 James J. Hill said: "It is all rot; it has cost 
 the Santa Fe Railroad a million dollars to try it, 
 and they have abandoned it." Machinist dele- 
 gates told the Congressional committee that it 
 had been given up by the American Locomotive 
 Company and "most unkindest cut of all" the 
 Bethlehem Steel Company, favorite scene of the 
 "efficiency engineers' " earlier stop-watch per- 
 formances. 
 
 _ Newspaper readers are becoming familiar with 
 strikes against the system. The Rock Island 
 Arsenal men struck through the means safest to
 
 AND INDUSTEIAL EFFICIENCY 69 
 
 government employes; they tackled Congress 
 about it. A division of the Watertown employes 
 walked out. At the Philadelphia plant of the 
 Keystone Watch Case Company nearly 200 un- 
 organized men struck against the stop-watch sys- 
 tem. The American wage earner may gain the 
 impression that he has been already rushed quite 
 to the reasonable limit when he contemplates the 
 usual reference-book table of the comparative 
 annual productivity of workmen. It runs: 
 
 American $2,450 
 
 Canadian 1,455 
 
 Australian 900 
 
 French 640 
 
 English 556 
 
 German 460 
 
 As to raising wages, two points come in view. 
 (1) To what extent has "efficiency" raised 
 wages? (2) Have its advocates any warrant in 
 prophesying that the wage workers accepting it 
 will not have their wages lowered? Here are 
 plain, undeniable facts which bear on both these 
 points : In all the stock examples of the efficiency 
 program the survivors of the original force have 
 obtained, as alleged, for the time being, an in- 
 crease. But the helpers, the performers of the 
 preliminary motions dropped from the high- 
 priced workman's routine, the "handy men" who 
 are substitutes for mechanics qualified for the
 
 70 THE WAGE EAENEES 
 
 trade, all take only the wage of the unskilled labor 
 market. We find in the index to Mr. Taylor's 
 book no reference to his admission (page 82) of 
 a reduction in the wages of stop-watch lathe men 
 at ''the beginning of the recent fall in the scale 
 of wages throughout the country." Here is a 
 clear concession to the law of competition which 
 reduces wages in an overstocked labor market. 
 And since Mr. Taylor does not fail to point out 
 that a logical result of his system is the destruc- 
 tion of the trade union, what power is to stand 
 against reductions in wages, down to the lowest 
 level at which stop-watch workmen may be hired 
 in dull times by that portion of unscrupulous and 
 greedy employers which exists in all branches of 
 industry 1 
 
 An imminent cause of a break-down in applied 
 stop-watch, high tension, piecework efficiency lies 
 in the graft its "differential rate" opens up for 
 the employer on the employe. The highest limit 
 of a machine and its human operator being as- 
 certained, to be entitled to the bonus above the 
 flat wage, this high point or one closely approach- 
 ing it must be reached and maintained by all 
 employes engaged in the same class of work. 
 When the stint is not reached and only the flat 
 wage consequently paid, the result may be a con- 
 fiscation by the employer of the production above 
 the usual fair day's quantity. Hear Mr. Taylor 
 on this point: "With the differential rate, if for
 
 AND INDUSTRIAL EFFICIENCY 71 
 
 any reason he [the workman] fails to do his full 
 task, he not only loses the large extra premium 
 which is paid for complete success, but in ad- 
 dition he suffers the direct loss of the piece price 
 for each piece by which he falls short." Now, 
 it is easy for the work to "run bad," making it 
 impossible for the operative to attain the high 
 limit. This is the case in the textile industry, as 
 found on investigation by the trade union. Metal 
 workers find in the variable degree of hardness 
 of the material a factor which baffles records. 
 Weather counts both ways in out-door work. In 
 all such cases, who is to decide for or against the 
 worker who may attribute his shortage of output 
 to causes beyond his control? With no trade 
 union, many abuses could be practiced with little 
 effective opposition. 
 
 The prospect of what may come about through 
 the introduction of this system brings to the shop 
 worker's mind unpleasant recollections of what he 
 has seen taking place under driving foremen and 
 selfish employers. For example, there is Mr. Tay- 
 lor 's own limited view of the moralities, the social 
 and patriotic objects, the human influences possi- 
 ble to shop work an edifying conception, given in 
 these words: "All employes should bear in mind 
 that each shop exists first, last, and all the time 
 for the purpose of paying dividends to its own- 
 ers." Why, then, in employing labor or in any 
 other transaction should the employer stop short
 
 72 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 of anything that will not send him to jail? Or, 
 again there are the views of President Harrah, of 
 the Midvale Company, as expressed before the 
 Committee on Labor of the House of Representa- 
 tives in 1900: "We have the most improved kind 
 of machinery now ; but we make it a rule to run a 
 machine to break." "We have absolutely no re- 
 gard for machinery or for men." Or, again, 
 there was the Triangle Waist Factory, with its 
 speeded-up sewing machines, the operators back 
 to back in rows with hardly room to move, the 
 operating room doors locked, insufficient exits, 
 systems of fines every point considered and cal- 
 culated to bring dividends. Every point, except 
 the shop afire. 
 
 Intensely unpleasant to the real workingman is 
 the caricature of the workingman brought out on 
 the stage in the- first scene of "Efficiency" a 
 loafer, studying how to avoid fulfilling his obliga- 
 tions with an employer. Almost equally disagree- 
 able is Mr. Taylor's ideal of a workman as pre- 
 sented in the final scenes of his work a human 
 automaton, in the social status of a convict. Nor 
 has Mr. Taylor been at all successful with the 
 other leading character of his playlet the em- 
 ployer. He brings him on the boards in too many 
 disguises as Benevolence, increasing wages as 
 Science, working wonders in the stage properties 
 of bonus, piecework, and stint ; as Political Econ- 
 omy saving the nation a lot of work all these,
 
 AND INDUSTRIAL EFFICIENCY 73 
 
 only to let this hero take down his mask in the last 
 act and show himself, barefaced, as plain Divi- 
 dend Hunter. 
 
 As to the extent to which the practice of effi- 
 ciency may unsettle trade unionism, in the present 
 subdivision of trades and the varying levels of 
 skilled and unskilled labor, the wage workers 
 hardly need to be overanxious. It takes two to 
 five years, according to Mr. Taylor, to get appre- 
 ciable returns from his system, and then it may 
 tumble to pieces, like a house of cards, as it seems 
 to have done at Bethlehem. Some branches of 
 efficiency, such as the bricklaying, require such a 
 considerable pyramid of a force, with assistants 
 at stage after stage in the work, that it may long 
 continue most profitable to depend on just brick- 
 layers to do the run of ordinary jobs. In the trade 
 of the machinist it can hardly be possible to abol- 
 ish from use an amount of skill and technical 
 knowledge that forms one of the elements of the 
 wealth of our country, simply by turning over to 
 laborers certain movements that take endless 
 repetition. Nor are our well-laid plans for indus- 
 trial education to be undone in a day by the stop- 
 watch.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE WAGE.EABNERS AND THE JUDICIARY. 
 
 To "respect .the courts" is an admonitory call 
 so often made on the workingman that he has 
 formulated for general consideration a counter- 
 call. He cannot condense it in another three 
 words. His response to the implied criticism ad- 
 dressed him might properly begin with some in- 
 quiry as to what class in society habitually shows 
 more respect than his own for the judiciary as an 
 institution. Do the politicians, for instance ? Do 
 the "captains of industry"? He believes that in 
 their sphere judges ought to be experts and ac- 
 cordingly appreciated. He understands that 
 order, that prime essential to society, depends 
 largely on obedience to the bench. He knows that 
 as the law is, so society is and vice versa, and that 
 accordingly as the law is well or badly adminis- 
 tered so much the better or the worse for all 
 classes, including the wage workers. To these 
 familiar commonplace generalities he assents, 
 without argument. 
 
 But, is it the duty of the workingman so to rev- 
 erence the courts that he should regard their de- 
 cisions as above the range of his discussion? 
 Should he maintain and express no judgment of 
 his own on his constitutional or inherent rights ?
 
 AND THE JUDICIARY 75 
 
 Queries such as these might appear absurd were 
 it not that inexperienced persons often make a 
 show of indignation when told that the decision of 
 any court is to be opposed. "Why did you not obey 
 the court and so avoid making yourself liable to 
 a jail sentence?" was in substance asked by a 
 woman in an audience which had been addressed 
 by me on some phases of labor's rights. Appar- 
 ently she regarded questioning any court's con- 
 clusions as disobedience to the law or at least evi- 
 dence of a lawless spirit. She had given no 
 weight to the one important fact that an appeal 
 through legal form is a justifiable opposition to 
 a court possibly in error. She had not under- 
 stood that contesting a lower court's decision 
 clear up to the highest court, especially in a case 
 involving a constitutional right, or a legal point 
 not fully settled, might be a patriotic duty. 
 
 To a considerable extent, ignorance, akin to this 
 woman's, is the foundation of a more or less gen- 
 eral impression, which organized labor's critics 
 would have stand for public opinion, that the 
 American workingman is "against the courts," is 
 in fact in the habit of denouncing and disobeying 
 them. 
 
 What is true in this charge is that the organized 
 working-classes are of necessity at the present 
 time obliged to direct the attention of the coun- 
 try to what they believe are errors or shortcom- 
 ings in certain proceedings of law courts with re-
 
 76 THE WAGE EARNEES 
 
 gard to labor questions which are unsettled and 
 which, it now seems, can only be settled through 
 a social process involving several stages. These 
 questions require first to be discussed publicly. 
 Their reply will involve defining the limits within 
 which courts may act; courts are not to encroach 
 on rights of the citizen which will be clearly estab- 
 lished, and they are to be assigned their unques- 
 tionably proper place relative to the lawmaking 
 and executive departments of our government. 
 One important result of this process will be that in 
 their judgments the courts will apply principles of 
 human rights which today are accepted by the en- 
 lightened majority, not only of this country, but 
 all civilized countries. 
 
 The first of these questions is the matter of dis- 
 cussing the fallibility of the courts themselyes, as 
 especially shown in the inconsistency of their find- 
 ings on the problems incident to the development 
 of our new industrial society. Certain points in 
 this primary inquiry are now up before the coun- 
 try in urgent form. Is there a tendency among 
 our judges to lag behind general progress in the 
 acceptance of certain principles of sociology true 
 in the opinion of nearly all men whose daily ex- 
 periences or studies bring before their minds the 
 social effects of the new industrial conditions! 
 Are those " rights of persons," made obvious to 
 the working-class by the facts of life as they now 
 are, accorded in the courts equal consideration
 
 AND THE JUDICIARY 77 
 
 with the "rights of things/' as established gen- 
 erations ago, when the worker was little more than 
 a dumb and dependent chattel ? On this point, the 
 most conspicuous facts as regards the courts can- 
 not be dwelt upon too emphatically. In deciding 
 cases involving labor's claims, a judge has before 
 him in every instance two practically contra- 
 dictory sets of precedents. He may give primary 
 importance and preponderant weight to the prece- 
 dents immediately affecting human rights, the 
 personal rights which lie in the category that prin- 
 cipally concerns the masses; or he may take the 
 contrary view, from another chain of precedents 
 that legal rights are for the most part concretely 
 represented in property. In Man vs. The Dollar, 
 the judge, guided by a line of legally valid prece- 
 dents, may be inclined to award judgment to a 
 substance, property, in contradistinction to what 
 may seem to him to be comparatively a shadow, 
 namely, rights disassociated from material pos- 
 sessions. 
 
 When the wage worker, in arguing to society 
 his cause relative to the courts, has established 
 the fact of the fallibility of judges and of the reas- 
 onableness of his query as to a tendency existing 
 among them to follow the precedents which in his 
 opinion stand as obstacles to the just protection 
 of the lives and the rights of the masses of men, he 
 is next prepared to state definitely what he holds 
 certain of these rights to be. As a good and
 
 78 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 worthy citizen, he is ready to contend for such 
 rights in the courts, in the public forum, and at 
 the polls. He has been taught that a right worth 
 having is worth fighting for, and that a right neg- 
 lected must be brought forward by the man who 
 ought to possess and exercise it. In conducting 
 this struggle the wage earner surely is guilty of 
 no impropriety in pointing out where, in his opin- 
 ion, judges have ignored his rights, and where 
 their action has been a violation of the funda- 
 mental principles of our republic. Moreover, cer- 
 tain of these rights are today pressing for an im- 
 mediate and definite recognition. One of them is, 
 the wage earner's right of exercising free speech 
 and of maintaining a free press, and in regard to 
 these is to be defined the just limit of a court's 
 interference with a citizen's utterances, in spoken 
 or printed word. Very important practical ques- 
 tions next follow closely. What are the constitu- 
 tional limits to a court injunction in labor dis- 
 putes! What act relative to an order from the 
 bench constitutes a contempt of court? Is the 
 wage worker to exercise freely his right to dis- 
 pose of his labor as he wills'? Is he to exercise 
 his right to control his purchasing power as he 
 wills? How far may he go in inducing another 
 wage earner to join him in an action which in his 
 judgment promotes benefits to both ? What are a 
 union man's rights on the highway? May an or- 
 ganization of wage earners refuse to work with
 
 AND THE JUDICIARY 79 
 
 men objectionable to them? Is it a crime for a 
 group of men to do that which it is legal for one of 
 their number to do? How long is the bench to be 
 free to play off the always dubious principle of 
 ''freedom of contract" against the manifest and 
 imperative principle of "the general welfare," to 
 the destruction of many forms of just protection 
 of the men, women and children engaged in indus- 
 try! Until these questions are answered authori- 
 tatively, once and for all, organized labor will be 
 the prey of combined enemies having as instru- 
 ments shrewd counsel under fee and as legal agen- 
 cies courts who place in the way of labor what- 
 ever barriers can be formed out of the vestiges of 
 the legal compulsion which held sway when labor 
 was hardly above the status of serfdom. 
 
 For the wage worker to hold that courts are 
 fallible, and to keep the fact well forward in con- 
 tending for what he regards as his rights, so far 
 from manifesting disrespect, is merely acting 
 upon what has been taught him by the State in 
 establishing a system of checks in the hierarchy of 
 courts as well as by the constantly differing opin- 
 ions of judges themselves. The gradations of 
 courts, the higher possessing revisionary powers 
 over the lower, result in exhibiting error in a 
 large percentage of the lower courts ' decisions, or 
 at least differences in the practical effect of their 
 conclusions as compared with those of the courts 
 above them. Majority rule on a divided bench
 
 80 THE WAGE EABNEES 
 
 indicates fallibility in one of the parties to the di- 
 vision, and in the course of a session of a court of 
 several members each may find himself in the 
 minority on one or more decisions, in which case 
 he is entitled to regard the majority as fallible. 
 To organized labor, bringing to the courts ques- 
 tions springing from modernized industry, the 
 judges have furnished continual illustrations of in- 
 adaptability either to one another's views or to 
 prevailing public opinion. Their decisions on these 
 questions have also shown their tendencies as dis- 
 putants to place an emphasis on either one or the 
 other amid conflicting principles. The series of 
 results of the split-up of the Court of Appeals of 
 New York in 1904 in finding, by a vote of four to 
 one, that the eight-hour act passed in that State in 
 1897 was unconstitutional, was from several 
 points of view worth a law-college education to 
 the labor men of the country. Two members of 
 the court regarded the act as an interference by 
 the Legislature with a right of the municipality, 
 and therefore unconstitutional. Two others, to 
 whose minds it deprived an individual of property 
 without due process of law, also found it unconsti- 
 tutional. But the fifth judge, accepting it as a 
 police regulation in the interest of public health 
 and morality, maintained that it was constitu- 
 tional. Judicial confusion leaving the matter in 
 this shape, the people of the State took it up and 
 by the aid of a judge-proof constitutional amend-
 
 AND THE JUDICIARY 81 
 
 ment passed an eight-hour act, the terms of which 
 tallied with provisions the United States Supreme 
 Court had declared valid in the Kansas eight-hour 
 law. 
 
 On the likelihood of judges varying in their 
 views of elementary legal principles, one or the 
 other of which by this time ought to be an estab- 
 lished basis of our public policy, the judicial 
 course on the New York ten-hour bakery act is 
 witness. By a vote of four to three, the State 
 Court of Appeals held that the statute was a 
 proper exercise of the police power and therefore 
 constitutional. But in the United States Supreme 
 Court five judges to four held the law to be un- 
 constitutional on the ground that it attempted an 
 arbitrary interference with the freedom of con- 
 tract. 
 
 The gist of the lesson to the wage earner in 
 these various decisions is that the principles of 
 the law which may be invoked in regard to such 
 statutes are but few and easily understood, while 
 each is an instrument to be grasped and employed 
 with a desired effect by interested litigants. 
 
 Not only does one see plainly in these typical 
 cases that judges are fallible, but also that they 
 may be swayed by personal associations and in- 
 clinations. That being the fact, the aspirations 
 for justice of the wage-working masses may be 
 sufficient motive and warrant in endeavoring to 
 establish their own views of justice.
 
 82 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 Their opponents may reasonably set out to 
 demonstrate that the principles of a law which the 
 wage earners propose cannot be aligned with rea- 
 son and justice, that the law would lead to heavier 
 burdens on society, or that under it the wage- 
 earners themselves would be the chief sufferers. 
 But to charge the wage earners with disrespect 
 for the judiciary because they criticise, even in 
 severe terms, the views held by certain judges is 
 diverting attention from the essential subject to 
 an incidental point. It is begging the question. 
 The wage earner may pertinently call attention to 
 the fact, recorded in Bigelow's " Overruled 
 Cases," that as far back as 1873 the appellate 
 courts had overruled nearly ten thousand of their 
 own decisions. Yet he could still respect the 
 courts, accordingly. 
 
 Impervious to any superstition that there are 
 principles in law or government which he may not 
 presume to discuss, as may other laymen, the 
 wage worker is prepared to assert his rights to 
 free speech and a free press. To bring comment 
 on this principle at once to a concrete point, refer- 
 ence may be made to the opinion regarding it offi- 
 cially rendered by Chief Justice Shepard, of the 
 Supreme Court, District of Columbia. Referring 
 to the constitutional inhibition of any abridg- 
 ment of the freedom of speech or the press, 
 Justice Shepard said from the bench, with regard 
 to an injunction order issued by a lower court of
 
 AND THE JUDICIARY 83 
 
 the District, that acts of publication by the de- 
 fendants which violated parts of the lower court's 
 decree exceeding its constitutional powers were 
 not causes for legal penalities. He quoted Justice 
 Miller, of the United States Supreme Court, as de- 
 ciding that a decree punishing a man for contempt 
 of court because he refused to comply with an 
 order which the court had no authority to make, 
 was void. Now, organized labor men have learned 
 that in injunctions issued against them there may 
 be, not only quite a list of acts forbidden them 
 which were already illegal and which they had no 
 intention of committing, but also a number of acts 
 which they are confident a reviewing court will de- 
 clare legal, which, indeed, courts have repeatedly 
 recognized as legal, and in such case the labor men 
 stand firmly on their rights as they know them, 
 and to that extent, driven to an extremity, they 
 may disobey a court's orders. When a labor offi- 
 cial, defending as in duty bound the rights of the 
 members of his organization as citizens, makes the 
 declaration that if a court should enjoin him from 
 doing something he had a legal, constitutional, 
 and moral right to do, he would violate the injunc- 
 tion, he is actually upholding the law and showing 
 his regard for what is to be the final action of the 
 higher courts. When he declares before the coun- 
 try that he will utter his deliberate and conscien- 
 tious thought, through speech or in print, he is 
 positive he is within his constitutional right. He
 
 84 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 has legal opinions in fortifying numbers to the 
 effect that no court can forbid his uttering his 
 thoughts, though naturally he expects to abide by 
 the consequences of his speaking or publishing in 
 so doing. He pits his conception of a fundamental 
 social principle against that of the lower courts, 
 confident that the judgment of the higher courts, 
 and certain that the judgment of time, will be on 
 his side. 
 
 Organized labor asks this country today to lay 
 down the limitations of the courts in the matter of 
 injunctions in labor disputes. It wishes to know 
 where it stands with regard to points continually 
 coming up in judicial injunctions. It wants to get 
 rid of the burden of going up again and again to 
 the higher courts to have inhibitions eliminated 
 from injunctions that have been repeatedly ad- 
 judged as beyond the powers of courts to issue. 
 Labor officials nowadays on reading a fresh in- 
 junction, probably drawn up by an employer's at- 
 torney and merely signed by the judge, can them- 
 selves blue-pencil off the clauses which a higher 
 court will declare null and void. But meantime, 
 during a formal hearing or appeal, labor will have 
 lost its rightful position in the impending dis- 
 pute. Its opponents will have enjoyed the unfair 
 advantage of using a court as their aid. To or- 
 ganized labor, the imperfections in court work, 
 only some of which have been referred to, form a 
 greater obstacle to reaching industrial peace than
 
 AND THE JUDICIAEY 85 
 
 the strength of the union's opponents in disputes. 
 If the employers defeat a strike, the union sees the 
 cause of its set-back to be in the labor market or 
 in its own defects, or other obvious cause which 
 time may remedy. But if the courts defeat a 
 strike, the employers gain only a respite and both 
 the employes engaged and their fellow-unionists 
 are embittered. Eventually they become stronger 
 in unionism, less disposed to friendly overtures, 
 and often they turn their attention mainly to 
 forms of radical relief. 
 
 Usually labor obeys injunctions. Of forty-six 
 issued in Massachusetts in eleven years in labor 
 cases, in nine instances only was there disobedi- 
 ence, and in only one of these by persons named 
 in the injunction. But this is not the point on 
 which pertinent argument today turns. It is only 
 since 1890 that courts in equity have by means of 
 injunctions been so encroaching on theretofore 
 recognized rights of labor that the necessity has 
 arisen to make clear the rightful limits of the 
 powers of judges so acting. Contemporaneously 
 with agitation and inquiry in this respect, other 
 legal disqualifications of labor in the United 
 States have perforce engaged the attention and 
 enlisted the reformatory efforts cf organized 
 workmen. Consequently the wage earners are 
 urgently asking questions of the courts and the 
 law-givers. If Great Britain can so arrange that 
 trade union funds are protected from legalized
 
 86 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 raids in consequence of labor disputes, it seems 
 reasonable to look for similar protection in our 
 country. If picketing during a lock-out or a strike 
 is recognized as legal by the United States Su- 
 preme Court, it might be grounds for prohibiting 
 a city council from passing an ordinance forbid- 
 ding it. If the men of conspicuous legal capabili- 
 ties who compose the Judiciary Committee of the 
 national House of Representatives can frame a 
 bill defining conspiracy and taking away from the 
 courts the power to issue injunctions against 
 unions acting by orderly methods in furtherance 
 of a labor dispute, why cannot such a bill become 
 a law and be observed by the courts f If compen- 
 sation to workmen for injuries sustained in the 
 course of employment can be adopted as an indus- 
 trial principle by the other great nations of the 
 earth, it is a strange commentary on our national 
 intellectual status if our people tolerate legal ob- 
 stacles to its enforcement here. If organizers of 
 the proletariat, preaching doctrines subversive of 
 its government, can hold meetings everywhere in 
 the German Empire, it ought to be made a cer- 
 tainty that our trade union organizers, teaching 
 principles strictly in accordance with the constitu- 
 tion and the laws of this country, could not be or- 
 dered out of Pennsylvania or West Virginia min- 
 ing or iron manufacturing districts by sheriffs or 
 constables. If laws limiting the hours of labor for
 
 AND THE JUDICIARY 87 
 
 women are held to be constitutional in one State, 
 it ought to be taken for granted though it can- 
 not that similar laws should be constitutional in 
 other States. Now, on all the points thus brought 
 under our observation, the demand arises for the 
 establishment of foundation principles in the stat- 
 utes, to be consistently observed and uniformly 
 administered by the public officials. Who can 
 rightly blame labor for decrying the defects of the 
 laws that fail to extend to it the protection given 
 in other countries f Is there any reasonable basis 
 for wonder that labor entertains projects of itself 
 directly influencing the law through its votes ? 
 
 Labor is not listening to the voice of anarchy. 
 It would replace the present anarchy by stable 
 laws. For better or worse, it would have the ques- 
 tions affecting labor which will not down, and 
 which have baffled our legislatures and our courts, 
 answered definitely, one way or another, for or 
 against labor's convictions. 
 
 The bench in America has been the last institu- 
 tion to awaken to the greatest of all modern prob- 
 lems. To indicate how the attitude of the courts 
 with respect to this problem is regarded by the 
 leaders of a most conservative movement, this ex- 
 cerpt from an editorial in "The Survey" may aid : 
 
 "Those who feel that they have a grievance 
 against the courts because of their attitude on so-
 
 88 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 cial and economic questions may choose among 
 several lines of action. One is to educate the 
 judges on the particular questions in which they 
 are interested. Another is to seek, through the re- 
 call and similar means, to keep the courts in har- 
 mony with public sentiment. Still another is to 
 remove from the courts the power to interpret 
 statutes and to determine their constitutionality, 
 leaving the former function to some administra- 
 tive department, and the latter, as in England, to 
 the legislature. ' ' 
 
 When consideration of such sentiments and 
 such propositions is seriously given in a magazine 
 of foremost standing in the circles whose first aim 
 is to systematize and give the highest efficiency to 
 the philanthropic impulses of the community, 
 rather than to economic readjustment, it serves to 
 show that intelligent opinion among those inti- 
 mately acquainted with needs affecting the de- 
 prived classes is, not that fault is to be found with 
 organized labor, but that general disappointment 
 has been caused through the backwardness and, in 
 prominent cases, perversity of the courts. 
 
 It can never be overlooked by labor that the 
 struggle in which it is engaged to obtain a full 
 exercise of its rights is one running through the 
 ages and yet but in part completed. Every step 
 of its progress has been disputed by power in- 
 trenched, not only in privilege but in the law, as 
 pronounced by the courts. Almost invariably
 
 AND THE JUDICIARY 89 
 
 judges have personified the dominant social force 
 of the time. In this country, the hope is not in 
 vain, the final power is to be in its educated 
 masses, enlightened as to common rights, faithful 
 to broad conceptions of justice, with law-making 
 sufficiently pliable to advance with progressive so- 
 cial and economic conditions, and with courts and 
 the people in mutual confidence.
 
 CHAPTEE VI. 
 
 THE WAGE EARNERS AND THE MINIMUM WAGE FOR 
 WOMEN AND CHILDREN/ 
 
 He is no imaginary figure in industry, the fair- 
 minded employer. His influence has its weight 
 with his fellow-capitalists, with labor organized or 
 unorganized, and with the community in general, 
 in times both of industrial peace and industrial 
 disturbance. His appearance on the scene when- 
 ever he has an opportunity to express his views 
 and a hope to attain a conscientious purpose is 
 regularly looked forward to with certainty by ex- 
 perienced representatives of labor. He is at hand 
 on occasions when employers are called on by 
 employes to act like men. He may, it is true, in 
 instances be over-sentimental, or animated with 
 Utopian ideals, or perhaps a shade biased through 
 some form of partisanship. But he has shown 
 himself active, it may be ventured, in all reform 
 groups in every country. He has been welcomed, 
 and given lead, in radical working-class political 
 movements, especially in Europe. He has allied 
 himself with reform associations, political or 
 otherwise, in every community. Frequently, in 
 America, with the national pride in practicability, 
 he avows himself simply a business man, deter- 
 mined to act justly through policy, if from no
 
 AND THE MINIMUM WAGE 91 
 
 higher motive. The truth is that the spirit of an- 
 tagonism toward injustice is aroused in him as it 
 is in the sincere spokesman for labor, the mind 
 and heart of either carrying the man above nar- 
 row, or class, considerations. The wage worker 
 who has been chosen by his comrades as official 
 defender of the rights of labor, himself perform- 
 ing his duties from honorable motives, recognizes 
 and welcomes sincerity, candor, and humanity 
 when shown on the employers ' side. And why not 
 expect these qualities thus to come into play I With 
 positions reversed, either representative employer 
 or delegated wage worker, hearkening to the 
 promptings of his spirit, cannot avoid, finally, 
 within himself, hearing both sides, weighing testi- 
 mony, ranging himself with the right, and, if no 
 more than secretly, giving assent to his real con- 
 victions. The wrench comes in permitting the 
 inner man to speak out. It is one of the hopes of 
 human nature that there are fair-minded employ- 
 ers who, rejecting the special pleading of their 
 class counsel, and braving the dangers of mistakes, 
 choose to err, if at all, through experiment in new 
 forms of justice, or generosity, or good-will, rather 
 than to fortify themselves behind inflexible law, 
 vague and time-worn economic maxims, or the 
 traditional advantages of wealth as against mere 
 labor. 
 
 It is with the fair-minded employer that we can 
 discuss with especial profit the more salient fea-
 
 92 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 tures of this comparatively new question in the 
 United States minimum wages for women and 
 children. 
 
 This employer, on his part, and we, on ours, are 
 to avoid the tactics of bellicose controversialists. 
 Should he on some points decide to differ with us 
 we are not to affront him with opprobrious epi- 
 thets. As we proceed to outline the moderate 
 form of the minimum wage to which at present we 
 give our support, he will not, we feel sure, in his 
 considerateness, flout us as "trumpeting" a new- 
 fangled economic philanthropy, as advocating 
 "political cure-alls," as making a general applica- 
 tion in all trades and callings of minimum wage 
 laws, or as "neglecting the injunctions of the 
 catechism. ' ' 
 
 First, then, for what state of things, and for 
 whom, is the minimum wage proposed? 
 
 With this query arises before our soberest judg- 
 ment the plaint of feeble, struggling poverty to 
 society. Between the two extremes of the 
 optimistic sociological expert's positive affirma- 
 tion that "never in the history of the world was 
 labor better off" and the pessimistic sociological 
 expert's equally confident assertion that "the 
 masses of the wage workers earn insufficient to 
 maintain themselves above some form of pau- 
 perism," many shades of opinion are entertained 
 on the subject. But, not losing ourselves in 
 sweeping generalities, can we not, in forming our
 
 AND THE MINIMUM WAGE 93 
 
 opinion, depend upon systematic investigations 
 made in certain occupations by competent ob- 
 servers, whose recorded reports bear the impress 
 of truth, and decide also that conditions in similar 
 grades of labor, as testified to by other inquirers, 
 cannot be very different? 
 
 Carefully made statements concerning the con- 
 ditions of labor come to us in the " surveys " of 
 life taken in industrial centres, in the census 
 tables, in the summaries of special investigators 
 in selected occupations, in the official reports of 
 trade unions and labor bureaus, and undoubtedly 
 on occasions of labor disputes in the newspaper 
 and magazine articles written by trained observ- 
 ers required by their vigilant principals to give 
 faithful reports of the events and conditions they 
 have witnessed. We need not in these pages essay 
 the task of detailed exposition of the generally 
 accepted findings of these media of information 
 with regard to certain categories of labor in 
 America. If the many volumes in the "Keport on 
 Condition of Woman and Child Wage Earners in 
 the United States,*' issued during the last three 
 years, do not carry conviction that there is woful 
 poverty and destitution in the ranks of these 
 feebler workers, especially in the textile occupa- 
 tions, among laundry and garment workers, in the 
 glass industry, and in the grade of stores and 
 factories employing mostly the young or less 
 capable classes of hands, the conclusion must be
 
 94 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 that the reader is proof against truths to him un- 
 welcome. The pitiful level to which the mode of 
 living among unskilled and helpless wage workers 
 must fall in certain occupations is to be plainly 
 seen, when, as expressed in the Massachusetts 
 "Report of the Commission on Minimum Wage 
 Boards," "the rate of wages depends to a large 
 degree upon the personal equation of employers 
 and upon the helplessness of their employes." It 
 must be the desperate impoverishment of a whole 
 class of workers that sends young boys to slate- 
 picking at mines when the fact is known that "the 
 average boy under sixteen years in a coal-breaker 
 takes something over three times as much risk as 
 the adult of losing his life." In 1911, thirty-eight 
 boys and youths under age were killed by accident 
 in the bituminous mines of Pennsylvania, and 
 eighty-nine in the anthracite regions. So often 
 have "home" workers in tenement districts of 
 great cities been written up for the public, grown 
 callous perhaps, that now, to prove that familiar 
 abuses still exist, reproductions of photographs 
 are printed with but a few lines of text photo- 
 graphs of single-room "homes" where the whole 
 family, down to five-year-old little ones, "break 
 threads" for sewing machine operators, or 
 "knot" artificial feathers, or sew the tops of the 
 legs and arms of dolls, "forty-eight for five 
 cents," or pick nuts, a mother and two daughters 
 of six and eight years earning together at this
 
 AND THE MINIMUM WAGE 95 
 
 work three dollars a week. The mass strikes of 
 recent years in the great cities have brought out 
 startling testimony of the life-destroying priva- 
 tions of a considerable percentage of the working- 
 class population engaged in the industries affected. 
 When we have the broad pictures of poverty drawn 
 upon our minds by these and similar significant 
 data, it would be an unnecessary repetition here 
 to set forth the categorical bases of our argument 
 through a mass of classified particulars. 
 
 Employers in general to-day recognize the grav- 
 ity-like tendency of wages to fall, especially in the 
 sweated trades, which at times leads to strikes in 
 the mass. Fair-minded employers, deploring it, 
 show themselves willing to assist in obviating this 
 tendency. They stand aside from the sort of capi- 
 talists who in their business seek only dividends. 
 But they are handicapped by the continuity of the 
 conditions of employment that especially manifest 
 themselves in the persistency of this trend down- 
 ward. The demoralizing procedure repeats itself 
 despite attempts to arrest it definitely. A great 
 strike in an underpaid occupation having to an 
 extent succeeded, unscrupulous employers at the 
 earliest opportunity begin testing the labor mar- 
 ket to ascertain its points of weakness. They 
 break the trade agreement in one or another of its 
 provisions, their harassed employes reluctant to 
 quarrel. Competition thus begun spreads in the 
 industry in proportion to the inability of the union
 
 96 THE WAGE EAKNEKS 
 
 to fight. In time, often after a brief period of 
 equal wages, the baleful conditions against which 
 the wage workers struck are re-established. Fol- 
 lowing a stage of miserable pay and long hours 
 comes again renewed striking, with perhaps fail- 
 ure for the employes, or if they succeed they win 
 agreements only to see them broken in the first 
 dull season by the same set of grasping employers 
 who have always taken unfair advantage of their 
 needs. This is the round of events in the wage 
 struggle of the industry. Unfortunately, the or- 
 ganization that carries on the striking is in cases 
 unsubstantial. The cessation from work partakes 
 in part the features of a strike, in part those of a 
 revolt against society. In some occupations, 
 again, there is little possibility of anything like a 
 strike. In either case, in the unstable state of the 
 unskilled labor market, the fair employer con- 
 cerned is a chief sufferer. Among the last resort- 
 ing to a lowered scale, he is among the first to help 
 restore a living rate. Therefore, to-day, he is, 
 with fitting determination, looking about for a 
 scheme that may bring a regulator of wages for 
 the protection of himself and his employes. Is he, 
 or is he not, to find it in a minimum wage? 
 
 We of the union side who advocate this mini- 
 mum wage law are also seeking a supplementary 
 wage regulator, to be employed for the two 
 obviously defenseless classes, the women and the 
 children in the lowest paid occupations, the same
 
 AND THE MINIMUM WAGE 97 
 
 as unionists found supplementary to unionism a 
 legal regulator of wages and hours for govern- 
 ment employes. In studying a statutory minimum 
 wage, we are willing to weigh duly any objections 
 of opponents that have the appearance of validity. 
 "Forcibly to regulate wages," we are warned, 
 "will destroy the basis of the right of contract 
 upon which our present industrial civilization has 
 been founded." But we must ask the critic who 
 raises this argument to reflect upon the various 
 spheres of social activity in which the regime of 
 contract does not now prevail. Some forms of 
 contract, he knows, are forbidden by the constitu- 
 tion. No one may contract to commit or condone 
 crime, or to establish slavery, even to enslave him- 
 self. Employes of the government have by no 
 means the same liberty of contract as other citi- 
 zens. Contract is in notable respects not free to 
 dependents on society. The actual legal status of 
 all the minors in this republic is that they are 
 primarily wards of the state. Parents may not 
 abuse them, or neglect them, to their mental or 
 moral detriment, or otherwise work them injury. 
 The State imperatively imposes on parents the 
 obligation to give their children a certain school- 
 ing. It fixes an age below which minors may not 
 be hired out to work. With women, also, the free 
 play for contract is much less than with men. The 
 Federal Supreme Court in handing down its de- 
 cision in the Oregon ten-hour case, said that
 
 98 THE WAGE EAENEES 
 
 woman "has been looked upon in the courts as 
 needing special care, that her rights may be pre- 
 served." The argument of another court, that a 
 woman must remain free to contract to work, in a 
 factory, as many hours a day as she wills, was 
 ruled unsound. 
 
 Freedom of contract not being absolute, the 
 question of its just or socially beneficial marginal 
 line presents in practice a constant dilemma. All- 
 comprehensive dogmatism here obviously fails. 
 Principles, precedents, maxims are at variance. 
 The actual marginal line shifts back or forth, rela- 
 tively with prevailing opinion. This is governed 
 by circumstances. As to the minimum wage, the 
 query to-day becomes, Shall the state dictate, in 
 peculiar but important circumstances, terms and 
 conditions of service beyond those relating to 
 hours, safety, sanitation, compensation for in- 
 juries, and kindred phases of protection? with 
 respect to all of which the marginal line has in the 
 course of industrial evolution been pushed further 
 afield upon the domain of abstract liberty. 
 
 Can any special reasons be offered by govern- 
 ment for interfering in the rates of wages? To 
 this, the reply may in part be arrived at by con- 
 templating the effects upon the state (society 
 organized for the purposes of government) in 
 the case of wages insufficient to maintain wage 
 earners independently of public assistance. 
 Surely, if society is continuously to be called on to
 
 AND THE MINIMUM WAGE 99 
 
 piece out the cost of the maintenance of a class of 
 its members, it has a just and serious concern in 
 all the conditions of the labor of that class. It 
 might be better at times assuredly would be bet- 
 ter to support entirely non-self-sustaining per- 
 sons rather than to permit them, through their 
 underpaid labor, at once to semi-pauperize them- 
 selves and to put in jeopardy, through their de- 
 structive competition, the wage-rates and, conse- 
 quently, the well-being of their fellow-workers in 
 general, who usually obtain a higher scale. Here, 
 regarding its especial wards, the state, mindful 
 above all of a defense of its own future, might 
 prescribe extraordinary protective measures. 
 
 "We are asked to consider carefully, in objec- 
 tion to the minimum wage, the fact that "at its 
 recent convention the American Federation of 
 Labor declared that a uniform legal scale of com- 
 pensation for work and services would mean the 
 abandonment of its fundamental principles, that 
 workers own their labor power, and that they 
 alone, acting as individuals or voluntary associa- 
 tions, have the sole right to set the price and 
 bargain for the same." To this, in the union 
 sense, we agree. The workers here referred to 
 are, can in fact only be, able-bodied adult males- 
 independent citizens, capable as a class of main- 
 taining their rights and defending their interests. 
 The wardship of the law touches them lightly. 
 Yet, exceptions exist to the principle enunciated
 
 100 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 in the resolution. A desired rate of wages is 
 enforced by statute on public works. In railroad 
 and mining work, maximum legal hours are, in 
 instances, prescribed. Militant labor in these 
 cases adds to its own bargaining abilities the 
 powers of the law. Moreover, were we to con- 
 tinue argument on the point, attention would nec- 
 essarily be given to that much-exploited tenet of 
 non-unionism, the proposition that, in all circum- 
 stances, a worker owns his own labor power, with 
 the sole right to set its price. 
 
 So much for basic principles. In practice, it is 
 not a certainty that a legal minimum must tend to 
 become a maximum. A legal rate of interest exists 
 concurrently with a wide play in market rates, 
 above as well as below the statutory percentage. 
 The legal minimum of wage for child labor sends 
 no young boys to work from the well-to-do classes. 
 A low legal minimum of wages for locomotive 
 engineers could not break down their present 
 scale, though their ranks are open to non-union- 
 ists. All union wages are the result, not of laws, 
 but of the cohesive power of union members 
 exerted in the labor market. Illustrations, these, 
 of tendencies wherever there is strength more 
 than counter-balancing the possibility of accepting 
 the conditions of weakness. Moreover, if we are 
 to take facts in lieu of prophecies, where the mini- 
 mum wage has been tried it has had the effect 
 generally of raising wages. In the "Outlook,"
 
 AND THE MINIMUM WAGE 101 
 
 January 11, 1913, in an article on "How a Mini- 
 mum Wage Law Has Worked," these statements 
 are made as to the statute in Australia : A tempo- 
 rary provision when first enacted, it has been re- 
 newed five times. "None of the predicted evils 
 has followed the act. Employers as well as em- 
 ployes welcome it. It has apparently not increased 
 the cost of production, although it has increased 
 wages. Efficiency, however, it has increased. It 
 has not only reduced the number of those who are 
 on the margin of dependency ; it has saved honest 
 employers from dishonest and underhanded com- 
 petition in arrangements with wage earners." 
 There has been no "leveling down." 
 
 Public attention has been called in the following 
 words to my own views relative to wages and the 
 American standard of living : * ' John Mitchell and 
 other authorities put the annual family minimum 
 living wage at $600 a year. The average family 
 wage in Massachusetts is shown by the latest cen- 
 sus to be $800, or $200 more than the necessary 
 family wage accepted by economists." To pre- 
 vent acceptance as a fact of this misquotation of 
 what I said ten years ago on this point, I repeat, 
 correctly, the part of the passage referred to 
 which contained the thought now applicable to the 
 minimum wage proposition ("Organized Labor," 
 p. 118) : "In cities of over one hundred thousand, 
 and especially in cities of over half a million, $600 
 would, in my opinion, be insufficient to maintain
 
 102 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 this standard for unskilled workingmen. ' ' This 
 estimate being behind the times by a decade, how 
 much must be added to it through the increased 
 cost of commodities meanwhile? The $800 aver- 
 age of the census for Massachusetts, a level made 
 high by the larger wages of the skilled and the 
 well-placed workers, would fail to provide com- 
 forts and savings for the unskilled in general in 
 the cities, many of whom earn several hundred 
 dollars less than the $800. 
 
 In the course of an address on the new Massa- 
 chusetts minimum wage law, one of its critics in- 
 advertently makes two prophecies: (1) It will not 
 be operative; (2) It will be operative, to the detri- 
 ment of employers, employes, and the State. In- 
 cidentally, this critic attributes to it the list of 
 evils common in the minds of conservatives to all 
 innovations in social regulation. Every infrac- 
 tion of ancient economic rule, we long ago learned 
 from the defenders of a settled society, is inquisi- 
 torial, costly, impractical, unphilosophic, unchris- 
 tian, ruinous to capital and destructive of labor's 
 self-respect. But the present generation has in 
 important matters often seen this set of argu- 
 ments undone by time. Practice has disproved 
 prophecy. 
 
 Stability in the wage-rates of women and minors 
 would eventually be a gain to all financially sound 
 employers. Living wages would compel every 
 industry to support its workers. Certain indus-
 
 AND THE MINIMUM WAGE 103 
 
 tries escape that duty as their wage scales now 
 are. 
 
 A continually fluctuating labor market is a 
 heavy burden on the fair employer in manufac- 
 tures. He is menaced by the under-cutting of his 
 wage-rates, by his rivals in business, by strikes of 
 his employes, by the uncertainties of the future, 
 by alterations in costs. His losses besides are 
 those of a citizen obliged to help support those of 
 his competitors not paying a living wage and 
 whose employes are hence from time to time 
 thrown on the community for assistance. 
 
 We cannot but conclude that the fair employer 
 must in the end agree with us on the desirability 
 and feasibility of the minimum wage as here advo- 
 cated. We have chosen to look at it much from his 
 angle of vision, which presents the subject in a 
 light not so readily caught from the purely labor 
 side. In so doing, we have sought to collaborate 
 with him to put bread in the mouths of underfed 
 children and to remove sorrow and anxiety from 
 the home of many a poor mother. 
 
 A word to the good, but principle-bound, men 
 who catch, as if seizing social safety devices, at 
 such phrases as "contract," "liberty," "a free 
 market," "mutual agreement," when speaking of 
 the arrangement of terms for labor. There are 
 few among them, we verily believe, who would not 
 take to task, in some way, any neighbor known to 
 them as an oppressor of the weak, an unmerciful
 
 104 THE WAGE EABNERS 
 
 taskmaster to children, a cheat in the payment of 
 his domestic servants. Such a man they would 
 talk about, avoid, boycott, punish with zeal. They 
 would unite in making an example of him. Why, 
 then, cannot the community rightfully unite in 
 simply exacting scant justice from an employer 
 who is habitually guilty of all the acts mentioned ? 
 Not only of those acts, but of robbing the com- 
 munity of a part of the means to maintain his 
 business. 
 
 An industry employing women and children 
 which cannot afford, or which fails, to pay wages 
 sufficiently high to enable them to live healthy and 
 normal lives is a detriment, not a benefit, to society 
 and should not be permitted to exist.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE WAGE EARNERS AND THE TRUSTS. 
 
 The trade unionist has his own special problems 
 with regard to the trusts. To a degree he is nat- 
 urally interested with all other citizens in watch- 
 ing the steps being taken by the government with 
 the avowed aim of dissolving them. As a con- 
 sumer he has reason to study their effects on 
 prices. As an investor, though not deeply con- 
 cerned in them personally, he is aware of the bad 
 effects on business caused by uncertainty as to 
 their legality, their future, and the financial fate 
 of their shareholders. As a fairly intelligent man 
 of the twentieth century, he can have no deep-set 
 aversion to that phase of the trust which relates 
 to increased efficiency through improved forms of 
 organization, or of management in buying and 
 selling, or through adopting the latest machinery 
 and the cheapest methods of transportation, for 
 these features of production, as developed to their 
 highest plane, are without doubt destined to be 
 characteristic of the final order of society. But 
 whatever his other relation to it may be, it is as a 
 trade unionist that certain particular results of 
 the trust problem affect him directly. One of these 
 results has been that the trade union, of all the 
 "combinations" of the day, was the first to be
 
 106 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 brought to account under the Sherman act, once 
 popular with reformers and intended by the gov- 
 ernment to be the instrument for curbing the real 
 trusts. Another has been the temporary weaken- 
 ing of several national trade unions through sys- 
 tematic machinations of the trusts on a scale not 
 possible to any but multi-millionaire organiza- 
 tions. 
 
 The course of the series of events relating to the 
 Sherman anti-trust act which ended in the convic- 
 tion of trade unionists as the only malefactors 
 under its operations up to nearly two decades 
 after its passage, would serve to confirm the cyni- 
 cal observation that under the law might makes 
 right and that no matter whom a statute is aimed 
 at, the laboring man is sure to be the one it 
 strikes. 
 
 It is the testimony of the officials of the Ameri- 
 can Federation of Labor at headquarters, and of 
 the labor legislative committeemen of that day, 
 that in 1890, at the time of the passage of the 
 Sherman act, it was understood that the proposed 
 statute should not apply to the trade union. "The 
 bill in its first stages," states President Gompers, 
 "contained a section affirmatively declaring that 
 the organizations of working people instituted for 
 the purpose of regulating wages, hours of labor, 
 and conditions of employment, should not come 
 under the operations of the proposed law." And 
 when that section was under consideration in Con-
 
 AND THE TRUSTS 107 
 
 gress Senator George of Mississippi and Senator 
 Hoar of Massachusetts, in reply to inquiries, said 
 that they were then satisfied that labor organiza- 
 tions would not fall under the law, if enacted in 
 that form. The bill, after being referred to a com- 
 mittee, was reported back with the section 
 dropped, but assurances were given by Senators 
 Hoar, George, Blair, Sherman and others that or- 
 ganized labor was not to come under the provis- 
 ions of the statute. 
 
 In the twenty-odd years since the law was 
 passed, the trusts of manufacturers and business 
 men have developed in this country as never be- 
 fore. Not until within the last few years has the 
 Sherman act seriously inconvenienced any of 
 them. Even now, as matters stand, none of the 
 trust-makers, as such, have gone to jail. Their 
 punishment through the law has not destroyed 
 their real powers of centralization, the source of 
 their strength. The worst that is happening to 
 any of the big combinations is "a readjustment 
 of organization to conform to recent interpreta- 
 tions of the Sherman law," or "a separation, 
 through legal forms, of the offending corporation 
 into its constituent parts." This, while public as- 
 surance is given by an attorney of national repu- 
 tation, who is a trust expert, that "the most ef- 
 fective of all temporary price arrangements" are 
 reached "by barely more than a word or a sign" 
 and are known as "gentlemen's agreements."
 
 108 THE WAGE EAENEBS 
 
 Those newspapers which are commonly regarded 
 as representative of big business refer with mock 
 respect to the Sherman statute when speaking of 
 the dissolution of several of the trusts now taking 
 place under its menace. The form of enforcing 
 a law is there ; substance in the economic changes 
 effected is lacking. * * The laws of trade cannot be 
 over-ruled by Congress;" combination in form 
 may be forbidden; ownership in fact cannot be 
 prevented." It would be curious indeed if one 
 man with a hundred millions might legally own an 
 industry, and control its methods of production 
 and distribution, while two men, as a trust, might 
 not. So, all told, who expects real competition to 
 be restored in the industries which in their opera- 
 tions have approached monopolization? 
 
 But toward labor organizations precedents have 
 been established under the Sherman law which 
 threaten to render it a weapon for their serious 
 injury, unless new legislation comes to their aid. 
 They are not in the business of production buy- 
 ing and selling materials, managing corporations, 
 issuing stock, and getting charters from the gov- 
 ernment. In no respect can they promote trade or 
 restrain trade in the sense commonly applicable 
 to trusts. An accurate discrimination in the em- 
 ployment of the term "combination," with its 
 many-phased meanings, has prompted the British 
 government to exempt explicitly the labor unions
 
 AND THE TRUSTS 109 
 
 of the United Kingdom from the provisions of its 
 law against combinations, an example followed by 
 Canada in its act to control and regulate those of 
 that country. But a bill before our Congress to 
 the same effect halts. Meantime, the power of our 
 courts is invoked to hamper the trade unions. The 
 United States Supreme Court has decided that a 
 refusal by organized workmen to buy a particular 
 firm's goods is a restraint of trade, as contem- 
 plated by the Sherman law a crime for which in- 
 dividual workmen or associations of workmen 
 may be fined and imprisoned and the union hat- 
 makers are wrestling in the mazes of the law, try- 
 ing to avoid a fine imposed on them of $240,000, 
 with fees and costs. A step further was taken by 
 the courts in New Orleans when seventy-five work- 
 men were indicted for withholding their labor in 
 support of men on strike against a reduction of 
 wages. A step still further has been attempted in 
 New York through a suit brought by an employer 
 against women of wealth for their humanitarian 
 assistance to girls of the sweatshops while on 
 strike. Will the next step be to order the dissolu- 
 tion of offending unions? 
 
 Really, the punishment the Sherman law is 
 bringing upon the trusts can be quite fully de- 
 scribed by telling what it is doing to the trade 
 union, as the only "trust" which cannot wriggle 
 away from the act by hiring lawyers to rewrite its 
 articles of incorporation. Only trade unionists
 
 110 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 have been hurtfully penalized under the act, not- 
 withstanding the obvious fact that the trade union 
 has none of the characteristics essential to a trust 
 if the word is to bear a specific meaning. The 
 trade union has not even papers of incorporation. 
 It holds no franchise or charter, issued by a legis- 
 lature. It possesses no legal privilege. It is pro- 
 tected by no tariff. It cannot raise or lower prices 
 of commodities, sell stocks in Wall street, adver- 
 tise goods or bleed consumers. Its "monopoly of 
 labor" is true only as it is true that an individual 
 has a monopoly of his own body, and of his own 
 labor, when he is free. The trade union's mission 
 is protective of the poor, of the weaker ones in 
 the economic struggle, of the men who have little 
 more than their own labor and find the possessors 
 of the wealth of the world in so many respects 
 their masters, of the women tortured and often 
 stricken through long hours and heavy burdens in 
 the factory or business mart while their first place 
 is in the home, of the children stunted in physical, 
 moral, and mental growth through racking labor 
 in their tender years. The trade union! Center 
 of hope for millions, theater of countless and end- 
 less acts of generosity; inculcator of the basic 
 social virtues of courage, brotherhood, and self- 
 sacrifice ; school, assimilator, inspirer of the penni- 
 less immigrant, that common object of plunder; 
 medium for genuine charity, uplifter to poverty, a 
 positive help to humanity ! The labor union the
 
 AND THE TRUSTS 111 
 
 one black, foul, criminal trust whose members de- 
 serve the stigma of a public disgrace, a sentence 
 to imprisonment in jail! 
 
 There is not another country on the face of the 
 earth that has adopted the principle of the Sher- 
 man law. There is not another country that has 
 in all its code such a law to be used against the 
 trade unions. There is not another country in 
 which the real trusts have been able to carry on a 
 campaign of displacement of union men with the 
 assistance of laws professedly designed for the 
 protection of labor. There is not another country 
 whose captains of industry have employed foreign 
 laborers by the million to break down the stand- 
 ards of living among its own people. 
 
 The steel trust, the tobacco trust, the flour trust, 
 the beef trust, the leather trust, the anthra- 
 cite coal trust do they today pay the Amer- 
 ican standard of wages to more than twenty 
 per cent, of their laborers! The farce of 
 the contract-labor law is seen in their hosts of 
 immigrant employes. For many years it has 
 not been worth while for the managers of any 
 large industry to send abroad openly to make 
 contracts with intending immigrants. The nec- 
 essary trick is simple. A few laborers in their 
 employ can on instigation summon by letter to 
 this country all the laborers of their home vil- 
 lages or communes who are disposed to emigrate, 
 an intimation as to where work may be found
 
 112 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 being sufficient. Or, the padrones and so-called 
 intelligence bureaus of the larger cities, New 
 York principally, are in position to import and 
 distribute gangs of almost any number of men 
 to any part of America. On these sources of 
 common labor the trusts have drawn while pur- 
 suing a plan on a comprehensive scope for cut- 
 ting wages, for maintaining the twelve-hour 
 shift, for depriving their workmen of the rights 
 and powers exercised through the trade union. 
 Toward the union, and consequently toward 
 American labor and the European labor most 
 nearly its equal in education and independent 
 character, the trusts have applied the principle, 
 carried out in their transactions in other 
 respects, of buying in the cheapest markets and 
 eliminating opposition. 
 
 Temporarily, in some notable instances, this 
 policy of the trusts toward labor has been par- 
 tially successful. But it may now be confidently 
 asserted that in adopting it they made a fatal 
 mistake. Not only have they added force to the 
 ugly antagonism which they are encountering on 
 the part of the American common people, and 
 made it more of a certainty that their contest for 
 permanency will be the more costly to them and 
 the more doubtful in its issue, but it may be 
 prophesied that all their deliberate efforts to 
 crush out trade unionism among their employes 
 will come to naught.
 
 AND THE TRUSTS 113 
 
 Each stage in the progress of the trade union 
 in this country has seen its appropriate methods 
 for promoting organization. At first, to form 
 local unions and then combine them in em- 
 bryonic district or national unions, volunteer 
 missionaries as organizers and other officials, 
 chiefly advanced the cause. Next, while allotting 
 to volunteer effort its fitting sphere of duty, paid 
 officials were employed, especially to conduct the 
 organization of the growing national and inter- 
 national unions. A step further was taken when 
 commissioned organizers became a regular fac- 
 tor of the unions, and assisted the international 
 officers, together forming a corps equipped for 
 their duties as men for a profession, familiar 
 with the labor laws, experienced as negotiators 
 with employers, acquainted with the markets for 
 the output of industries, and accustomed to watch 
 legislators. Another profitable step was estab- 
 lishing a labor press, every industrial centre 
 today having at least one union newspaper. In 
 all, propaganda proceeding from these various 
 sources brought the spirit of union labor into 
 every community in the country. 
 
 As a result, recruits no longer come to the 
 unions only as individuals, each entering as a 
 single convert and casting his lot with men per- 
 haps unknown to him. The present process takes 
 in men and women by the thousands. First 
 spreads the general sentiment among the people
 
 114 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 of an unorganized occupation that the union has 
 a positive, necessary, and inevitable mission with 
 the working-classes and not in a far-off future. 
 In looking to it for help, the workers see that 
 they are depending upon themselves and their 
 fellow-workers, and not upon Ladies Bountiful 
 and Lords Charitable. Millions of other workers 
 have obtained a foothold in freedom by asserting 
 themselves in a body why not they? "Tis the 
 truth, the living truth act on it ! And moved by 
 a common impulse, the incoherent multitude 
 becomes an organic entity; in it isolation has 
 given way to solidarity; brotherhood has re- 
 placed egoism; it feels, thinks, and acts as one 
 effective being, a division of society. So it was 
 when the ten thousand Fifth avenue dressmakers 
 walked out in September, 1911, when the forty, 
 seventy, one hundred thousand shirtwaist mak- 
 ers, garment workers, laborers in general of one 
 city or another in the past two or three years 
 took their first common step together, learning 
 by it sufficient of the virtues of unionism to form 
 an experience never to be forgotten. 
 
 This remarkable and predictive social phenom- 
 enon, a strike as nearly general to an industry 
 as circumstances require, has of recent years 
 repeatedly taken place in all the great industrial 
 countries. Just as Sedan taught in war a lesson 
 which military men say ought to have been ex- 
 pounded in fact at Gettysburg that a whole
 
 AND THE TRUSTS 115 
 
 army may be captured so one great strike after 
 another is teaching the laboring masses in all 
 countries the potentialities in the suspension of 
 work covering an entire occupation, or, if occa- 
 sion demands, even a larger social area. In this 
 country, in 1902, the anthracite miners found the 
 way, with 150,000 men ; in 1905-6, the typograph- 
 ical union held its entire trade magnificently, 
 with 50,000 highly skilled artisans ; in 1907-8, the 
 railroad men, without a walk-out, showed the 
 workableness of a nation-wide common stand, 
 communicating, as they did, the fact to the rail- 
 road managers that labor was not to bear the 
 brunt of the burdens of the panic of 1907 and 
 would accept no reduction in wages. In France, 
 in the great strike two years ago of the railway, 
 telegraph, and postoffice employes, the idea of in- 
 dustrial solidarity was illustrated, recklessly. In 
 Great Britain, in the summer of 1911, the absten- 
 tion from work was just as large as had been 
 predetermined by necessity. 
 
 Colonies transplanted to America from darkest 
 Europe do not remain benighted. Men who read 
 the working-class periodicals printed in foreign 
 languages say that of all the radical press in 
 America, they are the most bitter. Their editors 
 and the foreign labor leaders commonly preach 
 the general strike. The most ungovernable and 
 otherwise desperate strikers in America in recent 
 years have been great bodies of non-unionists,
 
 116 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 the larger proportion not speaking the English 
 language. 
 
 The game played by those manipulators of 
 wealth by the hundreds of millions, those man- 
 agers of scores of consolidated corporations, 
 bent on setting laboring men by the tens of thou- 
 sands in competition with one another, is fore- 
 doomed to failure. The leaven of American inde- 
 pendence and trade union sentiment is at work 
 among their deceived and oppressed employes 
 everywhere. The last illiterate bunch of muscles 
 among them has been electrified by the repeated 
 spectacle, here and abroad, of the mass facing 
 fearlessly, and with overwhelming power, both 
 master and class. Out of the confusion, the dis- 
 sension, the competition of the great trusts' 
 laborers may come, at any opportune moment, a 
 movement manifestive of a desire to profit by 
 the example thus so often set them by others of 
 their condition. Events have their direct, un- 
 deviating logic. In every calling among the 
 trust wage workers there is an imperative ne- 
 cessity both for themselves and for the common 
 weal of complete organization on a national 
 scale.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE WAGE EARNERS AND UNEMPLOYMENT. 
 
 When we consider that in an equitable and effi- 
 cient organization of society there could be no 
 unemployment, in the sense of capable wage- 
 workers wanting work and being unable to find 
 it, and then look at the amount of unemployment 
 today in this country, we see injustice, ineffi- 
 ciency, and neglect of our working people in the 
 economic plan and make-up of our present 
 society. 
 
 The United States is the only great industrial 
 country that has not taken up the problem of 
 unemployment and endeavored to mitigate its 
 deplorable effects. Neither the national govern- 
 ment nor that of any State has any adequate or 
 systematic means of ascertaining the number of 
 unemployed at any given time in any community. 
 With us in America the problem is exceptionally 
 complicated, through the factor of an immigra- 
 tion unknown to all other countries. Were we to 
 adopt measures for the relief of the unemployed 
 similar to those in practice either in Germany or 
 Great Britain, and make no provision for ex- 
 cluding immigrants from their operation, the 
 risk would be encountered of simply providing 
 better means than at present exist for distrib-
 
 118 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 uting newly landed immigrants throughout our 
 country, to get work which might be done by 
 labor already here. 
 
 For a century this government possessed, in 
 its unappropriated natural resources, an ever- 
 reliable absorber of labor seeking employment. 
 Those resources no longer perform that function 
 directly, except in a limited degree. We have 
 arrived at the state at which social action, in 
 some form, must to an extent take the place of 
 the individual effort which in the past could be 
 depended upon in a land of opportunities, the 
 principal of which, the free West, was contin- 
 uously open. 
 
 A Federal commission has reported that our 
 labor market is overstocked, especially in the 
 unskilled occupations. 
 
 Such is our national situation with respect to 
 employment, and its reverse, unemployment, 
 viewed in its broadest scope and features. It is 
 by this view that judgment on the question must 
 be reached. If we permit ourselves to approach 
 the subject merely as guided by personal expe- 
 rience, or the interests of one element, or another 
 in the community, or the observations of inves- 
 tigators who for any reason do not go on to the 
 end of their work, we may arrive at imperfect 
 conclusions. Some workingmen are rarely out 
 of employment ; they are the strong, the capable, 
 the energetic. If they look no further than their
 
 AND UNEMPLOYMENT 119 
 
 own experience, there is no such thing as unem- 
 ployment. Unfortunately for the cause of truth, 
 the fact is that many men, in and out of the wage- 
 earning class, solve every social problem to 
 their own satisfaction merely in the light of 
 what they themselves have seen or gone through. 
 Many employers cannot find workers when they 
 want them; they consequently become irritated 
 when told that much labor is idle and say that 
 the reason for it is to be found in sloth. Employ- 
 ers whose work fluctuates by seasons make widely 
 known at the beginning of their live season their 
 plaint of inability to find their complement of 
 workers at short notice; they send out no signals 
 of distress, however, at the beginning of their 
 dead season, when they dismiss all but a skeleton 
 of their force. Social investigators may record 
 such facts as that snow-shovelers in mid-winter 
 are scarce, despite the cry of unemployment; 
 they perhaps may not give due weight to the 
 explanation that city out-of-works are indoor 
 workers, unaccustomed to heavy muscular effort 
 and unprovided with the personal outfit neces- 
 sary for out-door labor in severe weather. 
 
 No ; such narrow views are not sufficient. The 
 subject can only be grasped nationally, or by 
 large areas of the country and by taking into 
 consideration besides the category of wage 
 laborers, all sorts and conditions of men and 
 women who offer their labor, manual or mental,
 
 120 THE WAGE EAENEBS 
 
 for compensation. If we so proceed we shall find 
 in America a state of economic affairs relative 
 to employment unlike that existing in any other 
 country. It may be taken for granted that in no 
 European country is there such a proportion as 
 in the United States of fairly successful grand- 
 fathers and fathers who, to their disappoint- 
 ment, cannot find situations for their boys of the 
 present generation, with prospects such as the 
 elders enjoyed. The reorganization of industry 
 and commerce of the last few decades has not 
 left it so easy to mount the ladder of success 
 from the lowest rung. Generally, the ladder for 
 small enterprises is no longer there. What to 
 do with their sons waiting for an opportunity is 
 frequently a more anxious question with fairly 
 well-to-do families than with people in compara- 
 tively straitened circumstances. Proportion- 
 ately, too, we have the largest number of pro- 
 fessional men in the world commonly in agree- 
 ment on one point, that the country could well 
 get along with fewer. On the other hand, 
 elasticity in diminishing the effects of unemploy- 
 ment among these classes exists in the possibili- 
 ties of doubling up at home with the old folks or 
 depending on the wife's income or labor. Hard 
 times in business cuts down the migration from 
 farm to town, postpones marriages, lessens the 
 demand for large and expensive flats or houses, 
 curtails personal outlay in many directions. It
 
 AND UNEMPLOYMENT 121 
 
 is a heart-breaking social process. The mortifica- 
 tions, anxieties, even agonies, experienced by the 
 people above public aid, as they resort to the 
 shifts best known to their class in staving off 
 stark poverty when their bread-winners are idle, 
 in many cases quite equal the acute sufferings of 
 the unemployed poor. Indeed, many of them who 
 meet with reverses become acquainted with hun- 
 ger itself. This phase of unemployment deserves 
 recognition here inasmuch as it is to be doubted 
 that the same class in foreign countries is so 
 much in jeopardy from lack of occupation as in 
 this country, changes in industry not being so 
 great or so sudden and widespread as here. 
 Moreover, the number of our men and women 
 who during unemployment drop off from the 
 ranks of the apparently prosperous, and are 
 obliged to take their chances with the hard work- 
 ing, is by no means inconsiderable. The bread 
 lines and the lodging houses of the Bowery type 
 have usually, by report, a large proportion of 
 educated Americans, indicative of the number 
 barely holding on at a grade a little higher up, 
 living in deprivation. This class of sufferers 
 from unemployment, while it strongly appeals to 
 the observer sentimentally, is beyond the reach 
 of direct state interference practically. The 
 people in it can never be enumerated, classified as 
 worthy or unworthy, placed under inspector- 
 ship, or given places through labor bureaus. But
 
 122 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 for all that, they form a noteworthy factor in the 
 problem of unemployment, its causes, its loss to 
 production, and its detriment to society. 
 
 When we turn our attention to our artisans 
 and laborers, we find them subject to certain 
 causes for unemployment not usual in Europe. 
 It is a settled policy with employers in some of 
 our great industries not to give a full year's 
 work to their employes, even where it might be 
 done. The anthracite miners average less than 
 two hundred days' work annually, whereas 
 steady employment might be given a regular 
 force in the industry for at least three hundred 
 days. Suspension of work at mills and factories, 
 in consequence of consolidation or with intention 
 of union breaking, has characterized the steel, 
 the textile and other industries. Our building 
 trades in the North lose two months more in the 
 winter season than do those of England. Such 
 factors serve to render the subject more perplex- 
 ing here than in the Old World. Other points of 
 difference exist. We have no such loss to indus- 
 try as that from the "class" of young men on 
 the Continent of Europe going each year into the 
 army, and no such dubious gain as in the re-entry 
 of the "class" returned to civil life, with the 
 difficulties of putting the right men into the 
 vacancies ; we have no such question as is before 
 England in connection with its numerous sea- 
 faring men, nor several other countries with
 
 AND UNEMPLOYMENT 123 
 
 their illiterate masses, in cases reaching nearly 
 50 per cent, of all the adult males. On the other 
 hand, European countries have not our negro 
 question, or an immigrant population, speaking 
 diverse tongues. 
 
 If we seek light on a remedy for our own 
 unemployment problem by studying what has 
 been done in the countries further advanced in 
 dealing with the question for themselves, we can- 
 not by any means be sure that their methods would 
 meet a degree of success here corresponding with 
 that attained by them elsewhere. 
 
 The very first step in taking cognizance of 
 unemployment as the object of a national reform 
 through such means as labor exchanges, out-of- 
 work relief, or similar administrative agencies 
 necessitating supervision of the unemployed, is 
 to ascertain approximately the number of people 
 who might thus be reached, on the average, 
 annually, in the course of the years. In the 
 United States this is a far more difficult task 
 than in any country in Europe. Area, the sparse 
 settlement of vast districts, our sudden fluctua- 
 tions in employment, besides the various nation- 
 alities of the immigrants and the wandering 
 habits of so many of our native wage earners 
 all these facts indicate so many obstacles to any- 
 thing like a correct census. Any one may make 
 his guess of the number out of work at a given 
 time. The politicians among the "outs" always
 
 124 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 have more unemployed in the country than the 
 politicians among the "ins." Social revolu- 
 tionists consistently see an enormous number of 
 the idle and starving. The New York Labor 
 Bureau publishes at stated periods a report bear- 
 ing on the subject for the State, based largely on 
 trade union returns, and not for the entire pop- 
 ulation. These reports carry the observer some- 
 what nearer the truth than might his own other- 
 wise unsubstantiated estimate, but the bureau 
 officials themselves do not ask the public to 
 regard their figures as well founded statistics 
 representing fully sifted facts. Their statements 
 may run that 5 to 10 per cent, of the membership 
 of certain trade unions were out of work at given 
 dates, which may indicate the dull seasons in the 
 trades reported rather than unemployment as a 
 social phenomenon affecting laborers of all call- 
 ings. The truth is bad enough at times, even 
 after it has been proved that commonly accepted 
 figures are inflated. The "Bulletin of the Bureau 
 of Labor" (Federal) has on record the results 
 of an inquiry made in 1878 when the Massachu- 
 setts Bureau of Labor Statistics made two can- 
 vasses of the State to ascertain the number of 
 people out of employment. It had been reported 
 that 40,000 were out in Boston, 200,000 to 300,000 
 in Massachusetts, and 3,000,000 in the United 
 States. The Bureau found 28,508 out in the State 
 in June, and not more than 23,000 in November
 
 AND UNEMPLOYMENT 125 
 
 skilled and unskilled, male and female. On this 
 basis, the number out for the whole country 
 would have been 460,000. Perhaps those who 
 speak for the unemployed have grown cautious, 
 but very recently the press quoted the worthy 
 gentleman who is devoting his life to the cause 
 of the unemployed, acting as president of an 
 organization laboring in their behalf, as giving 
 his estimate that in the summer of 1911 the num- 
 ber was over 4,500,000. If, indeed, it was 1,000,- 
 000 it signified a serious loss to the nation every 
 day. If the number were but half a million in 
 the class of laborers, there is still to be added the 
 number in the classes not so denominated. Even 
 when modified by persistent doubters and careful 
 bureau statisticians, the number of the unem- 
 ployed is sufficient to constitute a source of 
 national anxiety. When we think of the misery 
 of the man or woman dependent on wages being 
 out of work, but willing and anxious to work, and 
 reflect that perhaps today a million of persons 
 are thus suffering, we must decide that of all the 
 economic questions brought before society none 
 is more serious than this. 
 
 With the wage earners given steady employ- 
 ment, at living wages, society might proceed to 
 answer all the other problems of the human race 
 in comparative peace and happiness. But this 
 is a long stage beyond any yet sought by the 
 nations that have given the problem of unemploy-
 
 126 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 ment the most attention. They have gone no 
 further than to try to keep the unemployed wage 
 earners just about alive and to put them in con- 
 nection with employers. In this work Germany 
 has taken the lead, enabled to do so through her 
 state systems of insuring and pensioning the 
 laborers, of rendering aid through trade union 
 and other voluntary administrations, and of 
 maintaining labor bureaus and temporary lodg- 
 ings for the unemployed. Great Britain is now 
 in the fourth year of experimenting with a na- 
 tional system of government labor bureaus, from 
 which much was expected, as a step supple- 
 mentary to old-age pensions, but which has been 
 the subject of criticism by some of the trade 
 unions. 
 
 There is not space here to enter into a descrip- 
 tion of Germany's interwoven methods of pro- 
 tecting its laborers in the less gainful callings 
 from extreme distress, but mention of its prin- 
 cipal agencies will show their inapplicability as 
 a whole in this country, at least for a long time, 
 and the inadequacy of any of them separately 
 from the rest. 
 
 In Germany, every person under twenty-one 
 years of age must have a " labor book,*' which is 
 held by the employer during employment and 
 must be shown by an applicant when seeking 
 Work. When over twenty-one, all wage workers, 
 except a. comparatively small number of the
 
 AND UNEMPLOYMENT 127 
 
 higher paid, carry insurance cards, there being 
 at present about 18,000,000 persons insured. 
 The card of each individual shows a record of 
 his occupation, wages, health, insurance pay- 
 ments, and other economic circumstances. This 
 card he must produce when he takes a new job, 
 applies at a labor exchange for work, asks his 
 union for out-of-work payment, or seeks a lodg- 
 ing in one of the municipal or union shelters. 
 There are other cards, also, for the class of 
 migratory laborers liable to become homeless 
 tramps, who are subject to a system of police 
 and organized philanthropic supervision which 
 brings as nearly as possible all of them under a 
 discipline from which it is difficult to escape a 
 single day. Mendicancy renders one liable to 
 arrest. In the light of these systems, one work- 
 ing in with another, it may be seen why there is 
 little begging in public and no nuisance of law- 
 less vagrancy in Germany. But it would be a 
 woful error, it must be said, to suppose there- 
 fore that there is little poverty in the great Ger- 
 man Empire. Much acute suffering from dire 
 and hopeless poverty is prevented through the 
 government's elaborate methods and a vigilance 
 that never relaxes. Absolute starvation is rare, 
 scientific prevention of disease is advancing, 
 assistance reaches the poor from sources, public' 
 and private, not existing in America. But the 
 statistics relating to relief reveal the degree to
 
 128 THE WAGE EABNERS 
 
 which the masses still bear the burdens of 
 deprivation. For instance, the number of persons 
 obtaining temporary lodgings in a year in the 
 ''shelters" reaches two millions. Municipal out- 
 of-work insurance, of which much praise has been 
 written in this country, seems a small matter to 
 an American. The amount to be drawn may run 
 about thirty cents a day for six weeks. But then, 
 as to the whole system of pensions and sick in- 
 surance, much the same comment is to be made. 
 The amounts drawn, while on the whole an un- 
 doubtedly important aid to the workers, signify 
 only provision for the barest necessaries for 
 existence. 
 
 Enough is suggested in the foregoing facts to 
 lead to the conclusion that just what German 
 experience might teach us would be a matter for 
 careful study. No example for our imitation lies 
 on the surface of the German situation. No 
 more is there any lesson for us in the outcome of 
 either the British or French labor exchanges, 
 with their utterly unlike methods, except a 
 warning. 
 
 It is to be seriously doubted whether our work- 
 ing-class population in America can be helped 
 much through the European point of view with 
 regard to the wage workers. Of the three most 
 obvious classifications of our laborers the white 
 American, the negro, and the foreign the first 
 class stands so far apart not only from the
 
 AND UNEMPLOYMENT 129 
 
 others, in economic condition and mental devel- 
 opment, but from the European working-classes, 
 that public measures of help adapted to the latter 
 might not in the least degree be suitable to it. 
 The American-bred wage worker does not wish to 
 be the ward of any man or system classified, 
 numbered, tagged, and obliged to carry a card of 
 identification, or be subject to police control and 
 employing-class supervision. In fact, the Ameri- 
 can wage worker who is the product of our gen- 
 eral system of education is about the equal of his 
 fellow-citizens and needs only the fair opportuni- 
 ties promised in the principles of our republic to 
 work out his own economic salvation. 
 
 Safe conclusions to be derived from the reports 
 of those public employment offices thus far estab- 
 lished in the United States are that they are 
 adapted principally to the needs of unskilled 
 laborers and persons in domestic service and that 
 their beneficial development might lie in facili- 
 ties for making public the points where labor is 
 in demand and for the movement of laborers on 
 the land, especially in harvest seasons. In the 
 industries and mining, the most pressing need 
 exists for not only compensation for accidents 
 but for inspection. How little the public here is 
 prepared for such a network of labor exchanges 
 and its accompanying institutions as cares for 
 the unemployed in Germany, was illustrated by 
 the history of New York's State labor bureau.
 
 130 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 Established in 1896 as the beginning of a pro- 
 posed system on the Continental plan, its work 
 always of a feeble character, it was abolished in 
 1906, a failure, the appropriation for it being 
 turned over to additional factory inspection. 
 
 Well, what can be done for our unemployed 1 ? 
 Alas! it is, in the end, one of the deepest ques- 
 tions confronting our government, our civiliza- 
 tion, our social system. Immediately, in the 
 United States, effective and to a point continuous 
 relief to our overstocked labor market is to be 
 found in persisting in American principles, under 
 which the wage earner is an independent citizen, 
 rather than in trying to follow European exam- 
 ples, by which the wage earners are regarded as 
 wards of society. The American system of giv- 
 ing a citizen his rights and then letting him do 
 for himself has not yet entirely broken down. 
 What has broken down is the notion that America 
 could be permanently a refuge for the oppressed 
 and downtrodden of the whole world. An enor- 
 mous practical relief to our wage workers would 
 be given through governmental measures such as 
 these: Eestriction of immigration, a steady de- 
 velopment of the policy of reclamation, with 
 new adaptations of our homestead law to the 
 reclaimed lands, and persistency in the suppres- 
 sion of legalized privileges. In such methods lie 
 increased opportunity and decreased exploitation 
 for the masses. Existing voluntary systems in
 
 AND UNEMPLOYMENT 131 
 
 this country, such as trade union labor bureaus, 
 advertisements of labor supply and demand 
 through the press, and industrial insurance, are 
 more advanced in promoting working-class in- 
 terests than similar institutions in Europe. The 
 American "way out" would seem to be through 
 seeking economic justice and improving volun- 
 tary organizations and systems. A few dollars a 
 month more in the form of wages to each wage 
 worker in this country would excel both in social 
 and monetary value all that the German wage 
 earners obtain through their government's vast 
 and complicated bureaucratic system of working- 
 class relief.
 
 CHAPTEE IX. 
 
 THE WAGE EARNERS AND PRISON LABOR. 
 
 "For a hundred long years organized labor 
 has been waging a terribly one-sided war against 
 the competition of convict labor." These are not 
 the words of any labor official, uttered either in 
 complaint or as a boast. They are set down as 
 one of the findings of one who has investigated 
 the convict contract labor system in this country. 
 
 One-sided indeed has the conflict so often been 
 that trade unionists in many States in which the 
 pernicious system has been carried on have 
 accepted the fact, as a matter of course, that 
 obstacles to their attempts to abolish it should be 
 the sentiments of the philanthropically inclined 
 but short-sighted, the emotional utterances of 
 persons reflecting an uninformed public opinion, 
 and, naturally, the special pleadings to the pub- 
 lic, accompanied by underhand machinations, of 
 the two classes of men directly controlling the 
 labor of the prisoners namely, contractors and 
 prison managers. 
 
 What is assumed to be the criminal selfish- 
 ness of the trade unionists in demanding for 
 themselves the work performed by prisoners, the 
 grievous wrong done to convicts in keeping them 
 idle in their cells, the sufferings of their families
 
 AND PRISON LABOR 133 
 
 when deprived of even the little wages they might 
 earn during their terms of confinement, the cer- 
 tainty of the convict falling into temptation when 
 released at the end of his term without the pit- 
 tance he might have saved if kept at work on 
 wages, the serious injury to society caused by 
 turning loose upon it annually hundreds or even 
 thousands of desperately impoverished criminals 
 ignorant of any means of making an honest liv- 
 ing, whereas they might have been instructed in 
 good trades while in prison on these themes 
 have been written editorials, sermons, political 
 speeches, and college men's theses, until it might 
 seem that on this question all the rest of the 
 world were in unison against the trade unionists. 
 This, however, was never really the fact. 
 There has always been on the side of the union- 
 ists a considerable body of men, many of them 
 penologists, who had given sufficient study to the 
 complicated subject of prison labor to be entitled 
 to pronounce upon it a well-founded opinion. 
 With time, this group has been steadily rein- 
 forced by independent investigators and disin- 
 terested readers of their reports. When, three 
 and a half years ago, the National Committee on 
 Prison Labor entered upon its work, it was 
 found that its members were in practical agree- 
 ment on the question with the trade unionists, 
 that sentiment among active legislators and other 
 public leaders had been changing as guided by a
 
 134 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 knowledge of the subject, and that hopes to lift 
 our prison labor systems up to a plane that would 
 respond to the demands of the enlightened judg- 
 ment of competent penologists were reasonably 
 well founded. The present comparatively ad- 
 vanced status of the movement to bring prison 
 labor in America into accordance with methods 
 approved by European authorities on the subject, 
 may be attributed, in good part, to the views of 
 the backwardness of our practices expressed by 
 foreign delegates to the International Prison 
 Congress held in Washington in 1910. The pres- 
 ident of that congress said of America's prisons: 
 "In these jails it is hardly too much to say that 
 many of the features linger which called forth 
 the wrath and indignation of the great Howard 
 at the end of the eighteenth century. ' ' The laws 
 passed within the last few years at the sessions 
 of a number of our State legislatures providing 
 for changes in prison labor were in themselves 
 admissions of sad deficiencies in the methods 
 theretofore pursued. 
 
 It may perhaps be said that at length the tide 
 has turned and that the public is gradually com- 
 ing to recognize the correctness of the position 
 of the trade unionists with respect to prison 
 labor. Assistance is coming to them in putting 
 an end to a most unhappy situation, whether one 
 considers factors in it which affect the prisoner, 
 the free laborer, or the community.
 
 AND PRISON LABOE 135 
 
 It is natural for the reader to ask why it can be 
 affirmed positively that the trade unionists have 
 been in the right on this question when so many 
 other well-intentioned citizens who regarded 
 themselves as well informed on public matters 
 were in the wrong. The reply is that union men, 
 especially those of certain occupations, on being 
 for years brought constantly and intimately in 
 contact with the economic and social conse- 
 quences of contract prison labor, were driven by 
 merciless necessity to find a just solution of the 
 problem involved in it as a national disgrace and 
 social injury. 
 
 Iron molders, cigar-makers, boot and shoe 
 makers, chair-makers and other furniture work- 
 ers, shirt-makers and other garment workers, 
 harness-makers and other leather goods work- 
 ers, as well as wage earners in a goodly list of 
 other indoor occupations, at one time or other 
 in one State or other, during a long period have 
 had driven home to them through contract prison 
 labor a lesson in political economy which many 
 good people not wage workers, viewing the ques- 
 tion sentimentally rather than practically, could 
 have little opportunity to learn. Only a faint 
 impression may be gained when one reads in an 
 encyclopedic work on abstract economics such a 
 dictum as: "The price of the surplus of a com- 
 modity in a market is the price of the entire 
 stock," but a deep and lasting impression is re-
 
 136 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 ceived, as from a knock-out blow, by a force of 
 "free" dollar-a-day girl shirt-waist makers when 
 they are discharged because the goods turned out 
 from their employer's factory cannot compete in 
 market price with goods of the same kind pro- 
 duced for a prison labor manufacturer by 
 twenty-cents-a-day convicts. On this economic 
 point, the New York Commissioner of Labor has 
 thus quoted a shirt manufacturer: "All goods 
 are sold by commercialism, and the lowest price 
 makes the price for all as long as the cheaper 
 article is on sale." In his report for 1910, the 
 Commissioner of Labor of Missouri gives the 
 idea clearly when he says: "A bad feature for 
 the outside manufacturers is that convict goods 
 can be and are sold to dealers and jobbers at 
 figures slightly below their own. Therefore, it is 
 very plain that all prison-made articles stand a 
 better chance of selling first, and the demand 
 must exceed this output before the jobbers and 
 dealers can begin to handle the products of the 
 regular tax-paying factories employing honest 
 wage-earning men and women." 
 
 In Missouri alone in 1909 the output of convict 
 labor shops was valued at $4,708,102. Now, it is 
 by far the lesser factor in the problem for that 
 State that nearly seventeen hundred free indus- 
 trial wage earners were in that year thrown out 
 of work through the contract labor of that num- 
 ber of prisoners, with a loss to free labor of
 
 AND PRISON LABOR 137 
 
 $758,000 in wages, as computed by the Commis- 
 sioner. The portentous factor to society was the 
 demoralization of the markets through the 
 prison-labor goods, with ruinous consequences to 
 the free-labor manufacturers, necessitating low 
 wages for their employes and perhaps the tempo- 
 rary or even permanent closing of factories. 
 When one remembers that the case of Missouri 
 is the case of every State tolerating the convict 
 contract system, in all twenty-nine two years 
 ago, he may see the enormity of the wrong done 
 in the United States to the wage workers who 
 are not convicts and to the manufacturers who 
 are not privileged to have their goods made by 
 convicts in prison factories, with the advantages 
 of free rent, power, and heat and an untaxed 
 plant. 
 
 Left to themselves, the free manufacturers in 
 an industry can in a general way so conduct it 
 as either to minimize the occasional waste from 
 over-production or to overtake the market on the 
 occurrence of a shortage in production. In the 
 course of years they can maintain approximately 
 an equilibrium of trade, resulting on the whole 
 in fairly steady work for the wage earners and 
 average gains to the investors in the business. 
 But, to a number of industries, of all the circum- 
 stances which vitiate the natural course of free 
 production, prison labor has long been one of 
 the most hurtful and vexatious. Fully thirty
 
 138 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 years ago the stove manufacturers of New York, 
 in petitioning the Legislature to do away with 
 iron molding in Sing Sing, represented that as a 
 body they could, if the State took its hands off 
 them, provide for the average annual consump- 
 tion of their goods at remunerative prices, with- 
 out serious fluctuation in their scale of wages or 
 their number of employes. Contract prison 
 products, however, made the total output and its 
 market prices ruinously uncertain. In New 
 York, the contest between the two classes of 
 metal manufacturers, free and prison, ran 
 through decades. It was largely the efforts of 
 the molders' union, associated with other labor 
 organizations, which brought about the constitu- 
 tional amendment of 1895, by which was intro- 
 duced what is now known as the ''State use" 
 system, putting an end in New York to contract 
 prison labor. 
 
 A barbarous social abuse certain to arise from 
 the establishment of contract prison labor lies 
 in securing the needed laborers. It would not 
 do to have the contractors suffer through want 
 of employes! A significant light was thrown on 
 this phase of the subject in testimony given at 
 Washington before a sub-committee of the House 
 of Representatives three years ago, relative to a 
 report of the Baltimore grand jury in January, 
 1907. A passage in this report read: "Owing 
 to the high value of labor, we find the authorities
 
 AND PRISON LABOR 139 
 
 of our penal institutions anxious for long-term 
 prisoners, in order that their financial showing 
 shall be improved and that they may get appro- 
 priations for new buildings, on the ground of 
 their being entirely or partially self-supporting. 
 This is very commendable"! The Maryland 
 penitentiary is one of the shirt trust factories! 
 The process of legally putting poor and ignorant 
 black men to work in the Southern mines as con- 
 vict laborers has all the look of a villainous form 
 of conscription: of 1,350 convicts in the Alabama 
 mines on January 1, 1911, less than 10 per cent, 
 were white. The writer referred to in the 
 opening paragraph declares that of 2,591 
 persons imprisoned in 1910 in the New Haven 
 (Conn.) County Jail, fully 2,000 "had not 
 committed any crime at all." Nearly 400 had 
 been sentenced for a "breach of the peace" 
 ("street rows, family rows, clothes-line quarrels, 
 and the like") ; 1,115 for drunkenness ("for the 
 most part convivials who had had one glass too 
 many") ; 187 for trespassing on railroad prop- 
 erty ("an offense which most of us have com- 
 mitted in the course of a cross-country tramp") ; 
 and 161 for vagrancy ("which means, as a rule, 
 an unemployed workingman looking for a job"). 
 The real purpose, the writer asserted, in con- 
 fining these men in jail was to grind out profits 
 for the prison contractor. The New Haven 
 County Jail is one of the chair trust factories !
 
 140 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 How many men and women of the needle 
 trades in the United States, it may be asked, 
 have seen their jobs taken from them through 
 prison labor just as the employes of four shirt 
 factories in Baltimore, after the panic of 1907, 
 were discharged, doomed to idleness, when the 
 firm employing them transferred their sewing- 
 machines to the Maryland Penitentiary, to give 
 the prisoners work at full time? How many in- 
 dustrial wage workers have seen the places of 
 their employment close through their employer's 
 inability to compete with a manufacturer work- 
 ing convicts just as was the case of a chair- 
 making company which after thirty years in the 
 business was forced to discontinue turning out a 
 certain grade of goods made for it by free 
 employes at $1.50 to $3.00 a day, in competition 
 with convicts at 30 to 50 cents a day ? How many 
 poor, unfortunate blacks and whites have known 
 while at work in prison or mine that they had 
 been arrested, not to be punished as law- 
 breakers, but to be worked for a combination of 
 prison keepers and slave-driving prison labor 
 contractors just as may be the case today when- 
 ever the temptation and the power exists for 
 treacherous authority and unscrupulous greed to 
 seize and exploit weakness and helplessness? 
 Thousands, even tens of thousands of American 
 citizens have in one or other of these ways been 
 mercilessly and infamously robbed of their labor,
 
 AND PRISON LABOR 141 
 
 of their time, either of which means so much of 
 their very lives. All these sufferers had relatives, 
 or friends, or fellow-workers who witnessed their 
 cruel and unjust fate or heard the story of it, and 
 these, with the victims, have no doubt wondered, 
 in righteously rebellious spirit, where were law 
 and justice and mercy and Christianity, while 
 such shocking evils could be tolerated by society. 
 
 Is there a confirmed criminal class in this 
 country, skeptical of purity in the law and benefi- 
 cence in its institutions? Is there a growing 
 defiance of the public officials? Is there a wide- 
 spread conviction among the lowly that to be 
 poor is to be legitimate prey for cunning arch- 
 thieves cloaked in legal authority or endowed 
 with legal privileges, even to that of jailing the 
 victims of poverty and working them like slaves? 
 
 When one recalls to mind the enormous num- 
 bers of poor people who have suffered in some 
 form from the blunders or the criminalities pos- 
 sible under our prison labor systems, something 
 of the answer to a perplexing question which 
 law-abiding wage earners ask one another is sug- 
 gested. The question is: Who are the mob- 
 makers that suddenly appear in our cities in 
 times of popular excitement? Who are the mis- 
 sile throwers and violent shouters of incendiary 
 phrases, usually unknown to the unionists, that 
 during a lock-out or a strike make for the thick 
 of the crowds, to act contrary to the wishes and
 
 142 THE WAGE EAENEKS 
 
 instructions of the union? To what extent may 
 lawless outbreaks be due to the irrepressible 
 sense of wrong done him by society rankling in 
 the breast of here one man and there another, 
 feeding the latent mob spirit, to flame up with 
 the opportunity of manifesting it in public? It 
 is to be remembered that on January 1, 1911, the 
 total prison population of the United States was 
 more than one hundred thousand, while the total 
 number sent to prison in the course of the year 
 1910, for short as well as long terms, was more 
 than four hundred thousand. 
 
 As to a highly promising, if not yet thorough, 
 reform in prison labor, the principle has been 
 applied in New York for fifteen years. Pursuant, 
 as already mentioned, to the petitions of trade 
 unionists and citizens who coincided with their 
 plan, the Constitutional Convention of 1894 
 adopted an amendment providing that only such 
 goods should be made in the prisons as were to 
 be used in the public institutions of the State and 
 its subdivisions. The August, 1911, issue of the 
 "Prison Labor Bulletin" of the National Com- 
 mittee on Prison Labor, in announcing a forth- 
 coming complete report of the status of New 
 York's prison industries, says it will show that 
 under the "State use'* system the prison 
 population cannot, even with greatly increased 
 efficiency, come anywhere near supplying the 
 market which the law has thus provided for
 
 AND PRISON LABOR 143 
 
 prison-made goods. In addition, at the Onon- 
 daga Penitentiary, the stone quarry has been so 
 developed as to supply sufficient work all the year 
 round for the convicts there. 
 
 Here we have methods for employing prison 
 labor which have been shown through practice to 
 be productive, as nearly as possible, of unmixed 
 good viz., manufacturing articles to be used in 
 public institutions and breaking stones for road- 
 making. Further, some States have successfully 
 employed convicts in making roads. 
 
 It is now generally agreed that convicts should 
 be paid for their labor and that a part of their 
 wages should go to their families. With these 
 features, the New York program, supplemented 
 by road-making, presents the leading requisites 
 of an effective salutary scheme. Under it pris- 
 oners may be self-sustaining, as presumably they 
 were, on the whole, while at liberty. The suffer- 
 ing of those dependent upon them may be allevi- 
 ated through a part of their wages. The prison 
 products do not disturb the markets, the effect of 
 supplying the public institutions amounting only 
 to a slight restriction of the selling field for cer- 
 tain manufacturers. The factory wage-workers 
 are not exposed to convict competition. The 
 convicts may be kept steadily at work, while 
 undergoing a helpful manual training. Limita- 
 tions are set to the temptations, or opportunities, 
 on the part of prison superintendents, wardens,
 
 144 THE WAGE EAENEES 
 
 commissioners of whatever title for a vile and 
 cowardly graft. Manufacturers operating their 
 own plants are rid of a discreditable class of 
 competitors. 
 
 The change in public sentiment is indicated by 
 the legislation on the prison labor problem in 
 1911. No State in that year gave new powers of 
 leasing or contracting for convict labor. Only 
 one extended the field of its lessees. Twenty-one 
 made some provision for State operation or 
 assumption of industries. Eight provided for 
 State consumption, six for regulation of prices 
 and standardization of products and three for 
 the branding of prison-made articles. Nine 
 authorized road-making or road-stone crushing 
 by convicts. Provision for radical changes in the 
 methods of administration was made in seven 
 States. The principle of relief for dependent 
 families of prisoners was given some recognition. 
 All told, a good start was made in the right 
 direction. 
 
 Organized labor, the most forceful social ele- 
 ment in promoting these reforms, can welcome 
 such opinions on prison labor as the following, 
 given editorially in the employers' " Mines and 
 Minerals" for June, 1911: 
 
 "There is no question but that convicts should 
 be made to work, and at least earn their keep and 
 the expense of maintaining the penal institu-
 
 AND PRISON LABOR 145 
 
 tions, if the products of their labor do not enter 
 into competition with those of free labor. There 
 is a kind of work they can do, and it is work that 
 interferes least with free labor. They can crack 
 stone in the prison or jail yards, and this cracked 
 stone can be effectually used to make, repair and 
 keep in order the public roads. If each State 
 would put its prisoners to such use, it would 
 materially reduce the just complaints against 
 our abominable roads; and besides, the privi- 
 leges and rights of free, honest labor would be 
 interfered with less than by any other work." 
 
 It is true, with regard to prison labor, as of 
 many another social problem, that in defending 
 themselves trade unionists have been protecting 
 not only the interests of non-unionists but of 
 society in general.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE WAGE EARNERS UNION AND NON-UNION. 
 
 With a population of a hundred millions under 
 its flag, and a total area almost equaling that of 
 Europe, the United States contains large 
 districts, together with considerable strata of 
 society in every district, in which non-unionism 
 is the normal and natural condition of the family 
 bread-winners. In our agricultural States and 
 in the dependencies, wherever, in fact, the land- 
 owner and the tiller of the soil are one, or even 
 where the qualified tenant farmer is yet so rare 
 as to be in demand, the principle of trade 
 unionism invariably makes slow headway. Also, 
 among many professional and commercial men 
 who, though offering their labor for a hire, find it 
 difficult to establish a common scale the expecta- 
 tions of each being to find himself some day in 
 one of the highly prized places of his calling the 
 prevailing spirit is decidedly that of competition 
 as against one another, though it may be that of 
 combination against individuals not yet admitted 
 to their ranks. Even members of the typical pro- 
 fessional society or league who do not term their 
 remuneration wages, but fees or salaries, are 
 often unaware of having taken up with trade
 
 UNION AND NON-UNION 147 
 
 union principles by organizing and have no 
 sympathy with wage strikers. 
 
 In the earlier days of our Republic, when agri- 
 culture was the pursuit of three-fourths of the 
 population, individual initiative, knowledge of 
 one's calling, and the virtues of personal thrift 
 were usually sufficient to bring at least a 
 modicum of success. At a time when developing 
 trade unionism was absorbing much public atten- 
 tion in Great Britain, and being hailed by the 
 working people there as an institution promising 
 more for their material welfare than any other, 
 Americans in general were as yet bestowing upon 
 the organization of labor scarcely a passing 
 thought. Eemedies for low wages or non-employ- 
 ment for our wage workers of that period were 
 to go West, or to move from place to place, or 
 to change from one occupation to another in 
 any event, to " hustle," "reach out," with faith 
 in the abounding opportunities then existing in 
 the new and rich land. The social spirit 
 encouraged each man to launch out and do for 
 himself. "I paddle my own canoe" was a pop- 
 ular boast. The individual proved his manhood 
 by getting ahead which almost invariably 
 meant shrewdness in amassing wealth, no matter 
 by whom produced. The oldest of the trade 
 unionists of this country can remember when the 
 maxims which guided men to prosperity in busi- 
 ness, or in election to office, or to prominence in
 
 148 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 any walk of life, were those which imposed in- 
 junctions upon each person to work for himself 
 exclusively and avoid entangling alliances with 
 others, especially with any of his weaker brethren. 
 The youngest of our trade unionists may every 
 day hear of people who believe that these maxims 
 still hold good. 
 
 Trade unionism in this country has had to 
 make its way against what was undoubtedly the 
 original American spirit in business. All citi- 
 zens, including the farmers, were assumed to be 
 in business, producing and selling for themselves. 
 If a man was not in business, he was, if made of 
 good stuff, expected to be on the way, through 
 working, skimping, and saving, to going into 
 business, whether in agriculture, trade, manufac- 
 turing, or a profession. To a self-made man who 
 ardently held to this conception of society, which 
 involves the principle that to be successful one 
 must "rise," must be an employer, must show 
 his superiority in acquisitiveness over his fel- 
 lows, the proposition that there should be a wage- 
 workers' combination, possibly to be operative 
 against himself, seemed almost a blasphemous 
 breaking away from the moorings of accepted 
 morality. Such a union was to his mind con- 
 temptible, composed of an aggregation of fail- 
 ures, a startling evidence of social degeneracy. 
 Many men, self-made or made big through 
 heredity, their dependents and those attached to
 
 UNION AND NON-UNION 149 
 
 them by social ties, therefore felt it a bounden 
 duty to stamp out trade unionism, to continue to 
 uphold the ancient precepts that led to the suc- 
 cess they had worshiped, to proclaim that the 
 possession of property was evidence that the 
 possessor was a mental giant, to hold that an 
 employer's business entitled him to manage it 
 and the employes as he willed. 
 
 The opportunities existing in a rich, sparsely 
 settled country, the emulation afforded in every 
 community through the example of its self-made 
 men, the social atmosphere in which adulation of 
 the strong and independent was accepted as a 
 phase of truth itself these were factors giving 
 nourishment to the spirit of non-unionism. 
 Another, and a most notable, factor arose with 
 the appearance of labor organization. It was 
 made possible through the crudities in the form 
 and operations of the first organizations and the 
 natural blunders of their representatives 
 blunders which persist, on occasions, to the 
 present time, when the organized are under an 
 improved discipline. 
 
 In the Old World the uprising of labor in any 
 form through political parties or through trade 
 organizations, could not be met by the arguments, 
 springing from equality in voting or in material 
 opportunity, which in this country once had in 
 them some show of reason. In the thickly settled 
 countries of Europe the masses have had few
 
 150 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 opportunities, even in education; there has been 
 no semblance of equality among the citizens, 
 except as the poor were equally and miserably 
 poor; the economists and other teachers of the 
 public of Europe have therefore favored, rather 
 than discouraged, labor organization. Non- 
 unionism, with its wage workers, was never an 
 normal or natural situation. Unionism, as soon 
 as serfdom was actually put aside, was a logical 
 outcome of working-class liberty. In America, 
 on the other hand, the masses of white wage 
 workers have passed from the stage of compara- 
 tive economic freedom of forty years ago to a 
 social stage approximating that of the industrial 
 countries of Europe. Consequently, the area, 
 social and geographical, for the American non- 
 unionist has been contemporaneously narrowing. 
 The premises for his reasoning, in self-defense 
 or apology, have been gradually disappearing. 
 His left-over maxims, fitting to a period of crude 
 and mistaken individualism, are no longer appro- 
 priate to the times. The lot of one man, year in 
 and year out, in any of our great industries, is 
 the lot of the mass in nine cases in ten ; in nine- 
 teen in twenty ; or in ninety-nine in one hundred. 
 With few exceptions, the day for the industrial 
 wage worker to study purely personal advantage, 
 the over-reaching of his fellows, or promotion 
 and finally partnership through race-horse strain 
 and effort, has gone by. The mass of the workers
 
 UNION AND NON-UNION 151 
 
 have covered the whole game of climbing up, on 
 the shoulders of others, as taught in the circles 
 which profit by it, with a full set of queries. A 
 few of these are: What proportion of us can 
 possibly win the few glittering prizes ever dan- 
 gled before the eyes of us all? Of what profit is 
 it to the rest when one of us, or a score in a thou- 
 sand, is set up above the others? Why should 
 we not study, for the common betterment, the 
 methods which will surely yield equal benefits to 
 the entire brotherhood? While the hardships of 
 daily experience have been divesting the wage- 
 worker himself of the superstition that the condi- 
 tions of half a century ago still survive as guides 
 and bases for his hopes, his plans, his activities 
 in getting along in the world, converting him from 
 non-unionist to unionist, the theoretical territory 
 of non-unionism that is, individualism still 
 has strongholds in our courts and our colleges. 
 The lawyer, dealing in precedents, and the pro- 
 fessor, looking to history, are apt to see what 
 was instead of what is. The wage worker, on the 
 contrary, knows by contact with his tasks of job- 
 hunting and job-holding what actual conditions 
 are. Hence, while the college president-emeritus 
 has praise for the non-unionist, the union worker 
 regards him as usually unfaithful to his class, 
 though granting that occasionally he may yet be 
 a product of the conditions surviving in the side 
 currents of agricultural or industrial life where
 
 152 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 the general social situation of times gone by has 
 been still to some extent perpetuated. 
 
 In this survey of the origin and progress of 
 the two sentiments non-union and union, indi- 
 vidual and co-operative which in this country 
 bear upon the organization of labor, we arrive at 
 an understanding of the possibilities of honesty 
 and principle animating men on either side. The 
 judge on the bench may be acting in accordance 
 with his lights, which are legal tomes, in render- 
 ing judgments that are absurd when viewed from 
 the standpoint of the spirit and social needs of 
 today. The old-time college professor, a closet 
 man, may be loyal to ideals of citizenship which 
 were possible when his favorite authorities in 
 sociology gave the world their heavy volumes. 
 The college student, fresh from the farm or from 
 the home of a professional or business man, may 
 lightly play strike-breaker as a lark, or for the 
 extra cash needed to pay his way to a diploma, 
 not realizing his social crime, as seen by the 
 organized workers. The journeyman worker 
 coming from a country town may be but follow- 
 ing the only custom of which he has had practical 
 knowledge when he takes a job left vacant by 
 strikers, although this is nowadays a rare thing. 
 The usual founts of knowledge and influence from 
 which the plain people in small communities 
 absorb their views of life and its obligations as
 
 UNION AND NON-UNION 153 
 
 represented by the school teacher, the village 
 newspaper, the "influential business man," or 
 the speech-maker on patriotic occasions are 
 rarely engaged in the active propaganda of trade 
 unionism. 
 
 When, however, we mingle among the wage 
 earners of the industrial centers, of the railroad 
 world, of the mines, and the undertakings in gen- 
 eral requiring workers in large numbers, we 
 speedily find ourselves in a society by itself. It 
 is living in close contact with the harsh facts of 
 today; it is educated in branches of economics 
 not usually emphasized in the college curriculum ; 
 it is fighting the battle of the worker pushed hard 
 by conditions of the live labor market; it is 
 animated by a moral code which is the outcome 
 of the necessity of its defensive warfare; it is 
 busied in divers ways with advancing the welfare 
 of not only the organized workers but of all 
 men, women and children in the wage-working 
 ranks. 
 
 One is enabled to affirm, in sober earnest, that 
 the sentiment of this wage-workers' society in 
 the United States today is almost wholly union. 
 The statistics of the present paid-up membership 
 of the American Federation of Labor, the rail- 
 road brotherhoods, and the as yet unfederated 
 unions show very nearly three million members. 
 But this number does not express the sum total 
 of unionists as it exists in fact. Unionism, in its
 
 154 THE WAGE EAENEES 
 
 ebb and flow, is made the more possible to a larger 
 and larger number through union sentiment con- 
 tinually preceding organization itself. Beyond 
 the forces organized and paying dues to the 
 unions are the masses that long to be with their 
 comrades who are bearing the burdens of labor's 
 uplift through union methods. A large propor- 
 tion but await the opportune time to fall into line. 
 In the progress of organization errors have been 
 made which for a time have caused serious losses 
 to the unions; there has been on occasion poor 
 leadership ; unwise strikes have taken place. But, 
 whatever the cause of their falling away, it may 
 be confidently asserted that after men have once 
 experienced the help of the union, never will they 
 be again satisfied with the state of non-unionism. 
 They know that most of the betterments they en- 
 joy come to them, and are maintained, through 
 the power of organized labor. Three millions, 
 therefore, is too small a number for trade union- 
 ism. If it were as easy for men to enroll them- 
 selves in a union as in a political party, trade 
 unionism in America would today count its four 
 million or five or six, whatever number is neces- 
 sary to cover the vastly predominating force in 
 all the trades and callings that have been covered 
 by our modern industrialism. It is indeed true; 
 trade unionism envelops in its folds more than 
 are enrolled in the unions. 
 When we begin an estimate of the number of
 
 UNION AND NON-UNION 155 
 
 active non-union wage workers, we quickly come 
 to a halt. Professional strike-breakers are not 
 non-unionists. They are mercenaries, on hire to 
 whoever pays them their price. Should the 
 unions outbid the employers, they could buy the 
 strike-breakers, whose principles have nothing to 
 do with honest work. Their character is notori- 
 ous ; the jest of the newspapers, the thorn in the 
 side of employers, the worry and surprise of the 
 innocent university leaders who once deemed non- 
 unionists heroes. The steady and usually fair 
 wage worker who at times refuses to come out on 
 strike and give up his job may have yet in him 
 the making of a true union man. He may be in- 
 sufficiently educated, he may have had sore ex- 
 periences with the pioneers of organization in his 
 trade, he may feel that unnecessary sacrifices are 
 being demanded of him and his shopmates; yet 
 time may bring him around ready to perform any 
 duty the good of his fellow-men requires. 
 
 No workingman of principle can rest content 
 outside organized labor unless he has not con- 
 sidered the questions that its progress has evoked 
 to society. What, for example, has non-unionism 
 to offer in place of the insurance features of 
 unionism? The answer is, mostly, some form of 
 pauperism or mortifying dependence. But for 
 unionism, would there exist a single State Labor 
 Bureau in the country? Whence could be ob- 
 tained the enormous body of facts recorded in the
 
 156 THE WAGE EAENEES 
 
 bureau reports if not from them! How could 
 trade agreements be reached, except through the 
 unions ? For, it is a certainty, non-unionism can- 
 not promise a condition in which there would be 
 no strikes. The ugliest of outbreaks are at times 
 by non-union labor. What would the prevailing 
 workday be but for the unions? Have, or have 
 they not, brought the eight-hour day to many of 
 the trades? What as to the laws for the protec- 
 tion of workers in mines, in the factories, on the 
 railroads? Have non-unionists ever fought child 
 labor? Under the heel of the tyrannical shop 
 foreman, under the rigid rules of avaricious cor- 
 porations, under the neglect of society, what 
 would be the daily existence of the wage workers 
 should they accept permanently the tenets of non- 
 unionism ? 
 
 When such questions are troubling the con- 
 science of the wage worker not enrolled in a 
 labor organization, he finds himself going further 
 in self-examination. Has he a right to remain 
 standing aside from the men who are doing what 
 they can for their fellows? Would he not be 
 guilty of a form of treason to his fellow workers, 
 and of short-sightedness respecting his own in- 
 terests, in taking the place of a striker? The 
 conditions of labor being what they are, is there 
 any truth whatever in the claim that any wage- 
 worker has the moral or social right to work how, 
 when and where he pleases? No more has he 
 than has a man a right to injure himself.
 
 UNION AND NON-UNION 157 
 
 In among the workers, the non-unionist can 
 offer no live argument for his beliefs, no moral 
 principle in self-defense, no sentiment of brother- 
 hood, no just reason for standing aloof from his 
 fellows.
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 THE WAGE EARNERS AND THE SOCIAL UPLIFT. 
 
 When, some time ago, public attention was di- 
 rected to the women "core" makers in Massa- 
 chusetts foundries, the necessity for the good 
 offices of trade unions in the case was plainly seen 
 by conservative editors and other public teachers 
 who seldom have a good word for organized 
 labor. They took it for granted that the unions 
 were to be prominent among the organizations 
 which should set about removing from American 
 society the blemish existing in the spectacle of 
 womanhood, degraded, as must needs be in the 
 occupation in question, through the circumstances 
 of work beyond the strength of the sex, of 
 promiscuous workshop associations, and of un- 
 conventional exposure of the person in the fierce 
 heat of the foundry. Quarrel with the unions as 
 they may, even the "last ditchers" among the ad- 
 versaries of trade unionism must finally admit 
 that the sentiments of the wage-earning class are 
 entitled to a hearing, backed by an effective force, 
 and that to obtain that hearing and to give it force 
 the obvious essential is organization. In so far as 
 concession on these points is made by opponents, 
 they show themselves to be sympathizers with the 
 union. They acknowledge it has a place in society.
 
 AND THE SOCIAL UPLIFT 159 
 
 That such a sympathy and acknowledgment have a 
 much firmer hold in the average stubborn employ- 
 er 's heart and mind than he will admit, trade union 
 officials are led to believe through their expe- 
 rience as conferees in such matters as trade agree- 
 ments and much legislation protective of the 
 workers. A common observation among employ- 
 ers who are pretty stiff fighters with the labor 
 organizations among their employes is, "Can- 
 didly, if I were a wage worker I'd be a member 
 of the union. ' ' 
 
 This avowal is honest and human. It is equiv- 
 alent to declaring that every one who is oppressed 
 rightfully calls for fair play. This the wage- 
 earner standing alone cannot get, as all employers 
 are fully aware. Therefore, under some stress, 
 the last biased one among them will express a 
 willingness to comply with the rules of the game 
 in the struggle for life and opportunity. Now, 
 all games involving struggle are typified in the 
 familiar illustration of the street fight between 
 two urchins surrounded by a group of youthful 
 spectators, who constitute themselves judge and 
 jury. If the combatants are unequally pitted, the 
 weaker must be given advantages in some form 
 before the fight can go on. Whatever*the varied 
 interests of the lookers-on, all join in upholding 
 the traditional rules, even those who have special 
 reasons for taking sides, and the fighter who 
 refuses to proceed under the general judgment of
 
 160 THE WAGE EABNEES 
 
 right dealing is accounted unfair, and he loses hia 
 place in respectable society among boys. 
 
 Hence it may with good reason be asked : Who, 
 in fact, does not sympathize with the organized 
 labor movement? Who will say it is not called 
 for by existing social conditions? Who does not 
 know that the employer has the best of it over the 
 wage earner who seeks work merely as one in an 
 unorganized mass? Society on occasions may be 
 vexed with the organized laborer ; it may at times 
 regard him as unwise; it may, in its capacity as 
 jury, pronounce against him should he strike a 
 foul blow; but it would like to see removed the 
 disadvantages under which labor is conducting its 
 fight for a fair share in the fruits of the general 
 toil. 
 
 It can be safely laid down as an indisputable 
 proposition that the nearer the systematic ob- 
 server gets to the laborer, and the longer he 
 studies the labor movement, the more lively are 
 his sympathies with the laborer and the firmer 
 are his convictions that, on the whole and all 
 things considered, the labor movement of this 
 country has done whatever good has come within 
 its possibilities. It sometimes happens that social 
 workers, fresh from their college books after being 
 brought up in homes of the professional or busi- 
 ness classes, find themselves acting on the erro- 
 neous assumption that "working people," indefi- 
 nitely, need their ministrations. But they soon
 
 AND THE SOCIAL UPLIFT 161 
 
 find that they have been theoretically studying, 
 not the working classes but merely the statistics 
 of exceptions, the reports of conditions among 
 social strata not representative of wage workers 
 in general, indeed, the state of affairs among the 
 dependent and unsocialized. The novitiate social 
 worker resembles in his inexperience those mem- 
 bers of the police force who, in their daily famil- 
 iarity with crime and their comparative isolation 
 from normal life, are in danger of regarding all 
 men as potentially criminal. But the social work- 
 er's calling gives him in time the practical advan- 
 tages of getting close to the people, in their homes 
 and at their work, and of studying their own spe- 
 cial organizations. In the early stages of his 
 studies at first hand he finds himself asking: 
 What institution stands at the head in promoting 
 the welfare of the wage earners? Or, it may be 
 the query is : How are they best helping them- 
 selves, besides practicing individual thrift? He 
 finds answer in such facts as these : The managers 
 of philanthropic employment offices, of church 
 benevolent societies, of eleemosynary agencies in 
 general, are united in testifying to the care the 
 trade unions extend to their own unemployed, 
 necessitous, or sick members. The social worker 
 thereupon feels that in doing such work on so 
 large a scale the unions rightfully hold society as 
 indebted to them. Pursuing his inquiries as to
 
 162 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 unionism further, he finds that in every direction 
 in which amelioration of the lot of the worker is 
 directly practicable, the unions are actively at 
 work. As the voice of labor, they are naturally the 
 chief reliance of the agents of the State and na- 
 tional labor bureaus; they have for decades been 
 foremost in pressing upon the attention of legis- 
 lators the necessity for laws protective of wage 
 working women and children; they give life to 
 these laws, to the benefit of even the non- 
 unionists; they conduct their own schemes of in- 
 surance ; they enter a field not touched by philan- 
 thropy when they shrink the workday and expand 
 the wage bill they present to the employer. The 
 indebtedness of society to the unions thence 
 becomes a theme in the writings of the social 
 worker, as it is in the reports of the government 
 agent, and of all other systematic observers, 
 almost without exception. The trade union uplift 
 of the wage earners is referred to in many pages 
 in the volumes resulting from the Pittsburgh 
 "survey." It has been an accepted commonplace 
 fact in labor bureau reports. Rev. Dr. Washing- 
 ton Gladden, of Columbus, gives his testimony 
 upon it in a work recently issued. 
 
 The casual reader unacquainted with either the 
 reports of the unions or with other works of ref- 
 erence on the subject of union help to members in 
 misfortune, will doubtless feel that indefinite 
 statement might be rendered more palpable
 
 AND THE SOCIAL UPLIFT 163 
 
 through quotation of trustworthy figures. He can 
 be obliged. For example, he may verify at almost 
 any city public library, the statement that in the 
 last ten years the trade unions of Great Britain 
 have used their funds to the extent of twenty mil- 
 lion dollars in relieving the distress of unemploy- 
 ment. Unfortunately, in this country, many of our 
 unions do not publish the statistics of the insur- 
 ance or benevolent branches of their operations. 
 However, in 1912, six out of sixty-nine interna- 
 tional American Federation of Labor unions re- 
 porting had expended out-of-work benefits to the 
 amount of $215,398. Death benefits reported for 
 1908 (round numbers being given for convenience) 
 amounted to $1,257,000; 1909, $1,187,000; 1910, 
 $1,320,000; 1911, $1,471,400. Sick benefits, 1908, 
 $593,000; 1909, $731,000; 1910, $719,000; 1911, 
 $818,000 ; 1912, $1,649,000. But how imperfectly the 
 benevolent features of the unions are represented 
 in these haphazard statistics is seen in the fact 
 that they include no mention, for instance, of the 
 expenditures by the International Typographical 
 Union, in 1912, for the Union Printers ' Home, 
 $99,000; and for old-age pensions, $169,000; 
 these, besides the burial benefits of $32,000. 
 These sums, for this union, do not include the 
 outlay of local unions for supplemental death 
 benefits, or of the local or workshop sick benefit 
 societies, to which only union men are admitted. 
 In 1912, the Typographical Union buried 655 mem-
 
 164 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 bers, gave $5.00 a week as a pension to 1,038 mem- 
 bers over 60 years of age, when out of work, and 
 maintained 130 sick or aged members at the Union 
 Printers ' Home. In the railroad brotherhoods, as 
 is quite well known, the death and accident insur- 
 ance features carry the reader to the considera- 
 tion of enormous totals. In all, the mutual help 
 of the trade unionists is on a scale so great, with 
 results of such importance to society, that the 
 question may with propriety be raised as to what 
 would be the fate of our American working classes 
 in the absence of this inseparable function of the 
 unions. 
 
 Nor have all the forms of trade union benevo- 
 lence been mentioned. Seldom is there a union 
 meeting held at which "the hat" is not passed 
 around for a collection to serve a charitable pur- 
 pose. On the union factory bulletin board is often 
 posted a call for help for an unfortunate shop- 
 mate. A sanitary committee, uncompensated, is 
 no rare feature in a force of union men or women. 
 Contributors to a shop sick fund take turns in 
 personally attending on the sick or directing the 
 burial of the dead. But the uninformed inquirer 
 will be prompted to ask are not all these forms 
 of mutual help easily possible also to non-union- 
 ists f To this the reply must be that they are not. 
 Non-unionists rarely hold meetings, or have shop 
 societies, or appoint committees. These features 
 imply organization, which in any form is not
 
 AND THE SOCIAL UPLIFT 165 
 
 encouraged by non-union employers. Even the 
 occasional benefit associations of non-union em- 
 ployes, which rest under the suspicion of possibly 
 becoming the nucleus of striking labor organiza- 
 tions, are usually managed under the rules and 
 direction of the interested employers. The pen- 
 sion features of the railroads and other large cor- 
 porations, schemes to forestall union effort by 
 binding the employe to his job, are economically a 
 detriment to society in destroying the mobility of 
 labor, in closing the labor market to men nearing 
 a possible pension age, ai^d in tending to suppress 
 the activities of trade unionism. On the latter 
 point, however, the intentions of the schemers 
 have in frequent cases been defeated, when the 
 employes, loyal to their fellows rather than to the 
 employers who have set the pension bait for them, 
 have courageously adopted union methods. 
 
 Whether this necessarily somewhat sketchy 
 presentation of the purely humane side of trade 
 unionism is suggestive of the truth may be 
 verified, or contradicted, by a considerable num- 
 ber of that profession which of recent years has 
 seriously taken up a study of the labor movement. 
 This is the ministry of the church. There was 
 a period, which to the veterans of the labor move- 
 ment seems hardly yet passed, when it was taken 
 for granted that clergymen, from their education 
 and associations and the habit of regarding .alms- 
 giving as including much if not the most that is in
 
 166 THE WAGE EAENERS 
 
 charity, were unable to comprehend trade 
 unionism. To the unionists fell the task of teach- 
 ing the church the evil economic effects of its rep- 
 resentatives finding, or providing, work for the 
 needy at low wages, or for the young children of 
 poor widows, or for the non-unionists who wanted 
 the places that unionists had rejected. Earnest- 
 ness in the study of social conditions under mod- 
 ern industry has resulted in bringing the clergy, 
 of whatever denomination, to accept labor organ- 
 ization as a necessity of the times. In many cases 
 ministers have first been attracted to the benevo- 
 lent work of the unions, the set of facts therein 
 presented touching the tender heart and not very 
 profound conscientiousness that sees high merit In 
 giving something to those in misfortune. The 
 next step more difficult, requiring broader ob- 
 servation, clearer and closer thought, and a con- 
 science keenly selective of social values has come 
 with time. Today, many of the denominations as 
 such, and the prevailing opinion among clergymen 
 as individuals, have pronounced for the unions. 
 When Dr. Gladden in his latest work practically 
 puts labor organization on trial and gives a ver- 
 dict in its favor, when Rev. Charles Stelzle year 
 by year issues his weekly letters in favor of the 
 unions and regularly attends labor conventions, 
 when Rabbi Wise delivers one of his glowing 
 eulogiums on union labor, when Cardinal Gibbons 
 advises people to refrain from purchasing the
 
 AND THE SOCIAL UPLIFT 167 
 
 products of sweatshops, when a score of clergy- 
 men stand ready in almost every community to 
 write letters and articles for the union organs, 
 when throughout the country on Labor Sunday 
 from almost every pulpit a labor sermon is 
 preached when all these evidences of trade union 
 recognition are manifested on the part of the 
 clergy, it may be regarded as an accepted fact that 
 the church is today emphatically on the side of 
 union labor. 
 
 Considering how serious a step is taken by de- 
 liberative bodies of the church in giving formal 
 approval to organizations not representative of 
 their faith in each instance, the recognition given 
 recently by such bodies to trade unionism forms 
 a noteworthy sign of the times. While ordinarily 
 the question of resolutions passed in conventions 
 is matter to be glanced at as perfunctory expres- 
 sion of stereotyped opinion, in this case of the 
 church and the organized wage .earners every 
 word of each resolution possesses a peculiar force 
 in significance. Every point in such recommenda- 
 tions, it is to be remembered, was well weighed 
 before adoption, every phrase subjected to criti- 
 cism, and the step taken was fraught with good 
 or baneful results for the convention, or synod, 
 or council passing the resolutions. Hence it is not 
 only with satisfaction but with the certainty of 
 placing before the thoughtful reader an appeal 
 to his convictions and a guide to his future atti-
 
 168 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 tude on the labor problem, that the trade union 
 writer assembles the subjoined quotations. 
 
 The following are resolutions adopted at the 
 Tenth Annual Convention of the American Fed- 
 eration of Catholic Societies, 1911 : 
 
 "We sympathize with every legitimate effort to 
 obtain a living wage, reasonable hours, protec- 
 tion of life and limb, workingmen's just compen- 
 sation, decent and healthful conditions in the 
 home, shop, mine, and factory and pledge our 
 support to all legislative action instituted to this 
 end. 
 
 "We give our hearty endorsement to all unions 
 in behalf of labor which are based on Christian 
 principles. We appeal to the Christian leaders 
 and membership of such organizations to foster 
 and keep intact the conservative and just ideals 
 for which trade unionism should always stand." 
 
 The Congregational Brotherhood of America, 
 through its Secretary for Labor and Social 
 Service, in its leaflet ''The Church, Opportunity 
 and Resources for Social Service," says: 
 
 "A strike may entail suffering upon thousands 
 of people and untold hardship upon a whole com- 
 in unity, but there are conditions far worse than 
 those caused by a strike. The labor union repre- 
 sents the organized effort of a fine set of men 
 standing for principles that are fundamental to 
 the success and growth of our free institutions. 
 The church ought to be able to see the heroism 
 that will lead a man to throw down his tools and
 
 AND THE SOCIAL UPLIFT 169 
 
 walk out of the shop, taking suffering and hard- 
 ship for himself and family in order that he and 
 his fellow-worker may have a fair wage, reason- 
 able hours and decent conditions in the shop." 
 
 The Episcopal Church, through its Association 
 for the Advancement of Labor, has since 1887 been 
 untiring in its efforts to bring together church 
 members and trade unionists in promoting many 
 of the purposes of the unions. The Methodist 
 Church South has taken advanced social action 
 against child labor. The Presbyterian Church, in 
 its Department of Church and Labor, gives full 
 recognition to trade union work. At the Roches- 
 ter convention, November 11-23, 1912, clergymen 
 were present as fraternal delegates from the Fed- 
 eral Council of the Churches of Christ in America, 
 the American Federation of Catholic Societies, 
 and the Church Association for the Advancement 
 of Labor. In attendance at the weekly or monthly 
 Central Labor Union meetings in perhaps a score 
 of our larger cities are usually ministers of sev- 
 eral denominations. 
 
 The Federal Council of the Churches of Christ 
 in America adopted the following as a part 
 of a general statement of its attitude toward social 
 and industrial questions: 
 
 "We deem it the duty of all Christian people 
 to concern themselves directly with certain prac-
 
 170 THE WAGE EAENEBS 
 
 tical industrial problems. To us it seems that 
 the churches must stand 
 
 "For equal rights and complete justice for all 
 men in all stations of life. 
 
 ' ' For the right of all men to the opportunity for 
 self-maintenance, a right ever to be wisely and 
 strongly safeguarded against encroachments of 
 every kind. 
 
 ''For the right of workers to some protection 
 against the hardships often resulting from the 
 swift crises of industrial change. 
 
 "For the principle of conciliation and arbitra- 
 tion in industrial dissensions. 
 
 "For the protection of the worker from dan- 
 gerous machinery, occupational disease, injuries, 
 and mortality. 
 
 1 ' For the abolition of child labor. 
 
 "For such regulation of the conditions of toil 
 for women as shall safeguard the physical and 
 moral health of the community. 
 
 "For the suppression of the sweating system. 
 
 "For the gradual and reasonable reduction of 
 the hours of labor to the lowest practicable point, 
 and for that degree of leisure for all which is a 
 condition of the highest human life. 
 
 "For a release from employment one day in 
 seven. 
 
 "For a living wage as a minimum in every 
 industry, and for the highest wage that each in- 
 dustry can afford. 
 
 "For the most equitable division of the prod- 
 ucts of industry that can ultimately be devised. 
 
 "For suitable provision for the old age of the 
 workers and for those incapacitated by injury. 
 
 "For the abatement of poverty.
 
 AND THE SOCIAL UPLIFT 171 
 
 "To the toilers of America and to those who by 
 organized effort are seeking to lift the crushing 
 burdens of the poor, and to reduce the hardships 
 and uphold the dignity of labor, this council sends 
 the greeting of human brotherhood and the pledge 
 of sympathy and of help in a cause which belongs 
 to all who follow Christ." 
 
 On mentally reviewing the hosts of sympa- 
 thizers with labor organizations, and recalling 
 numerous instances in which he has seen men and 
 women of the well-to-do classes persuaded by the 
 justice of the cause of organized labor to become 
 among its supporters, the union representative 
 may utter a word of warning to every opponent of 
 trade unionism. It is, if you would remain its 
 enemy, let the subject alone. It is dangerous to 
 you. Some day, in a course of active opposition 
 to the unions, you will surely begin to think your 
 best thoughts and feel in accordance with your 
 best manhood. You will put yourself in the 
 unionist's place, see economic conditions as he 
 sees them, and appreciate the preponderating 
 facts in his life which have carried him over to 
 his labor organization. You will sympathize with 
 him, recognize the necessity of his work, and per- 
 haps, as with the churchmen here cited before you, 
 join in his praise.
 
 CHAPTER XH. 
 
 THE WAGE EARNERS AND THE EMPLOYERS. 
 
 The typical American employer, in exercising 
 the common sense and business sagacity required 
 in successful management and in achieving a 
 desired reputation for fair-mindedness, avoids 
 placing himself among those disputatious irrecon- 
 cilables, the exceptions in his class, who refuse to 
 recognize that their extreme anti-union views are 
 out of date. Consequently, as the organization of 
 labor has developed in this country, the bulk of the 
 employers in one occupation after another have 
 openly accepted the trade union as one of the in- 
 evitable modern institutions one which is an out- 
 come of the new industrial conditions, a necessary 
 refuge and creation of the wage workers, a legiti- 
 mate order and body within our Republic, cover- 
 ing a social territory lying beyond the dictator- 
 ship of employing capital. The closing of that 
 period in our industrial history in which the trade 
 unions might possibly have been regarded by con- 
 servative employers as yet awaiting honorable 
 standing with other recognized beneficent institu- 
 tions, ought to have been regarded by even them 
 as arrived at the day that President Taft said: 
 "Time was when everybody who employed labor 
 was opposed to the labor union; when it was re-
 
 AND THE EMPLOYERS 173 
 
 garded as a menace. That time, I am glad to say, 
 has largely passed away, and the man today who 
 objects to the orgnization of labor should be rele- 
 gated to the last century." 
 
 Granted, President Taft did not explicitly set 
 the seal of his approval on every feature that the 
 trade union regards as essential to its functions. 
 Nor do employers who recognize organized labor 
 uniformly acquiesce with good grace in every 
 union regulation, but taking broad views of life 
 and of the perplexities in the general industrial 
 situation, they have learned that on the whole the 
 union brings both to the employing and the work- 
 ing classes, as well as to the nation, results im- 
 measurably better than the chaos of the labor 
 market, the defenselessness of the wage workers, 
 and the silencing of the voice of oppressed labor, 
 where the masses are unorganized. 
 
 Granted, also, that in general the industrial 
 peace which exists between organized wage 
 workers and their employers is recognized by both 
 sides as really a phase of economic conflict; it is 
 a truce, possible of indefinite duration, in which 
 each has learned to respect the other. On both 
 sides are men. Neither knows despot or serf. 
 Both are included, to the extent of their trade 
 contracts, in a wage-market democracy. The 
 mutual attitude is far from indicating social ill- 
 health. Both sides gain in the discipline conse- 
 quent on learning through strife the wisdom of
 
 174 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 conciliation, on seeing facts as shown on the other 
 side of the shield, and on hearkening on occasions 
 to warnings in public opinion. The mental horizon 
 of both employer and employe, in that situation 
 becomes sufficiently wide to permit of a clear 
 survey of all the body of facts for and against 
 either party. The organized wage earners and 
 the organized employers may agree upon regard- 
 ing each other as on different sides of the labor 
 market, even, to an extent, as rivals in dividing 
 the wealth they together produce, but they may 
 yet have wisdom enough to stop short of declar- 
 ing each other social enemies and showing them- 
 selves animated with the bitterness of a mutual 
 hate or bent on exterminating each other's organ- 
 izations. 
 
 Not in a spirit of rancor and recrimination 
 would a congress of American employers and 
 employes meet today if it were truly representa- 
 tive if, for example, it were composed of one 
 wage-earning delegate from each of the railroad 
 brotherhoods and one employer delegate from 
 among the railroad managers closest to each of 
 these, and also one delegate from each of the 113 
 international unions in the American Federation 
 of Labor and one from the employers of each cor- 
 responding occupation. Such a congress might 
 reasonably be expected to exhibit to the world a 
 wealth of instructive experience, a healthy breadth 
 of view and manly toleration, a habit of self-con-
 
 AND THE EMPLOYERS 175 
 
 trol, a desire for a clear understanding of the 
 differences in principle between the two great 
 human elements in industry. In the course of the 
 proceedings of such a deliberative body, it is cer- 
 tain, the labor delegates would act under a sense 
 of their grave responsibilities, while the ex- 
 tremists among the employers would be obliged, 
 through the prevailing opinion in their own num- 
 bers, it can be believed, to drop from their case 
 against unionism the sort of arguments certain 
 radical attorneys and hasty-tempered officials who 
 speak for the few belated and contentious employ- 
 ers ' associations nowadays rely upon to mislead 
 the public. 
 
 What the latter can be truthfully charged with 
 is narrowness, exaggeration in statement, lack of 
 candor in argument, impracticability, and, withal, 
 shortsightedness. They ignore, or at least give 
 slight weight to, the fundamental economic causes 
 for trade union principles and organization. They 
 "harp on one string, " presenting repeatedly in 
 various forms their one set of partisan pleadings 
 as if they thereby exhausted the whole subject at 
 issue. Their task of trying to demolish the unions 
 they carry on in terms of heat and hate, which 
 usually betray misrepresentation. But, worse for 
 them as business men, they fail to win their case 
 before the public and they lose in their fight on 
 unionism. 
 
 Suppose that before a congress such as that
 
 176 THE WAGE EABNERS 
 
 we have imagined a labor delegate were to make 
 against one of the employers present the charges 
 contained in the preceding paragraph. Could he 
 substantiate them! Suppose he were to make 
 them against Mr. John Kirby, Jr., president of 
 the National Association of Manufacturers. 
 
 To begin, Mr. Kirby has signally failed to defeat 
 American unionism, which surely has been his 
 purpose other than filling the air with plaint and 
 denunciation. In one of his leaflets he expresses 
 his desire to see the American Federation of 
 Labor "as dead as a mackerel." In his inaugural 
 address in 1909 he said : * ' Today the life of the 
 American Federation of Labor is hanging by a 
 thread." But the report of the secretary of the 
 Federation for each year since that time shows an 
 unprecedented increase in the paid-up member- 
 ship, the total for 1912 the largest yet reached 
 being 1,841,000. As an Irish delegate at a recent 
 convention of the American Federation of Labor 
 well said, Mr. Kirby 's effort to disrupt the trade 
 union movement was like the attempt to destroy 
 the shamrocks of the Emerald Isle the faster you 
 plucked them the thicker they grew. 
 
 In another leaflet Mr. Kirby announces: "Why 
 even the Canadian unions have repudiated the 
 methods of the American Federation of Labor," 
 quoting, in confirmation, a "Grand Council of 
 Provincial Workingmen" as deciding "in favor 
 of cutting loose." But at the recent convention,
 
 AND THE EMPLOYEES 177 
 
 as usual, Canada was fully represented, its dele- 
 gates reporting unquestioned loyalty to the inter- 
 national body. In other leaflets Mr. Kirby refers 
 to the Buck's Stove and Range Co.'s contest with 
 union labor as if it were to be as uncompromising 
 as his own. But the company is today on friendly 
 terms with all the unions. He mentions approv- 
 ingly a recent attack by "the Knights of Labor" 
 on the American Federation of Labor. But at this 
 showing of how hard pressed he must be for argu- 
 ments, trade unionists merely smile and ask where 
 those Knights are to be found. In another of Mr. 
 Kirby J s leaflets, which contains his address on 
 taking the presidency of the Manufacturers' As- 
 sociation in 1909, he quotes a magazine in calling 
 attention to the fact that in 1906 and 1907 the 
 International Typographical Union spent three 
 million dollars on its eight-hour strike, the article 
 saying: "They lost ground" in the first of these 
 two years and in the second * ' threw into the same 
 whirlpool," "with a dogged tenacity of a man 
 who does not know he is defeated," the sum so 
 expended. But that eight-hour strike was com- 
 pletely won. When it began the International 
 Typographical Union had 46,000 members ; it has 
 now 54,700. These have gotten back in increased 
 wages since the strike was closed all the sums it 
 cost the union, several times over, besides enjoy- 
 ing the marked reduction of the workday. In most 
 of his leaflets Mr. Kirby, in unmeasured terms,
 
 178 THE WAGE EARNERS 
 
 attacks the National Civic Federation. But that 
 organization gives no indication of being enfeebled 
 thereby. Mr. Kirby in an address took the side 
 of the employers against the shirt-waist strikers, 
 citing with approval the dictum, ' ' The Waist and 
 Dress Manufacturers will never sign any union 
 agreements." But they did, the last one among 
 them. Mr. Kirby seems to regard his favorite 
 assertion relative to the proportion of union wage- 
 workers to all the workers of this country as one 
 of his strongest points, for he prints it at least a 
 score of times in his addresses and leaflets. In his 
 "Goal of the Labor Trust" he puts his figures 
 thus: "The fact that a paltry 3y 2 per cent, of 
 the workingmen of this country, embracing the 
 militant, discordant, and disturbing element of 
 society, should be permitted to dominate over in- 
 dustrial and commercial affairs as they have done, 
 is a disgrace to American business men and to 
 American manhood." But where is the industrial 
 employer who is making believe that he has access 
 to a labor market in which, as Mr. Kirby else- 
 where puts his proposition, "3 l /2 per cent, of the 
 workers" "coerce, intimidate, and brutally perse- 
 cute the other 96y 2 per cent?" Mr. Kirby 's state- 
 ments of this kind typical of the premises on 
 which he makes his usual absurd deductions 
 could not arouse any interest among the employ- 
 ers in the congress we have imagined, practical 
 men as they would be. The bituminous mine oper-
 
 AND THE EMPLOYEES 179 
 
 ators present would know full well that the pro- 
 portion of union miners runs from 60 to 75 per 
 cent, of the whole number; and the employing 
 printers that more than 90 per cent, of the avail- 
 able and competent compositors are union; even 
 the waist and skirt manufacturers, in proper sea- 
 son, are made aware that not even 3y 2 per cent, 
 of their employes are then non-union. Mr. Kirby 
 would in vain point out to his fellow-employer 
 delegates at the congress the millions of domestic 
 servants, farm laborers, office clerks, and unorgan- 
 ized casual workers as playing any part in the in- 
 dustrial market in which they are commonly in- 
 terested in obtaining their skilled employes. On 
 these classes of workers the employers do not 
 bestow a glance when choosing between union and 
 non-union men, each for his particular industry. 
 The momentous fact to industrial employers is 
 that the unions master their respective divisions 
 of the labor market and hold the labor in them on 
 sale collectively. The unionists also speak for 
 the non-unionists, who are unable to voice their 
 own demands, either before the public, the legis- 
 lative bodies, or the employers. 
 
 A minor point in the estimate of delegates to a 
 mixed congress discussing economics, and yet a 
 matter of some consideration among American 
 gentlemen, might be made against Mr. Kirby 
 should a labor delegate quote specimens of the 
 billingsgate he habitually employs in his peppery
 
 180 THE WAGE EAENEES 
 
 "literature"; "Loud-mouthed agitator and 
 preacher of discontent"; "yelpings of such men"; 
 "labor demagogue"; "captured the Civic Feder- 
 ation, body, boots and breeches"; "no organiza- 
 tion of men, not excepting the Ku-Klux-Klan, the 
 Mafia, or the Black Hand Society, has ever pro 
 duced such a record of barbarism"; "fake union 
 promoters"; "sinister threatenings of the labor 
 trust"; "gab-fests"; "a fine bunch of reform- 
 ers"; "a reverend demagogue" (Mr. Stelzle). 
 It was such phraseology that brought from Presi- 
 dent-Emeritus Eliot of Harvard the suggestion, 
 "Your words would carry greater weight with the 
 American people if they were somewhat less 
 intense. ' ' 
 
 Mr. Kirby would be asked to give names at 
 once were he to assert before the congress we 
 have imagined, what he has printed repeatedly in 
 his association's leaflets, that "a man prominent 
 in labor circles," said to him: "A labor union 
 without violence is a joke," and that "a PresL 
 dent of a labor union" said to him: "The only 
 way to make a boss give us what we want is to tie 
 him up in knots and beat hell out of the scabs 
 who work for him." He would also be compelled 
 to face the challenge of Samuel Gompers to pro- 
 duce his proofs should he repeat his quotation 
 attributing to Mr. Gompers the declaration on one 
 occasion that he "is the master of a million 
 minds." Mr. Kirby could also be set right, on
 
 AND THE EMPLOYERS 181 
 
 the spot, were he to say, as in his leaflets, that, 
 "John Mitchell has expressed in the strongest 
 language his contempt for the decisions of the 
 courts and his refusal to obey them," and that 
 "Gompers, Mitchell and Morrison have openly 
 defied the authority" of "the supreme judicial 
 tribunal." As all men may know, the basis of 
 these last assertions is the fact that organized 
 labor has asked for a decision by the highest 
 court on certain decrees of a lower court, which 
 may be in error. But all such talk by Mr. Kirby 
 is recognized as mere campaign perversion and 
 distortion. 
 
 Mr. Kirby 's spirit, the tone of his utterances, 
 his manner in expressing himself, and the plane 
 of his argument, all would fail to awaken favor- 
 able response in a gathering of serious men repre- 
 sentative of the two classes most closely interested 
 in the social problems he has set out to solve in 
 his fiery and dogmatic way. These men could not 
 accept Mr. Kirby 's presentation of the economic 
 question of trade unionism as either correct or 
 adequate. The traditional methods of blind par- 
 tisanship which, chiefly, are to minimize the 
 discussion of principles, to avoid, if possible, 
 agreement between disputants as to the funda- 
 mental points at issue, and with wrath and fury 
 to make the most of any weaknesses which may 
 with even faint color of truth be fastened upon to 
 discredit the other side these are Mr. Kirby 's
 
 182 THE WAGE EAENEBS 
 
 sole methods. Fair-minded and intelligent repre- 
 sentatives of his own class, acting under obliga- 
 tions to their country, indeed, to civilized society, 
 would promptly see through his tricks of putting 
 his adversaries in a false position, discount, his 
 assertions, take his measure as an unfair pleader 
 and a poor prophet and look elsewhere for a 
 worthy champion. Indeed, in the actual course of 
 events, that is what has taken place. 
 
 What, justly and logically, is the order of argu- 
 ment on the question of the trade union? 
 
 Trade unionism is a natural consequence of the 
 social conditions resulting from competition 
 between wage-workers for employment. That is 
 the primary, the basic, the comprehensive fact 
 to be considered by every assemblage, every 
 economic observer, every contestant on either 
 side, when considering the question of organized 
 labor. There is no other equally illuminating 
 initial point for a discussion of the wage problem. 
 That this is true is accepted as an indisputable 
 commonplace wherever men of affairs face men 
 of labor in arranging terms for labor in the 
 market. 
 
 Mr. Kirby's solution of the problem is that 
 there must be no "interference with the natural 
 law of supply and demand." He would have the 
 sellers of labor ever at the mercy of buyers, 
 whereas the trade union would put sellers on an 
 equal footing with the buyers. The depths of
 
 AND THE EMPLOYEES 183 
 
 deprivation and despair to which the mass of 
 wage earners may be carried by unrestricted com- 
 petition among themselves for the boon of work 
 lias been illustrated the world over, times without 
 number. The competing laborers have been tan- 
 talized with a vicious circle of inapplicable or self- 
 destructive palliatives for the persistent fact of 
 general competition and its baneful effects. "Be 
 thrifty" is a useless injunction either to the wage 
 earners out of work or to those whose gains at 
 best fail to secure the standard of living of civil- 
 ized beings. " Be competent. " "Be loyal to your 
 employers." "Be quiet." "Distrust agitators." 
 All such admonitions have everywhere been 
 listened to and followed by well-meaning, confid- 
 ing, upright, industrious laborers, to find at last 
 that while each in certain conditions may have its 
 place in prudent conduct or wise self-guidance, all 
 together as in the case of the industrious, 
 patient, self-denying, but starving sewing women 
 count for little in an overstocked wage market. 
 When is the wage market overstocked! The 
 answer is: Whenever a wage worker 's employer 
 can tell him to be off if dissatisfied, there's another 
 man waiting for his job. That fact makes the 
 employer the master. No individual in the mass 
 of laborers can stand up for his own terms in 
 employment when another, his equal, or anything 
 like it, will accept lower terms. Moreover, the 
 employer himself, whatever his just or generous
 
 184 THE WAGE EAENEES 
 
 inclinations, is made to bend to the law of com- 
 petition in labor when his rival reduces the cost 
 of production through working his employes 
 longer hours than he would exact or for smaller 
 wages than he would wish to pay. 
 
 Who does not know these truths'? Who cannot 
 see that in respect to the actual contact between 
 the buyers and sellers of labor they are all-inclu- 
 sive? Who has not seen them exemplified on a 
 small scale as between two village shops or on a 
 vast scale in mine, or iron-works, or railroad, 
 employing thousands of workmen! Who does 
 not know that they have formed the riddle of 
 economists, the vexation of philanthropists, the 
 problem of problems for statesmen, the torture of 
 toilsome wage workers, the bases for the menace 
 of social revolution? 
 
 Trade unionists every day overcome Mr. 
 Kirby's " natural law of supply and demand" by 
 a method equally natural. They refuse to sell 
 their labor in competition. From the proposition 
 that they shall not do so flow as corollaries the 
 regulations by which the unionists forestall the 
 buyers' methods of over-stocking or undermining 
 the labor market. They justify their rules by the 
 necessity of self-preservation for their union. 
 Their organization is the instrument indispensable 
 in attaining their purpose a welfare of the work- 
 ing classes impossible in a state of competition. 
 
 No congress of employers and employed, if
 
 AND THE EMPLOYERS 185 
 
 honestly setting out to face truth germane to their 
 object, could possibly avoid debating this main 
 principle of the labor question. They could never 
 get away from it unanswered. All other phases 
 of the subject are subsidiary to it. The character 
 of the men in the labor movement, or of the men 
 ambitious to be the champions among organized 
 labor's enemies, is not pertinent to it. In a par- 
 liament studying the labor problem, economics 
 coming separately and first, the enforced com- 
 petition of laborers must be the overshadowing 
 matter for consideration. But Mr. Kirby and his 
 kind ignore it. 
 
 Why Mr. Kirby is conducting a losing fight is 
 plainly to be seen. He has not won with the 
 working classes, for the reason that all his argu- 
 ments, when they come to the testing point, are 
 but arguments for the restoration of competition 
 in the labor market, and that condition is intol- 
 erable because destructive to the workers. He has 
 not won with the employing classes, for several 
 reasons. The wise and experienced among them, 
 equally with the union men, regard the drift of 
 his talk has he any doctrines? as antiquated, 
 impractical, detrimental to society. A large pro- 
 portion of them do not share his feelings of misery 
 and pain when judging of the outcome of unionism. 
 On the contrary, they pronounce for the unions. 
 They would rather go with the union's sympa- 
 thizers the churches, the women's clubs, the law-
 
 186 THE WAGE EAENEBS 
 
 makers, the organizations that strive for indus- 
 trial agreement, all of which, in their turn, 
 Mr. Kirby has rabidly denounced than the way 
 Mr. Kirby has chosen, the way of ceaseless con- 
 flict, hard feeling, hysterical lamentation, and 
 foredoomed defeat.
 
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