MILITARISM AND INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATION
American cities have been slow to consider industrial questions as
germane to government, and the Federal authorities have persistently
treated the millions of immigrants who arrive every year upon a
political theory and method adopted a century ago, because both of
them ignore the fact that the organization of industry has completed
a revolution during that period. The gigantic task of standardizing
the successive nations of immigrants throughout the country has fallen
upon workmen because they alone cannot ignore the actual industrial
situation. To thousands of workmen the immigration problem is a
question of holding a job against a constantly lowering standard of
living, and to withstand this stream of “raw labor” means to them the
maintenance of industrial efficiency and of life itself. Workingmen
are engaged in a desperate struggle to maintain a standard of wages
against the constant arrival of unskilled immigrants at the rate of
three-quarters of a million a year, at the very period when the
elaboration of machinery permits the largest use of unskilled men.
It may be owing to the fact that the workingman is brought into direct
contact with the situation as a desperate problem of a living wage
against starvation; it may be that wisdom is at her old trick of
residing in the hearts of the simple, or that this new idealism, which
is that of a reasonable life and labor, must, from the very nature of
things, proceed from those who labor; or possibly it may be because
amelioration arises whence it is so sorely needed; but certainly it is
true, that, while the rest of the country talks of assimilation as if
it were a huge digestive apparatus, the man with whom the immigrant
has come most sharply into competition, has been forced into fraternal
relations with him.
Curiously enough, however, as soon as the immigrant situation is
frankly regarded as an industrial one, as these men must regard it,
the political aspects of the industrial situation is revealed in the
fact that trade organizations which openly concern themselves with
the immigration problem on its industrial side, quickly take on the
paraphernalia and machinery which have hitherto associated themselves
only with governmental life and control. The trades unions have worked
out all over again local autonomy, with central councils and national
representative bodies and the use of the referendum vote; and they also
exhibit many of the features of political corruption and manipulation.
The first real lesson in self-government to many immigrants has come
through the organization of labor unions, and it could come in no
other way, for the union alone has appealed to their necessities. One
sees the first indication of an idealism arising out of these primal
necessities, and at moments one dares to hope that it may be sturdy
enough and sufficiently founded upon experience to make some impression
upon the tremendous immigration situation.
The movements embodying a new idealism have traditionally sought refuge
with those who are near to starvation. Although the spiritual struggle
is associated with the solitary garret of the impassioned dreamer,
it may be that the idealism fitted to our industrial democracy will
be evolved in crowded sewer ditches and in noisy factories. It may
be contended that this remarkable coming together of the workingman
and the immigrant has been the result of an economic pressure, and is
without merit or idealism, and that the trades union record on Chinese
exclusion and negro discrimination has been damaging. Be that as it
may, this assimilation between the immigrant and the workingman has
exhibited amazing strength, which may be illustrated from two careful
studies made in two different parts of the country.
To quote first from a study made from the University of Wisconsin
of the stock yards strike which took place in Chicago in 1904[6]:
“Perhaps the fact of the greatest social significance is that this
was not merely a strike of skilled labor for the unskilled, but was
a strike of Americanized Irish, Germans, and Bohemians, in behalf of
Slovaks, Poles, and Lithuanians.... This substitution of races in the
stock yards has been a continuing process for twenty years. The older
nationalities have already disappeared from the unskilled occupations,
and the substitution of races has evidently run along the line of
lower standard of living. The latest arrivals, the Lithuanians and
Slovaks, are probably the most oppressed of the peasants of Europe.”
The visitors who attended the crowded meetings of the strikers during
the summer of 1904 and heard the same address successively translated
by interpreters into six or eight languages, who saw the respect
shown to the most uncouth of the speakers by the skilled American men
representing a distinctly superior standard of life and thought, could
never doubt the power of the labor organizations for amalgamation,
whatever opinion they might hold concerning their other values. This
may be said in spite of the fact that great industrial disturbances
have arisen from the under-cutting of wages by the lowering of racial
standard. Certainly the most notable of these have taken place in those
industries and at those places in which the importation of immigrants
has been deliberately fostered as a wage-lowering weapon; and even in
those disturbances and under the shock and strain of a long strike,
disintegration did not come along the line of race cleavage.
The other study was made in the anthracite coal fields, and was
undertaken from the University of Pennsylvania[7]: “The United
Mine Workers of America is taking men of a score of nationalities,
English-speaking and Slav, men of widely different creeds, languages,
and customs, and of varying powers of industrial competition, and is
welding them into an industrial brotherhood, each part of which can
at least understand of the others that they are working for one great
and common end. This bond of unionism is stronger than one can readily
imagine who has not seen its mysterious workings or who has not been
a victim of its members’ newly found enthusiasm. It is to-day the
strongest tie that can bind together 147,000 mine workers and the
thousands dependent upon them. It is more than religion, more than the
social ties which hold together members of the same community.”
It was during a remarkable struggle on the part of this amalgamation
of men from all countries, that the United States government, in spite
of itself, was driven to take a hand in an industrial situation,
owing to the long strain and the intolerable suffering entailed upon
the whole country. Even then, however, the Government endeavored to
confine its investigation to the mere commercial questions of tonnage
and freight rates with their political implications, and it was only
when an aroused and moralized public opinion insisted upon it that
the national commission was driven to consider the human aspects of
the case. Because of this public opinion, columns of newspapers and
days of investigation were given to the discussion of the deeds of
violence, discussions having nothing to do with the original demands
of the strikers and entering only into the value set upon human life
by each of the contesting parties. Did the union encourage violence
against non-union men, or did it really do everything to suppress
violence? Did it live up to its creed which was to maintain a standard
of living that families might be properly housed and protected from
debilitating toil and disease, and that children might be nurtured into
American citizenship? Did the operators protect their men as far as
possible from mine damp, from length of hours proven by experience to
be exhausting? Did they pay a wage to the mine laborer sufficient to
allow him to send his children to school? Questions such as these, a
study of the human problem, invaded the commission day after day during
the sitting. One felt for the moment the first wave of a rising tide
of humanitarianism, until the normal ideals of the laborer to secure
food and shelter for his family, a security for his own old age, and
a larger opportunity for his children became the ideals of democratic
government.
Let us imagine the result if, during the long anthracite strike, the
humane instinct had so over-mastered the minds of the strikers, and so
exalted their passions that they had lifted a hand against no man, even
though he seemed to be endangering their cause before their eyes. Such
a result might have come about, partly because the destruction of life
had become abhorrent and impossible to them engaged as they were in
the endeavor to raise life in the coal regions to a higher level, and
partly because they would have scorned to destroy an enemy in order
to achieve a mere negative result when the power lay within themselves
to convert him into an ally, when they might have made him a source
of help and power, a comrade of the same undertaking. If the element
of battle, of mere self-seeking, could be eliminated from strikes,
if they could remain a sheer uprising of the oppressed and underpaid
to a self-conscious recognition of their condition, so unified, so
irresistible as to sweep all the needy within its flood, we should have
a tide rising, not to destruction, but to beneficence. Let us imagine
the state of public feeling if there had been absolutely no act of
violence traceable, directly or indirectly, to the union miners; if
during the long months of the strike the great body of miners could
have added the sanction of sustained conduct to their creed. Public
sympathy would have led to an understanding of the need these miners
were trying to meet, and the American nation itself might have been
ready to ask for legislation concerning the minimum wage, and for
protection to life and limb, equal to the legislation of New Zealand
or Germany. But because the element of warfare unhappily did exist,
government got back to its old business of repression.
To preserve law and order is obviously the function of government
everywhere; and yet in our complicated modern society, especially as
thousands of varied peoples are crowded into cities, it is not always
easy to see just where real social order lies. The officials themselves
are sometimes perplexed, and at other times deliberately use the
devices of government for their own ends. We may take once more in
illustration the great strike in the Chicago stock-yards. The immediate
object of the strike was the protection of the wages of the unskilled
men from a cut of one cent per hour, although, of course, the unions
of skilled men felt that this first invasion of the wages increased
through the efforts of the union, would be but the entering wedge of an
attempt to cut wages in all the trades represented in the stock-yards.
Owing to the refusal on the part of the unions to accept arbitration
offered by the packers at an embarrassing moment, and because of the
failure of the unions to carry out the terms of a contract, the strike
in its early stages completely lost the sympathy of that large part of
the public dominated by ideals of business honor and fair dealing. It
lost, too, the sympathy of that growing body of organized labor which
is steadily advancing in a regard for the validity of the contract, and
is faithfully cherishing the hope that in time the trades unions may
universally attain an accredited business standing.
The leaders after the first ten days were, therefore, forced to
make the most of the purely human appeal which lay in the situation
itself, that 30,000 men, including the allied trades, were losing
weeks of wages, with a possible chance of the destruction of their
unions on behalf of the unskilled who were the newly arrived Poles
and Lithuanians, unable as yet to look out for themselves. Owing
to the irregular and limited hours of work--a condition quite like
that prevailing on the London docks before the great strike of the
dockers--the weekly wage of these unskilled men was exceptionally low,
and the plea of the strikers was based upon the duty of the strong
to the weak. A chivalric call was issued that the standard of life
might be raised to that designated as American, and that this mass of
unskilled men might secure an education for their children. Of course
no appeal could have been so strong as this purely human one which
united for weeks thousands of men of a score of nationalities into that
solidarity which only comes through a self-sacrificing devotion to an
absorbing cause.
The strike involved much suffering and many unforeseen complications.
At the end of eight weeks the union leaders made the best terms
possible. Through these terms the skilled workers were guaranteed
against a reduction in wages, but no provision was made for the
unskilled in whose behalf the strike had at first been undertaken.
Although the hard-pressed leaders were willing to make this concession,
the politicians in the meanwhile had seen the great value of the human
sentiment which bases its appeal on the need of the under dog and which
had successfully united this mass of workingmen into a new comradeship
with the immigrants. The appeal was infinitely more valuable than any
merely political cry, and the fact that the final terms of settlement
were submitted to a referendum vote at once gave the local politicians
a chance to avail themselves of this big, loosely defined sympathy.
They did avail themselves of this in so dramatic a manner that they
almost succeeded, solely upon that appeal, in taking the strike out of
the hands of the legitimate officers and placing it in their own hands
for their own political ends.
The situation was a typical one, exemplifying the real aim of popular
government with its concern for primitive needs, forced to seek
expression outside of the organized channels of government. If the
militia could have been called in, government would have been placed
even more dramatically in the position of the oppressor of popular
self-government. The phenomenal good order, the comparative lack of
violence on the part of the striking workmen, gave no chance for the
bringing in of the militia. The city politician was of course very much
disappointed, for it would have afforded him an opening to put the
odium of this traditional opposition of government, an opposition which
has always been most dramatically embodied in the soldier, upon the
political party dominating the State but not the city. It would have
given the city politician an excellent opportunity to show the concern
of himself and his party for the real people, as over against the
attitude of the party dominating the State. But because the militia was
not called, his scheme failed, and the legitimate strike leaders who,
although they passed through much tribulation because of this political
interference, did not eventually lose control.
The situation in the Chicago stock-yards also afforded an excellent
epitome of the fact that government so often finds itself, not only in
opposition to the expressed will of the people making the demand at the
moment, but apparently against the best instincts of the mass of the
citizens as a whole.
For years the city administration had so protected the property
interests invested in the stock-yards, that none of the sanitary
ordinances had ever been properly enforced. The sickening stench and
the scum on the branch of the river known as Bubbly Creek at times
made that section of the city unendurable. The smoke ordinances were
openly ignored, nor did the meat inspector ever seriously interfere
with business, being quite willing to have meat sold in Chicago which
had not passed the inspection for foreign markets. The water steals,
too, for which the stock-yards were at one time notorious, must have
been more or less known to certain officials. But all this merely
corrupted a limited number of inspectors, and although their corruption
was complete and involved entire administrations, it did not actually
touch large numbers of persons. During the strike of 1904, however,
1,200 policemen, actual men possessed of human sensibilities, were
called upon to patrol the yards inside and out. There is no doubt
that the police inspector of the district thoroughly represented the
alliance of the City Hall with the business interests, that he did
not mean to discover anything which was derogatory to the packers nor
to embarrass them in any way during the conduct of the strike. Had
these 1,200 men, more than a regiment in numbers, been a regiment in
training and tradition, they, too, would have seen nothing, and would
have been content at heart, as they were obliged to be in conduct, to
have arrested the strikers on the slightest provocation, and to have
protected the strike-breakers.
But they were, in point of fact, called upon to face a very peculiar
situation, because of the type of men and women who formed the bulk
of the strike-breakers, and because, during the first weeks of the
strike, these men and women were kept constantly inside the yards,
day and night. In order to hold them at all, discipline outside of
working hours was thoroughly relaxed, and the policemen in charge
of the yards, while there ostensibly to enforce law and order, were
obliged every night to connive at prize-fighting, at open gambling, and
at prostitution. They were there, not to enforce law and order as it
defines itself in the minds of the bulk of healthy-minded citizens, but
only to keep the strikers from molesting the non-union workers. This
was certainly commendable, but, after all, only part of their real duty.
Because they were normal men living in the midst of normal life and
not in barracks, they were shocked by the law-breaking which they were
ordered to protect, and much drawn in sympathy to the strikers whom
they were supposed to regard as public enemies. An investigator who
interviewed one hundred policemen found only one who did not frankly
extol the virtues of the strikers as over against the shocking vices of
the imported men. This, of course, was an extreme case brought about by
the unusual and peculiar type of the imported strike-breakers. There
is, however, trustworthy evidence incorporated in affidavits which were
at the time submitted to the Mayor of Chicago, concerning the unlawful
conduct of the men who were under the protection of the city police.
It was hard for a patriot not to feel jealous of the union and of the
enthusiasm of those newly emigrated citizens. They poured out their
gratitude and affection upon this first big friendly force which had
offered them help in their desperate struggle in the New World. This
devotion, this comradeship, and this fine _esprit de corps_ should have
been won by the Government itself from these newly arrived, scared,
and untrained citizens. The union was that which had concerned itself
with the real struggle for life, shelter, a chance to work, and bread
for their children. It had come to them in a language they could
understand, through men with interests akin to their own, and it gave
them both their first chance to express themselves through a democratic
vote, and an opportunity to register by a ballot their real opinion
upon a very important matter.
They used the referendum votes, the latest and perhaps the most clever
device of democratic government, and yet they used it to decide a
question which the government supposed to be quite outside its realm.
When they left the old country, the government of America held their
deepest hopes, and represented that which they believed would obtain
for them the fullness of life denied them in the lands of oppressive
governments. It is a curious commentary on the fact that we have not
yet attained self-government when the real and legitimate objects of
men’s desires must still be incorporated in those voluntary groups for
which the government, when it does its best, can only afford protection
from interference. As the religious revivalist looks with longing upon
the fervor of a single-tax meeting, as the orthodox Jew sees his son
stay away from Yom Kippur service in order to pour all his religious
fervor, his precious zeal for righteousness which has been gathered
through the centuries, into the Socialist Labor Party--so a patriot
finds himself exclaiming to the immigrant, like another Andrea del
Sarto to his wife, “Oh, but what do they--what do they to please you
more?”
The stock-yards strike afforded an example of the national appeal
subordinated to an appeal made in the name of labor. During the early
stages of the strike it was discovered that newly arrived Macedonians
were taking many of the places vacated by the strikers. One of the
most touching scenes during the strike was the groups of Macedonians
who would sit together in the twilight playing on primitive pipes
singularly like the one which is associated with the great god Pan. The
slender song would carry amazingly in the smoke-bedimmed air, affecting
the spectator with a curious sense of incongruity.
When the organized labor of Chicago discovered that the strikers’
places were taken by Greeks, the unions threatened, unless the Greeks
were “called off,” to boycott the Greek fruit-dealers all over the
city, who with their street stands are singularly dependent upon
the patronage of workingmen. The fact that the strike-breakers were
Macedonians, as it happened, was an additional advantage at the
moment; for the Greeks have been much concerned to make it clear that
Macedonia belongs to Greece, and have hotly resented the efforts of
Bulgaria to establish a protectorate over the country. They therefore
responded at once to this acknowledgment of their claim, and, partly to
show that the Macedonians and Greeks were countrymen, partly because
they resented the implication that a Greek could act a cowardly part
in any situation, and also, doubtless, because they were merchants
threatened with loss of trade, they made superhuman efforts to clear
the yards of Macedonians. This they accomplished in a remarkably short
time. So reckless were they in the methods they used that it was
common gossip throughout the Greek colony that strike-breakers would
be refused the comforts of religion by the Greek priests in the city,
although doubtless this rumor was unfounded. This utter recklessness
of method, this determination to deter strike-breaking at any cost,
is, of course, a revelation of the war element which is an essential
part of any strike. The appeal to “loyalty” is the nearest approach to
a moral appeal which can be safely made in the midst of a war of any
sort. During a long strike one result of the non-moral appeal is to
confuse the situation so that it becomes utterly impossible to tell how
many men refuse to become strike-breakers because they are terrorized
and how many stay away from conviction. The non-moral appeal not only
sins against the principles advocated by trades unionists, but it
contradicts itself and brings great confusion into the situation, as
war ideals always do when thrust into a peaceful society. It was, for
instance, quite impossible to tell whether the lowering in the type
of man who was willing to take a striker’s place, so that at last
only very ignorant men from the southern plantations could be induced
to work, was due to a species of class consciousness, a response to
the demand felt so strongly by labor men--“Thou shalt not take thy
neighbor’s job”--or whether workingmen are becoming so afraid to take
striker’s places that these places must at last be given to men who
have come from such remote parts of the country that “they do not know
enough to be afraid.” The unions themselves could take no accounting of
their real strength because of the terrorism which had become thrust
into the situation. And yet all that the stock-yards workers were
demanding through this long and disastrous strike, was the minimum
wage which has been guaranteed by conservative governments elsewhere,
and is recognized even in the United States in much governmental work
under the contracts of civil or Federal authorities. So timid are
American cities, however, in dealing with this perfectly reasonable
subject of wages in its relation to municipal employees, that when they
do prescribe a minimum wage for city contract work, they allow it to
fall into the hands of the petty politician and to become part of a
political game, making no effort to give it a dignified treatment in
relation to the cost of living and to the margin of leisure. In this
the English cities have anticipated us, both as to time and legitimate
procedure. Have Americans formed a sort of “imperialism of virtue,”
holding on to preconceived ideals of government and insisting that
they must fit all the people who come to our shores, even though they
crush the most promising bits of self-expression in the process? Is the
American attitude toward self-government like that of the Anglo-Saxon
towards civilization, save that he goes forth to rule all the nations
of the earth by one pattern, while we remain at home and bid them to
rule themselves by one pattern? We firmly decline not only to consider
matters of industry and commerce as germane to government, but we also
decline to bring men together upon that most natural and inevitable of
all foundations, their industrial needs.
The government which refuses to consider matters of this sort, or at
least waits until their neglect becomes a scandal before it consents to
deal with them, as a result of this caution forces the most patriotic
citizens to ignore the Government and to embody their scruples and
hopes of progress in voluntary organizations. To be afraid to extend
the functions of government may be to lose what we have. A government
has always received feeble support from its constituents as soon as
its demands appeared childish or remote. Citizens inevitably neglect
or abandon civic duty, when their government no longer embodies their
genuine desires. It is useless to hypnotize ourselves by unreal talk of
colonial ideas, and of our patriotic duty towards immigrants as though
the situation was one demanding the passage of a set of resolutions
when we fail to realize that the nation can be saved only by patriots
who are possessed of a contemporaneous knowledge.
As industrial relations imply peaceful relations, under a certain
rough reorganization and reconstruction of governmental functions
which the association of labor presents, it is inevitable that in
its international aspects the association should formally advocate
universal peace. Workmen have always realized, however feebly and
vaguely they may have expressed it, that it is they who in all ages
have borne the heaviest burden of privation and suffering imposed on
the world by the military spirit.
The first international organization founded, not to promote a
colorless peace, but to advance and develop the common life of all
nations, was founded in London in 1864 by workingmen, and was called
simply “The International Association of Workingmen.” They recognized
that a supreme interest raised all workingmen above the prejudice of
race, and united them by wider and deeper principles than those by
which they were separated into nations. They hoped that as religion,
science, art, had become international, so now at last labor might take
its place as an international interest. A few years later, at its third
congress in Brussels they recommended that in case of war a universal
strike be declared.
There is a growing conviction among workingmen of all countries
that, whatever may be accomplished by a national war, however moral
the supposed aim of such a war, there is one inevitable result--an
increased standing army, the soldiers of which are non-producers, and
must be fed by the workers.
The surprising growth of Socialism, at the moment, is due largely to
the fact that it is the only political party upon an international
basis, and also that it frankly ventures its future upon a better
industrial organization. These two aspects have had much more to do
with its hold in industrial neighborhoods than have its philosophic
tenets or the impassioned appeal of its propagandists. The Socialists
are making almost the sole attempt to preach a morality sufficiently
all-embracing and international to keep pace with even that material
internationalism which has standarized the threads of screws and the
size of bolts, so that machines may become interchangeable from one
country to another. It is the same sort of internationalism which
Mazzini preached when distracted Italy was making her desperate
struggle for a unified and national life. He issued his remarkable
address to her workingmen and solemnly told them that the life of the
nation could not be made secure until her patriots were ready to die
for human issues. He saw, earlier than most men, that the desire to
be at unity with all human beings, to claim the sense of a universal
affection is a force not to be ignored. He believed that it might
even then be strong enough to devour the flimsy stuff called national
honor, glory, and prestige, which incite to war and induce workingmen
to trample over each other’s fields and to destroy the results of each
other’s labor.
Workingmen dream of an industrialism which shall be the handmaid of
a commerce ministering to an increased power of consumption among
the producers of the world, binding them together in a genuine
internationalism. Existing commerce has long ago reached its
international stage, but it has been the result of business aggression
and constantly appeals for military defense and for the forcing of new
markets. In so far as commerce has rested upon the successful capture
of the resources of the workers, it has been a relic of the mediaeval
baron issuing forth to seize the merchants’ boats as they passed his
castle on the Rhine. It has logically lent itself to warfare, and is,
indeed, the modern representative of conquest. As its prototype rested
upon slavery and vassalage, so this commerce is founded upon a contempt
for the worker and believes that he can live on low wages. It assumes
that his legitimate wants are the animal ones comprising merely food
and shelter and the cost of replacement. The industrialism of which
this commerce is a part, exhibits this same contemptuous attitude, but
it is more easily extended to immigrants than to any other sort of
workmen because they seem further away from a common standard of life.
This attitude toward the immigrant simply illustrates once more that it
is around the deeply significant idea of the standard of life that our
industrial problems of to-day centre. The desire for a higher standard
of living in reality forms the base of all the forward movements of
the working class. “The significance of the standard of life lies not
so much in the fact that for each of us it is different, as that for
all of us it is progressive,”[8] constantly invading new realms. To
imagine that for immigrants it is merely a question of tin cups and
plates stored in a bunk _versus_ a white cloth and a cottage table,
and that all goes well if sewing-machines and cottage-organs reach
the first generation of immigrants, and fashionable dressmakers and
pianos the second, is of course a most untutored interpretation. Until
the standard of life is apprehended in its real significance and made
the crux of the immigrant situation, as recent economists are making
the power of consumption the test of a nation’s prosperity, we shall
continue to ignore the most obvious and natural basis for understanding
and mutual citizenship.
Because workmen have been forced to consider this standard of living
in regard to immigrants as well as themselves, they have made genuine
efforts toward amalgamation. This is perhaps easily explained, for,
after all, the man in this country who realizes human equality is not
he who repeats the formula of the eighteenth century, but he who has
learned that the “idea of equality is an outgrowth of man’s primary
relations with nature. Birth, growth, nutrition, reproduction, death,
are the great levelers that remind us of the essential equality of
human life. It is with the guarantee of equal opportunities to play
our parts well in these primary processes that government is chiefly
concerned”[9] and not merely with the repression of the vicious, nor
with guarding the rights of property. All that devotion of the trades
union for the real issues and trials of life could, of course, easily
be turned into a passion for self-government and for the development
of the national life if we were really democratic from the modern
evolutionary standpoint, and held our town-meetings upon the topics of
vital concern.
So long, however, as the Government declines to concern itself with
these deeper issues involved in the standard of life and the industrial
status of thousands of its citizens, we must lose it.
If progress were inaugurated by those members of the community who
possess the widest knowledge and superior moral insight, then social
amelioration might be brought about without the bungling and mistakes
which so distress us all. But, over and over again, salutary changes
are projected and carried through by men of even less than the average
ethical development, because their positions in life have brought them
in contact with the ills of existing arrangements. To quote from John
Morley: “In matters of social improvement, the most common reason
why one hits upon a point of progress and not another, is that one
happens to be more directly touched than the other by the unimproved
practice.”[10] Perhaps this is a sufficient explanation of the fact
that untrained workmen are entrusted with the difficult task of
industrial amelioration and adjustment, while the rest of the community
often seems ignorant of the truth that institutions which do not march
with the extension of human needs and relationships are dead, and may
easily become a deterrent to social progress. Unless we subordinate
class interests and class feeling to a broader conception of social
progress, unless we take pains to come in contact with the surging and
diverse peoples who make up the nation, we cannot hope to attain a sane
social development. We need rigid enforcement of the existing laws,
while at the same time, we frankly admit the inadequacy of these laws,
and work without stint for progressive regulations better fitted to
the newer issues among which our lot is cast; for, unless the growing
conscience is successfully embodied in legal enactment, men lose the
habit of turning to the law for guidance and redress.
I recall, in illustration of this, an instance which took place fifteen
years ago. I had newly come to Chicago, fresh from the country, and had
little idea of the social and industrial conditions in which I found
myself on Halsted Street, when a dozen girls came from a neighboring
factory with a grievance in regard to their wages. The affair could
hardly have been called a labor difficulty. The girls had never heard
of a trades union, and were totally unaccustomed to acting together.
It was more in the nature of a “scrap” between themselves and their
foreman. In the effort toward adjustment, there remains vividly in my
memory a conversation I had with a leading judge who arbitrated the
difficulty. He expressed his belief in the capacity of the common law
to meet all legitimate labor difficulties as they arise. He trusted
its remarkable adaptability to changing conditions under the decisions
of wise and progressive judges. He contended, however, that, in order
to adjust it to our industrial affairs, it must be interpreted, not so
much in relation to precedents established under a judicial order which
belongs to the past, but in reference to that newer sense of justice
which this generation is seeking to embody in industrial relations. He
foresaw something of the stress and storm of the industrial conflicts
which have occurred in Chicago since then, and he expressed the hope
that the Bench of Cook County might seize the opportunity, in this
new and difficult situation, of dealing with labor difficulties in a
judicial spirit.
What a difference it would have made in the history of Chicago during
the last fifteen years if more men had been possessed of this temper
and wisdom, and had refused to countenance the use of force. If more
men had been able to see the situation through a fresher medium; to
apprehend that the old legal enactments were too individualistic and
narrow; that a difference in degree may make a difference in kind;
if they had realized that they were the first generation of American
jurists who had to deal with a situation made novel by the fact that
it was brought about by the coming together of two millions of people
largely on an industrial basis!
Our constitutions were constructed by the advanced men of the
eighteenth century, who had studied the works of the most radical
thinkers of that century. Radicalism then meant a more democratic
political organization, and in its defence, they fearlessly quoted the
Greek city and the Roman Forum. But we have come to admit that our
present difficulties are connected with our industrial organization
and with the lack of connection between that organization and our
inherited democratic form of government. If self-government were
to be inaugurated by the advanced men of the present moment, they
would make a most careful research into those early organizations of
village communities, folk-motes, and mirs, those primary cells of
both industrial and political organizations, where the people knew
no difference between the two, but, quite simply, met to consider in
common discussion all that concerned their common life. They would
investigate the crafts, guilds, and artels, which combine government
with daily occupations, as did the self-governing university and free
town. They would seek for the connection between the liberty-loving
mediaeval city and its free creative architecture, that art which
combines the greatest variety of artists and artisans. They would
not altogether ignore the “compulsion of origins” and the fact that
our present civilization is most emphatically an industrial one. In
Germany, when the Social Democratic party first vigorously asserted the
economic basis of society and laid the emphasis upon its industrial
aspect, the Government itself, in a series of legislative measures,
designated “the Socialism of Bismarck,” found itself dealing directly
with industry, through a sheer effort to give itself a touch of
reality. The Government of Russia, in the first year of the Japanese
War, made an effort to relieve the needs of the people. The bureaucracy
itself organized the workmen into a species of trades unions through
which the Russian Government promised to protect the proletarian from
the aggressions of capital. The entire incident was suggestive of the
protection afforded by the central State to the slowly emancipated
serfs of central Europe when the barons, reluctant to give up their
rights and privileges, so unjustly oppressed them.
Shall a democracy be slower than these old Powers to protect its
humblest citizen, and shall it see them slowly deteriorating because,
according to democratic theory, they do not need protection?
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Trade Unionism and Labor Problems, by John R. Commons, page 248.
[7] “The Slav Invasion,” by F. J. Warne, pages 118, 119.
[8] The Standard of Life, by Mrs. Bernard Bosanquet, page 4.
[9] The American City. Delos F. Wilcox, page 200.
[10] Compromise, John Morley, page 213.