It cannot too often be stated that the labor problem is not a class
affair, but that it concerns the entire human race. There may be a class
of aristocrats, of plutocrats, of criminals, of society idlers, or of
any such group whose instinct is to withdraw itself from the common mass
of humanity. But for laborers this is an impossibility. They remain, and
must remain, part and parcel of the whole people. They are the people.
There can be no laboring class. It is a contradiction of terms.
Especially is this true in America, where from the President of the
country down to the coal-heaver everybody is supposed to work. So strong
is this supposition, that the inference is that whoever does not bear
some part of the world’s burden is a diseased unit in humanity. The
ultimate aim of all normal progress in social justice is to remove these
units. All who have wealth in excess of a reasonable accumulation of the
products of their own labor, all who live on endowment and inheritance,
all who are sycophants, idlers, or holders of sinecures, must some day,
when the terms of justice shall have been worked out, be put to work,
and those who will not work shall not eat.
Just by what route the millennial state of simple equity shall come we
cannot say, but come it surely will, and the profits of individual labor
of brawn or brain shall go to the individual, and the profits arising
from the state or social combination shall go to the state, to the
people as a whole.
One of the most far-reaching acts of 1914 was the statement by the
national congress, in its passage of the anti-trust law preventing the
use of the Sherman act against trade unions, that “the labor of a human
being is not a commodity or article of commerce.”
The implications of this declaration it will be difficult to see for
some time. It seems now to strike a blow at the very centre of the old
system of business under which the world has operated for some six
thousand years.
It means that humanity does not consist of employers and endowed
persons, of nobles, wealthy people, and professional men—doctors,
lawyers, priests, and squires; that culture, schools, courts, and
senates are not for these only, and that the employed, the clerks, and
workmen, who make the money for these upper classes, are not on the same
economic level as the spades and pens they handle; but that a man; any
man, and his wage are direct concern of government; that the iron law of
supply and demand may govern the grinding of flour, but not of human
creatures, and that the brute law of competition shall some time, in
some way, be changed to the human law of co-operation.