GROUP MORALITY IN THE LABOR MOVEMENT
This generation is constantly confronted by radical industrial changes,
from which the community as a whole profits, but which must inevitably
bring difficulty of adjustment and disaster to men of certain trades.
In all fairness, these difficulties should be distributed and should
not be allowed to fall completely upon the group of working-people
whose labor is displaced as a result of the changes and who are obliged
to learn anew their method of work and mode of life.
If the great industrial changes could be considered as belonging
to the community as a whole and could be reasonably dealt with,
the situation would then be difficult enough, but it is enormously
complicated by the fact that society has become divided into camps in
relation to the industrial system and that many times the factions
break out into active hostility. These two camps inevitably develop
group morality--the employers tending toward the legal and contractual
development of morality, the workingmen toward the sympathetic
and human. Among our contemporaries, these two are typified by the
employers associations and the trades unions.
It is always difficult to judge a contemporaneous movement with any
degree of fairness, and it is perennially perplexing to distinguish
what is merely adventitious and temporary from that which represents
essential and permanent tendencies. This discrimination is made much
more difficult when a movement exhibits various stages of development
contemporaneously, when a dozen historic phases are going on at the
same time. Yet every historic movement towards democracy, which
constantly gathers to itself large bodies of raw recruits while the
older groups are moving on, presents this peculiar difficulty. In the
case of trades unions, certain groups are marked by lawlessness and
disorder, others by most decorous business methods, and still others
are fairly decadent in their desire for monopolistic control. It is a
long cry from the Chartists of 1839, burning hayricks, to John Burns of
1902, pleading in the House of Commons with well-reasoned eloquence for
an extension of the workingmen’s franchise. Nevertheless they are both
manifestations of the same movement towards universal suffrage and show
no greater difference than that between the Chicago teamsters, who
were blocking commerce and almost barricading the streets in 1902 when
at the same moment John Mitchell made his well-considered statement
that he would rather lose the coal strike, with all that that loss
implied, than gain it at the cost of violence. Students of industrial
history will point out the sequence and development of the political
movement from the Chartist to the Independent Labor party. They will
tell us that the same desire burned in the hearts of the ignorant
farmers which fired the distinguished parliamentarian, but they give
no help to our bewildered minds when we would fain discover some order
and sequence between the widely separated events of the contemporaneous
labor movement.
We must first get down to the question, In what does “the inevitably
destined rise of the men of labor” consist? What are we trying to
solve in this “most hazardous problem of the age”? Is progress in the
labor movement to come, as we are told progress comes in the non-moral
world, by the blind, brute struggle of individual interests; or is it
to come, as its earlier leaders believed, through the operation of the
human will? Is it a question of morals which must depend upon educators
and apostles; or is it merely a conflict of opposing rights which may
legitimately use coercion? The question, from the very nature of the
case, is confusing; for, of necessity, the labor movement has perfectly
legitimate economic and business aspects, which loom large and easily
overshadow the ethical. We would all agree that only when men have
education, a margin of leisure, and a decent home can they find room to
develop the moral life. Before that, there are too many chances that
it will be crushed out by ignorance, by grinding weariness, and by
indecency. But the danger lies in the conviction that these advantages
are to be secured by any means, moral or non-moral, and in holding them
paramount to the inner life which they are supposed to nourish. The
labor movement is confronted by that inevitable problem which confronts
every movement and every individual. How far shall the compromise be
made between the inner concept and the outer act? How may we concede
what it is necessary to concede, without conceding all?
We constantly forget that, in the last analysis, the spiritual growth
of one social group is conditioned by the reaction of other social
groups upon it. We ignore the fact that the worship of success, so long
dominant in America, has taught the majority of our citizens to count
only accomplishment and to make little inquiry concerning methods.
Success has become the sole standard in regard to business enterprises
and political parties, but it is evident that the public intends to
call a halt before it is willing to apply the same standard to labor
organizations.
It is clear that the present moment is one of unusual crisis--that many
of the trades unions of America have reached a transitional period,
when they can no longer be mere propagandists, but are called upon to
deal with concrete and difficult situations. When they were small and
persecuted, they held to the faith and its implication of idealism. As
they become larger and more powerful, they make terms with the life
about them, and compromise as best they may with actual conditions.
The older unions, which have reached the second stage that may be
described as that of business dealing, are constantly hampered and
harassed by the actions of the younger unions which are still in the
enthusiastic stage. This embarrassment is especially notable just
now, for, during this last period of prosperity, trades unions have
increased enormously in numbers; the State Federation of Minnesota,
for instance, reported an increase of six hundred per cent. in one
year. Nearly all the well-established unions have been flooded by new
members who are not yet assimilated and disciplined.
During this period of extraordinary growth, the labor movement has
naturally attracted to itself hundreds of organizations which are yet
in their infancy and exhibit all the weakness of “group morality.” This
doubtless tends to a conception of moral life which is as primitive as
that which controlled the beginnings of patriotism, when the members
of the newly conscious nation considered all those who were outside
as possible oppressors and enemies, and were loyal only towards those
whom their imagination included as belonging to the national life. They
gave much, and demanded much, in the name of blood brothers, but were
merciless to the rest of the world. In addition to its belligerent
youth and its primitive morality, the newer union is prone to declare
a strike, simply because the members have long suffered what they
consider to be grievances, and the accumulated sense of unredressed
wrong makes them eager for a chance to “fight for their rights.” At
the same time, the employer always attempts his most vigorous attack
upon a new union, both because he does not wish organized labor to
obtain a foothold in his factory, and because his chances for success
are greater before his employees are well disciplined in unionism.
Nevertheless in actual conflict a young union will often make a more
reckless fight than an older one, like the rough rider in contrast
with the disciplined soldier. The members of a newly organized group
naturally respond first to a sense of loyalty to each other as against
their employers, and then to the wider consciousness of organized
labor as against capital. This stage of trades unionism is full of
war phraseology, with its “pickets” and “battle-grounds,” and is
responsible for the most serious mistakes of the movement.
The sense of group loyalty holds trades unionists longer than is normal
to other groups, doubtless because of the constant accessions of those
who are newly conscious of its claims.
Those Chicago strikes, which, during the last few years, have
been most notably characterized by disorder and the necessity for
police interference, have almost universally been inaugurated by
the newly organized unions. They have called to their aid the older
organizations, and the latter have entered into the struggle many times
under protest and most obviously against their best interests.
The Chicago Federation of Labor has often given its official
indorsement to hot-headed strikes on the part of “baby unions” because
the delegates from the newly organized or freshly recruited unions had
the larger vote, and the appeal to loyalty and to fraternity carried
the meeting against the judgment of the delegates from the older unions.
The members of newly organized unions more readily respond to the
appeal to strike, in that it stirs memory of their “organization
night,” when they were admitted after solemn ceremonies into the
American Federation of Labor. At the same time, the organizers
themselves often hold out too large promises, on the sordid side, of
what organization will be able to accomplish. They tell the newly
initiated what other unions have done, without telling at the same time
how long they have been organized and how steadily they have paid dues.
Several years ago, when there seemed to be a veritable “strike fever”
in Chicago among the younger trades unions, it was suggested in the
Federation of Labor that no union be authorized to declare a strike
until it had been organized for at least two years. The regulation
was backed by some of the strongest and wisest trades unionists,
but it failed to pass because the organizers were convinced that it
would cripple them in forming new unions. They would be obliged to
point to many months of patient payment of dues and humdrum meetings
before any real gain could be secured. The organizers, in fact, are
in the position of a recruiting officer who is obliged to tell his
raw material of all the glories of war, but at the same time bid them
remember that warfare is always inexpedient. He must advise them to
take a long and tedious training in the arts of diplomacy and in the
most advanced methods of averting war before any action can possibly be
considered.
In point of fact the organizers do not do this, and many men join
unions expecting that a strike will be speedily declared which will
settle all the difficulties of modern industrialism. It is, therefore,
not so remarkable that strikes should occur often and should exhibit
warlike features. What is remarkable is the attitude of the public
which has certainly eliminated the tactics of war in other civil
relations.
A tacit admission that a strike is war and that all the methods of
warfare are permissible was made in Chicago during the teamsters’
strike of 1905, when there was little protest against the war method
of conducting a struggle between two private organizations, one of
employer and one of employed. Why should the principles of legal
adjustment have been thus complacently flung to the winds by the two
millions of citizens who had no direct interest in this struggle, but
whose pursuits in business were interfered with, whose safety on the
streets was imperiled, and whose moral sensibilities were outraged?
How did the public become hypnotized into a passive endurance of a
street warfare in which two associations were engaged, like feudal
chiefs with their recalcitrant retainers? In those similar cases, when
blood grew too hot on both sides, the mediaeval emperor intervened and
compelled peace. General public opinion is our hard-won substitute for
the emperor’s personal will. Public opinion, however, did not assert
itself and interfere--on the contrary, the entire town acquiesced in
the statement of the contestants that this method of warfare was the
only one possible, and thereupon yielded to a tendency to overvalue
physical force and to ignore the subtler and less obvious conditions on
which the public welfare rests. At that time all methods of arbitration
and legal redress were completely set aside.
There is no doubt but that ideas and words which at one time fill a
community with enthusiasm may, after a few years, cease to be a moving
force, apparently from no other reason than that they are spent and
no longer fit into the temper of the hour. Such a fate has evidently
befallen the word “arbitration,” at least in Chicago, as it is applied
to industrial struggles. Almost immediately following the labor
disturbances of 1894 in Chicago, the agitation was begun for a State
Board of Arbitration, resulting in legislation and the appointment of
the Illinois Board. At that time the public believed that arbitration
would go far towards securing industrial peace, or at least that it
would provide the device through which labor troubles could be speedily
adjusted, and during that period there was much talk concerning
compulsory arbitration with reference to the successful attempts in New
Zealand.
During the industrial struggles of later years, however, not only
are the services of the State Board rejected, but voluntary bodies
constantly find their efforts less satisfactory. Employers contend
that arbitration implies the yielding of points on both sides.
Since, however, most boards of arbitration provide that grievances
must be submitted to them before the strike occurs, and the men are
thus kept at work while the grievances are being considered, the men
therefore have virtually nothing to lose by declaring a strike. They
are subjected to a temptation to constantly formulate new demands,
because, without losing time or pay, they are almost certain to secure
some concession, however small, in their favor. The employers in the
teamsters’ strike thus explained their position when they declared
that there was nothing which could be submitted to arbitration. These
employers also contended that the ordinary court has no precedent
for dealing with questions of hours and wages, of shop rules, and
many other causes of trade-union disputes, because all these matters
are new as questions of law and can be satisfactorily adjusted only
through industrial courts in which tradition and precedent bearing
upon modern industrial conditions have been accumulated. The rise and
fall of wages affect not one firm only, but a national industry, and
even the currents of international trade, so that it is impossible to
treat of them as matters in equity. With this explanation, the Chicago
public rested content during the long weeks of the teamsters’ strike,
for no one pointed out that these arguments did not apply to this
particular situation, so accustomed have we grown in Chicago to warfare
as a method of settling labor disputes. The charges of the Employers’
Association against the teamsters did not involve any points demanding
adjustment through industrial courts. The charges the Employers’
Association made were those of broken contracts, of blackmail, and of
conspiracy, all of them points which are constantly adjudicated in Cook
County courts.
It was constantly asserted that officers of the Teamsters’ Union
demanded money from employers in the height of the busy season in order
to avert threatened strikes; that there was a disgraceful alliance
between certain members of the Team Owners’ Association and officers of
the Teamsters’ Union.
It would, of course, have been impossible to prove blackmail and
the charges of “graft,” unless the employers themselves or their
representatives had borne testimony, which would inevitably have
implicated themselves. During the first weeks of the strike, these
charges were freely made, definite sums were named, and dates were
given. There was also an offer on the part of various managers to make
affidavits, but later they shrank from the publicity, and refused to
give them, preferring apparently to throw the whole town into disorder
rather than to “stand up” to the consequences of their own acts and to
acknowledge the bribery to which they claim they were forced to resort.
They demonstrated once more that a show of manliness and an appeal to
arms may many times hide cowardice.
To throw affairs into a state of warfare is to put them where the moral
aspect will not be scrutinized and where the mere interest of the game
and a desire to watch it will be paramount.
The vicious combination represented by certain men in the Team Owners’
Association and in the Teamsters’ Union, “the labor and capital hunting
together” kind, is a public menace which can be abolished only by a
combined effort on the part of the best employers and the best labor
men. The “better element” certainly were in a majority, for the most
dangerous members of this sinister combination were at last reduced
to fifteen or twenty men. These very men, however, after a prolonged
strike, became either victors or martyrs, and in either case were
firmly established in power and influence for the succeeding two
years. Why should an entire city of two million people have been put
to such an amazing amount of inconvenience and financial loss, with
their characters brutalized as well, in order to accomplish this? The
traditional burning of the house in order to roast the pig is quite
outdone by this overturning of a city in order to catch a “score of
rascals,” for in the end the rascals are not caught, and it is as if
the house were burned and the pig had escaped. Was it not the result
of acting under military fervor? Over and over again it has been found
that organizations based upon a mutual sense of grievance or of outrage
have always been militant, for while men cannot be formed permanently
into associations whose chief bond is a sense of exasperation and
wrong dealing, during the time they are thus held together they are
committed to aggressive action.
Moral rights and duties formed upon the relations of man to man are
applicable to all situations, and to deny this applicability to a
difficult case, is to beg the entire question. The consequences do not
stop there, for we all know that to deny the validity of the moral
principle in one relation is to sap its strength in all relations.
Employers often resent being obliged to have business relations
with workingmen, although they no longer say that they will refuse
to deal with them, as a woman still permits herself to say that she
“will not argue with a servant.” They nevertheless contend that the
men are unreasonable, and that because it is impossible to establish
contractual relations with them, they must be coerced. This contention
goes far toward legitimatizing terrorism. It therefore seems to them
defensible to refuse to go into the courts and to insist upon war
because they do it from a consciousness of rectitude, although this
insensibly slips into a consciousness of power, as self-righteousness
is so prone to do. But these are all the traits of militant youth,
which in the teamsters’ strike was indeed borne out by the facts in the
case.
The Employers’ Association of Chicago was largely composed of merchants
whose experience with trades unionism was almost limited to the
Teamsters’ Union which has been in existence for only five years and,
from the first, has been truculent and difficult. Had the employers
involved been manufacturers instead of merchants, they would have had
years of experience with unions of skilled men, and they would have
more nearly learned to adjust their personal and business relations
to trades unionism. When an entire class in a community confess that
without an appeal to arms they cannot deal with trades unions, who,
after all, represent a national and international movement a hundred
years old, they practically admit that they cannot manage their
business under the existing conditions of modern life. To a very
great extent it is a confession of weakness, to a very great extent a
confession of frailty of temper. To make the adjustment to the peculiar
problems of one’s own surroundings is the crux of life’s difficulties.
“New organizations” and “new experiments in living” would not arise if
there were not a certain inadequateness in existing organizations and
ways of living. The new organizations and experiments may not point
to the right mode of meeting the situation, but they do point to the
existence of inadequateness and the need of readjustment. Changes in
business methods have been multiform during the past fifteen years,
and Chicago business men who have made those other adjustments would
certainly be able to deal with labor in its present organized form if
they were not inhibited by certain concepts of their “group morality.”
In the meantime the public, which has been powerless to interfere, can
only point to the consequences of grave social import which are sure to
result from a prolonged period of disturbance.
First, there is the sharp division of the community into classes, with
its inevitable hostility and misunderstanding. Capital lines up on one
side, and labor on the other, until the “fair-minded public” disappears
and Chicago loses her democratic spirit which has always been her most
precious possession. In its place is substituted loyalty to the side to
which each man belongs, irrespective of the merits of the case--the “my
country right or wrong” sentiment which we call patriotism only in war
times, the blind adherence by which a man is attached against his will,
as it were, to the blunders of “his own kind.”
During the first week of the strike, I talked with labor men who were
willing to admit that there were grounds for indictment against at
least two of the officers in the teamsters’ locals. During the third
week of the strike all that was swept aside, and one heard only that
the situation must be taken quite by itself, with no references to
the first causes, that it was a strike of organized capital against
organized labor, and that we could have no peace in Chicago until it
was “fought to a finish.”
Second, there is an enormous increase in the feeling of race animosity,
beginning with the imported negro strike-breakers, and easily extending
to “Dagoes” and all other distinct nationalities. The principle of
racial and class equality is at the basis of American political life,
and to wantonly destroy it is one of the gravest outrages against the
Republic.
Chicago is preëminently a city of mixed nationalities. It is our
problem to learn to live together in forbearance and understanding
and to fuse all the nations of men into the newest and, perhaps,
the highest type of citizenship. To accept this responsibility may
constitute our finest contribution to the problems of American life,
but we may also wantonly and easily throw away such an opportunity
by the stirring up of race and national animosity which is so easily
aroused and so reluctantly subsides.
Third, there is the spirit of materialism which controls the city and
confirms the belief that, after all, brute force, a trial of physical
strength, is all that counts and the only thing worthy of admiration.
Any check on the moral consciousness is paralyzed when the belief
is once established that success is its own justification. When the
stream of this belief joins the current of class interest, the spirit
of the prize fighters’ ring which cheers the best round and worships
the winner, becomes paramount. It is exactly that which appeals to
the so-called “hoodlum,” and his sudden appearance upon the street
at such times and in such surprising numbers demonstrates that he
realizes that he has come to his own. At the moment we all forget that
the determination to sacrifice all higher considerations to business
efficiency, to make the machine move smoothly at any cost, “to stick
at nothing,” may easily make a breach in the ethical constitution of
society which can be made good only by years of painful reparation.
Fourth, there is the effect upon the children and the youth of the
entire city, for the furrow of class prejudice, which is so easily run
through a plastic mind, often leaves a life-long mark. Each morning
during the long weeks of the strike, thousands of children at the more
comfortable breakfast tables learned to regard labor unions as the
inciters of riot and the instruments of evil, thousands of children
at the less comfortable breakfast tables shared the impotent rage
of their parents that “law is always on the side of capital,” and
both sets of children added to the horrors of Manchuria and Warsaw,
which were then taking place, the pleasurable excitement that war
had become domesticated upon their own streets. We may well believe
that these impressions and emotions will be kept by these children
as part of their equipment in life and that their moral conceptions
will permanently tend toward group moralities and will be cast into a
coarser mold.
In illustration of this point I may, perhaps, cite my experience during
the Spanish War.
For ten years I had lived in a neighborhood which is by no means
criminal, and yet during October and November of 1898 we were startled
by seven murders within a radius of ten blocks. A little investigation
of details and motives, the accident of a personal acquaintance with
two of the criminals, made it not in the least difficult to trace
the murders back to the influence of the war. Simple people who
read of carnage and bloodshed easily receive suggestions. Habits of
self-control which have been but slowly and imperfectly acquired
quickly break down when such a stress is put upon them.
Psychologists intimate that action is determined by the selection
of the subject upon which the attention is habitually fixed. The
newspapers, the theatrical posters, the street conversations for weeks,
had to do with war and bloodshed. Day after day, the little children on
the street played at war and at killing Spaniards. The humane instinct,
which keeps in abeyance the tendency to cruelty, as well as the growing
belief that the life of each human being, however hopeless or degraded,
is still sacred, gives way, and the more primitive instinct asserts
itself.
There is much the same social result during a strike, in addition
to the fact that the effect of the prolonged warfare upon the labor
movement itself is most disastrous. The unions at such times easily
raise into power the unscrupulous “leader,” so-called. In times of
tumult, the aggressive man, the one who is of bellicose temper, and
is reckless in his statements, is the one who becomes a leader. It is
a vicious circle--the more warlike the times, the more reckless the
leader who is demanded, and his reckless course prolongs the struggle.
Such men make their appeal to loyalty for the union, to hatred and to
contempt for the “non-union” man. Mutual hate towards a non-unionist
may have in it the mere beginnings of fellowship, the protoplasm of
tribal fealty, but no more. When it is carried over into civilized
life it becomes a social deterrent and an actual menace to social
relations.
In a sense it is fair to hold every institution responsible for the
type of man whom it tends to bring to the front, and the type of
organization which clings to war methods must, of course, consider
it nobler to yield to force than to justice. The earlier struggle of
democracy was for its recognition as a possible form of government
and the struggle is now on to prove democracy an efficient form of
government. So the earlier struggles of trades unions were for mere
existence, and the struggle has now passed into one for a recognition
of contractual relations and collective bargaining which will make
trades unions an effective industrial instrument. It is much less
justifiable of course in the later effort than it was in the earlier to
carry on the methods of primitive warfare.
This new effort, however, from the very nature of things, is bringing
another type of union man into office and is modifying the entire
situation. The old-time agitator is no longer useful and a cooler man
is needed for collective bargaining. At the same time the employers
must put forth a more democratic and a more reasonable type of man if
they would bear their side of this new bargaining, so that it has come
about quite recently that the first attempts have been made in Chicago
towards controlling in the interests of business itself this natural
tendency of group morality.
It may offer another example of business and commerce, affording us
a larger morality than that which the moralists themselves teach.
Certain it is that the industrial problems engendered by the industrial
revolutions of the last century, and flung upon this century for
solution, can never be solved by class warfare nor yet by ignoring
their existence in the optimism of ignorance.
America is only beginning to realize, and has not yet formulated, all
the implications of the factory system and of the conditions of living
which this well-established system imposes upon the workers. As we
feel it closing down upon us, moments of restlessness and resentment
seize us all. The protest against John Mitchell’s statement[11] that
the American workingman has recognized that he is destined to remain
a workingman, is a case in point. In their attempt to formulate and
correct various industrial ills, trades unions are often blamed for
what is inherent in the factory system itself and for those evils which
can be cured only through a modification of that system. For instance,
factory workers in general have for years exhibited a tendency to
regulate the output of each worker to a certain amount which they
consider a fair day’s work, although to many a worker such a restricted
output may prove to be less than a fair day’s work. The result is, of
course, disastrous to the workers themselves as well as to the factory
management, for it doubtless is quite as injurious to a man’s nervous
system to retard his natural pace as it is to unduly accelerate it.
The real trouble, which this “limitation” is an awkward attempt to
correct, is involved in the fact that the intricate subdivision of
factory work, and the lack of understanding on the part of employees
of the finished product, has made an unnatural situation, in which the
worker has no normal interest in his work and no direct relation to it.
In the various makeshifts on the part of the manufacturer to supply
motives which shall take the place of the natural ones so obviously
missing, many devices have been resorted to, such as “speeding up”
machinery, “setting the pace,” and substituting “piece work” for day
work. The manufacturers may justly say that they have been driven to
these various expedients, not only by the factory conditions, but by
the natural laziness of men. Nevertheless reaction from such a course
is inevitably an uncompromising attempt on the part of the workers
to protect themselves from overexertion and to regulate the output.
The worst cases I have ever known have occurred in unorganized shops
and have been unregulated and unaided by any trades union. The “pace
setter” in such a shop is often driven out and treated with the same
animosity which the “scab” receives in a union shop.
In the same spirit we blame trades unionists for that disgraceful
attitude which they have from time to time taken against the
introduction of improved machinery--a small group blindly attempting
to defend what they consider their only chance to work. The economists
have done surprisingly little to shed light upon this difficulty;
indeed, they are somewhat responsible for its exaggeration. Their old
theory of a “wage fund” which did not reach the rank and file of trades
unionists until at least in its first form it had been abandoned by the
leading economists, has been responsible both for much disorder along
this line, and for the other mistaken attempt “to make work for more
men.”
A society which made some effort to secure an equitable distribution of
the leisure and increased ease which new inventions imply would remove
the temptations as well as the odium of such action from the men who
are blinded by what they consider an infringement of their rights.
If the wonderful inventions of machinery, as they came along during
the last century, could have been regarded as in some sense social
possessions, the worst evils attending the factory system of
production--starvation wages, exhausting hours, unnecessary monotony,
child labor, and all the rest of the wretched list--might have been
avoided in the interest of society itself. All this would have come
about had human welfare been earlier regarded as a legitimate object of
social interest.
But no such ethics had been developed in the beginning of this century.
Society regarded machinery as the absolute possession of the man who
owned it at the moment it became a finished product, quite irrespective
of the long line of inventors and workmen who represented its gradual
growth and development. Society was, therefore, destined to all the
maladjustment which this century has encountered. Is it the militant
spirit once more as over against the newer humanitarianism? The
possessor of the machine, like the possessor of arms who preceded him,
regards it as a legitimate weapon for exploitation, as the former held
his sword.
One of the exhibits in the Paris Exposition of 1900 presented a
contrast between a mediaeval drawing of a castle towering above the
hamlets of its protected serfs, and a modern photograph of the same
hill covered with a huge factory which overlooked the villages of
its dependent workmen. The two pictures of the same hill and of the
same plain bore more than a geographic resemblance. This suggestion
of modern exploitation would be impossible had we learned the first
lessons which an enlarged industrialism might teach us. Class and
group divisions with their divergent moralities become most dangerous
when their members believe that the inferior group or class cannot
be appealed to by reason and fair dealing, but must be treated upon
a lower plane. Terrorism is considered necessary and legitimate that
they may be inhibited by fear from committing certain acts. So far
as employers exhibit this spirit toward workmen, or trades unionists
toward non-unionists, they inevitably revert to the use of brute
force--to the methods of warfare.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] Organized Labor, John Mitchell. Preface.