ARBITRATION

THE universal cry for arbitration is either dishonest or unwise. For

every evil there are quack remedies galore--especially for every evil

that is irremediable. Of this order of remedies is arbitration, for of

this order of evils is the inadequate wage of manual labor. Since the

beginning of authentic history everything has been tried in the hope

of divorcing poverty and labor, but nothing has parted them. It is not

conceivable that anything ever will; success of arbitration, antecedently

improbable, is demonstrably impossible. Most of the work of the world

is hard, disagreeable work, requiring little intelligence. Most of the

people of the world are unintelligent--unfit to do any other work. If

it were not done by them it would not be done, and it is the basic work.

Withdraw them from it and the whole superstructure would topple and

fall. Yet there is too little of the work, and there are so many

incapable of doing anything else that adequate return is out of the

question. For the laboring _class_ there is no hope of an existence that

is comfortable in comparison with that of the other class; the hope of

an individual laborer lies in the possibility of fitting himself for

higher employment--employment of the head; not manual but cerebral

labor. While selfishness remains the main ingredient of human nature

(and a survey of the centuries accessible to examination shows but a

slow and intermittent decrease) the cerebral workers, being the wiser

and no better, will manage to take the greater profit. In justice it

must be said of them that they extend a warm and sincere invitation to

their ranks, and take "apprentices;" every chance of education that the

other class enjoys is proof of that.

All this is perhaps a trifle abstruse; let us, then, look at arbitration

more nearly; in our time it is, in form at least something new. It

began as "international arbitration," which already, in settling a few

disputes of no great importance, has shown itself a dangerous remedy. In

the necessary negotiation to determine exactly what points to submit to

whom, and how, and where, and when to submit them, and how to carry out

the arbitrator's decision, scores of questions are raised, upon each of

which it is as easy to disagree and fight as upon the original issue.

International arbitration may be defined as the substitution of many

burning questions for a smouldering one; for disputes that have reached

a really acute stage are not submitted. The animosities that it has

kindled have been hotter than those it has quenched.

Industrial arbitration is no better; it is manifestly worse, and any law

enforcing it and enforcing compliance with its decisions, is absurd and

mischievous. "Compulsory arbitration" is not arbitration, the essence

whereof is voluntary submission of differences and voluntary submission

to judgment. If either reference or obedience is enforced the

arbitrators are simply a court with no powers to do anything but apply

the law. Proponents of the fad would do well to consider this: If a

party to a labor dispute is _compelled_ to invoke and obey a decision

of arbitrators that decision must follow strictly the line of law; the

smallest invasion of any constitutional, statutory or common-law right

will enable him to upset the whole judgment No legislative body can

establish a tribunal empowered to make and enforce illegal or extra

legal decisions; for making and enforcing legal ones the tribunals that

we already have are sufficient This talk of "compulsory arbitration"

is the maddest nonsense that the industrial situation has yet evolved.

Doubtless it is sent upon us for our sins; but had we not already a

plague of inveracity?

Arbitration of labor disputes means compromise with the unions. It can,

in this country, mean nothing else, for the law would not survive a

half-dozen failures to concede some part of their demands, however

reasonless. By repeated strikes they would eventually get all their

original demand and as much more as on second thought they might choose

to ask for. Each concession would be, as it is now, followed by a new

demand, and the first arbitrators might as well allow them all that they

demand and all that they mean to demand hereafter.

Would not employers be equally unscrupulous. They would not. They could

not afford the disturbance, the stoppage of the business, the risk

of unfair decisions in a country where it is "popular" to favor and

encourage, not the just, but the poor. The labor leaders have nothing to

lose, not even their jobs, for their work is labor leading. Their dupes,

by the way, would be dupes no longer, for with enforced arbitration the

game of "follow my leader" would pay until there should be nothing to

follow him to but empty treasuries of dead industries in an extinct

civilization. If there must be enforced arbitration it should at least

not apply to that sum of all impudent rascalities, the "sympathetic

strike."

As to the men who have set up the monstrous claim asserted by the

"sympathetic strike," I shall refer to the affair of 1904. If it was

creditable in them to feel so much concern about a few hundred aliens in

Illinois, how about the grievances of the whole body of their countrymen

in California? When their employers, who they confess were good to them,

were plundering the Californians, they did not strike, sympathetically

nor otherwise. Year after year the railway companies picked the pockets

of the Californians; corrupted their courts and legislatures; laid its

Briarean hands in exaction upon every industry and interest; filled the

land with lies and false reasoning; threw honest men into prisons and

locked the gates of them against thieves and assassins; by open defiance

of the tax collector denied to children of the poor the advantages of

education--did all this and more, and these honest working men stood

loyally by it, sharing in wages its dishonest gains, receivers, in one

sense, of stolen goods. The groans of their neighbors were nothing to

them; even the wrongs of themselves, their wives and their children did

not stir them to revolt. On every breeze that blew, this great chorus

of cries and curses was borne past their ears unheeded. Why did they not

strike then? Where then were their fiery altruists and storm-petrels

of industrial disorder? No!--the ingenious gods who have invented the

Debses and Gomperses, and humorously branded them with names that would

make a cat laugh, have never put it into their cold selfish hearts to

order out their misguided followers to redress a public wrong, but only

to inflict one--to avenge a personal humiliation, gratify an appetite

for notoriety, slake a thirst for the intoxicating cup of power, or

punish the crime of prosperity.

It is a practical, an illogical, a turbulent time, yes; it always

is. The age of Jesus Christ was a practical age, yet Jesus Christ was

sweetly impractical. In an illogical period Socrates reasoned clearly,

and logically died for it. Nero's time was a time of turbulence, yet

Seneca's mind was not disturbed, nor his conscience perverted. Compare

their fame with the everlasting infamy that time has fixed upon the

names of the Jack Cades, the Robespierres, the Tomaso Nielos--guides and

gods of the "fierce democracies" which rise with a sickening periodicity

to defile the page of history with a quickly fading mark of blood and

fire, their own awful example their sole contribution to the good of

mankind. To be a child of your time, imbued with its spirit and endowed

with its aims--that is to petition Posterity for a niche in the Temple

of Shame.

No strike of any prominence ever takes place in this country without

the concomitants of violence and destruction of property, and usually

murder. These cheerful incidents one who does not personally suffer them

can endure with considerable fortitude, but the sniveling, hypocritical

condemnation of them by the press that has instigated them and the

strikers who have planned and executed them, and who invariably ascribe

them to those whom they most injure; the solemn offers of the leaders to

assist in protecting the imperiled property and avenging the dead, while

openly employing counsel for every incendiary and assassin arrested in

spite of them--these are pretty hard to bear. A strike means (for it

includes as its main method) violence, lawlessness, destruction of the

property of others than the strikers, riot and if necessary bloodshed.

Even when the strikers themselves have no hand in these crimes they are

morally liable for the foreknown consequences of their act. Nay, they

are morally liable for _all the_ consequences--all the inconveniences

and losses to the community, all the sufferings of the poor entailed by

interruptions of trade, all the privations of other workingmen whom

a selfish attention to their own supposed advantage throws out of the

closed industries. They are liable in morals and should be made so in

law--only that strikes are needless. It is not worth while to create a

multitude of complex criminal responsibilities for acts which can easily

be prevented by a single and simple one. How?

First, I should like to point out that we are hearing a deal too much

about a man's inalienable right to work or play, at his own sovereign

will. In so far as that means--and it is always used to mean--his right

to quit any kind of work at any moment, without notice and regardless of

consequences to others, it is false; there is no such moral right, and

the law should have at least a speaking acquaintance with morality. What

is mischievous should be illegal. The various interests of civilization

are so complex, delicate, intertangled and interdependent that no man,

and no set of men, should have power to throw the entire scheme into

confusion and disorder for pro-motion of a trumpery principle or a class

advantage. In dealing with corporations we recognize that. If for any

selfish purpose the trade union of railway managers had done what their

sacred brakemen and divine firemen did--had decreed that "no wheel

should turn," until Mr. Pullman's men should return to work--they would

have found themselves all in jail the second day. _Their_ right to quit

work was not conceded: they lacked that authenticating credential of

moral and legal irresponsibility, an indurated palm. In a small lockout

affecting a mill or two the offender finds a half-hearted support in

_the_ law if he is willing to pay enough deputy sheriffs; but even

then he is mounted by the hobnailed populace, at its back the daily

newspapers, clamoring and spitting like cats. But let the manager of a

great railway discharge all its men without warning and "kill" its own

engines! Then see what you will see. To commit a wrong so gigantic with

impunity a man must wear overalls.

How prevent anybody from committing it? How break up this _régime_ of

strikes and boycotts and lockouts, more disastrous to others than to

those at whom the blows are aimed--than to those, even, who deliver

them. How make all those concerned in the management and operation

of great industries, about which have grown up tangles of related and

dependent interests, conduct them with some regard to the welfare of

others? Before committing ourselves to the dubious and irretraceable

course of "Government ownership," or to the infectious expedient of a

"pension system," is there anything of promise yet untried?--anything of

superior simplicity and easier application? I think so. Make a breach

of labor contract by either party to it a criminal offense punishable by

imprisonment "Fine or imprisonment" will not do--the employee, unable to

pay the fine, would commonly go to jail, the employer seldom. That would

not be fair.

The purpose of such a law is apparent: Labor contracts would then be

drawn for a certain time, securing both employer and employee and

(which is more important) helpless persons in related and dependent

industries--the whole public, in fact--against sudden and disastrous

action by either "capital" or "labor" for accomplishment of a purely

selfish or frankly impudent end. A strike or lockout compelled to

announce itself thirty days in advance would be innocuous to the public,

whilst securing to the party of initiation all the advantages that

anybody professes to want--all but the advantage of ruining others and

of successfully defying the laws.

Under the present _régime_ labor contracts are useless; either party can

violate them with impunity. They offer redress only through a civil suit

for damages, and the employee commonly has nothing with which to

conduct an action or satisfy a judgment. The consequence is seen in

the incessant and increasing industrial disturbances, with their

ever-attendant crimes against property, life and liberty--disturbances

which by driving capital to investments in which it needs employ no

labor, do more than all the other causes so glibly enumerated by every

newspaper and politician, though by no two alike, to bring about the

"hard times"--which in their turn cause further and worse disturbances.