However keen our interest in the problems arising out of the recent
Spanish war, and however earnest our study of the policy to be pursued
toward our new dependencies, we should not forget that the problems
pressing for a solution before the war are still with us. The labor
question, which then commanded so much of our thought, is still
unsettled, and is by no means dwarfed by the subjects now upon every
lip. Rather, as has been shown in an article in a recent number of
this magazine, this question really forms one of the most important
elements of the present situation, and should not be lost sight of in
shaping public policy. We are entering upon an untilled field as far
as our institutions are concerned, and we have the opportunity to
start on a higher level in treating the relations of capital and labor
in our new possessions, if we have the wisdom to know how, and the
courage to do as well as we know.
It will help us in a consideration of the present status of the
laborer and of his future if we study his past, beginning, if not with
Adam, at least with the laborer's entrance into English history as a
distinct class. Any one at all familiar with Green's Short History of
the English People will see how much use I have made of that
instructive and fascinating work. And if I tell only an old story, it
may still be of value to many of us in recalling facts almost
forgotten, and a help to others whose vision into the past is limited.
Brushing away the cobwebs in the old attic of our father's house
usually brings to light treasures the recollection of which had
slipped from our minds.
The free laborer, the man who works for wages, for whom and where he
chooses, did not exist as a class until within about six hundred
years. In the early days the laborer was tied to the soil where he was
born. Such a thing as a laborer going about to seek work where he
would, or having much to say about his master or his wages, was
usually out of the question.
At a very early day the towns or boroughs of England had preserved old
rights, or regained them, which the rural part of England had lost,
and in general serfage could not exist there as it did in the country
round them. Trade and manufacture, such as they were in that day, did
not make the demand for labor which was made by the agricultural
pursuits of the country or in the castles of the nobility. So we do
not find in the towns of the eleventh or twelfth century the large
labor class we do to-day. In general we may fairly say that the labor
class began in the country.
The manorial system had divided the rural part of England for
cultivation and general order into large estates. The lord of the
manor occupied a part of the estate for his own demesne and divided
the rest among his villeins or serfs, who in return were obliged to
render services to him. It is not necessary for my purpose to enter
into any long description or discussion of the different relations
existing between different tenants and their overlord, or the
differences existing under Saxon or Norman rule. The general relation
of lord of the manor and his tenants or villeins or serfs is the main
point to be observed. The villeins or serfs of the manor cultivated
the lord's home farm or demesne, filled his barn, cut his wood, and
did all his work. "These services were the labor rent by which they
held their lands." Some of these tenants, the villeins, were obliged
to work on the lord's demesne at harvest only and to help plow and
sow, while the others, the serfs, to speak in general terms, were
obliged to help on the home farm or in the castle the year round.
In course of time the use of a certain parcel of land by the tenant
and a right to pasturage and so forth on the one hand, and the amount
and kind of service required on the other, became definitely regulated
by custom; and instead of the use of the land being a mere indulgence
given to the tenant to be taken away from him on any whim of his lord,
it became a definite right in the land which must be respected and
could be pleaded at law.
"The number of teams," and so forth, "the services that a lord could
claim, at first mere matter of oral tradition, came to be entered on
the court roll of the manor, a copy of which became the title deed of
the villein." So after a while instead of "villein" he became a
"copyholder."
As time went on it grew to be customary, instead of rendering services
for the use of the land held by copyhold, to pay a money rent. In
other words, the system of leasing the little farms came into use, and
from that came the tenant farmer. This left the other laborers about
the lord's demesne or his castle as before. While the class of
villeins, who did only occasional services, although definite as to
amount and time, gradually commuted these services into money
payments, and became farmers, the other serfs still remained on the
manor, liable to do their work when and where it was customary. This
rise of the wealthier tenants made a new class between the large
proprietors, the lords of the manor, and the tenants or serfs still
bound by custom to work for their lords. But the same process which
freed the farmer from personal service in time became the chief way of
freeing the serf also. Until this came about the serf or laborer,
whatever other rights he might have, and he was not a slave, was born
to his holding and his lord. He could choose neither master nor place
of work. "He paid head money for license to remove from the estate in
search of trade or hire, and a refusal to return on recall by his
owner would have ended in his pursuit as a fugitive outlaw." But the
advance of society silently worked to free the laborer from this local
bondage. The runaway serf gained freedom by residence in a chartered
town for a year and a day. The influence of the church was directed
toward his emancipation, at least on all estates outside of its own,
but the main cause was the growing tendency to commute labor services
for money payments. As Mr. Green says: "The luxury of the castle hall,
the splendor and pomp of chivalry, the cost of campaigns, drained the
purses of knight and baron, and the sale of freedom to a serf or
exemption from services to a villein afforded an easy and tempting
mode of refilling them. In this process even kings took part. Edward
III sent commissioners to royal estates for the especial purpose of
selling manumissions to the king's serfs, and we still possess the
names of those who were enfranchised with their families by a payment
of hard cash in aid of the exhausted exchequer." The Crusades,
whatever else they may have accomplished, aided in this freedom for
the serf. Those costly expeditions dissipated the estates of the
barons, and, to use Hume's somewhat strained expression, "Their
poverty extorted from their pride those charters of freedom which
unlocked the fetters of the slave." And so, following the rise of the
farmer, came this new class--the free laborer. By the latter part of
the fourteenth century labor was no longer, as a rule, "bound to one
spot or one master; it was free to hire itself to what employer and to
choose what field of employment it would."
This is the beginning of the labor class as we know it. In those times
labor was abundant and therefore cheap. The landowners in the country
and the craftsmen in the town found plenty of help, and the new class
then coming upon the stage could go where it was needed. From a serf
the common laborer had become his own master as far as choosing his
own employer and the place of his employment. But just at this time a
condition of affairs arose which put an end to this state of things.
In 1348 came the Great Plague. That swept away more than half of the
three or four millions who then made up the population of England. The
plague and the sudden rise of wages which followed, although coupled
with an increase in the cost of living, quite naturally brought on an
outburst of lawless self-indulgence which told especially upon the
laborer looking for work. He easily became the "sturdy beggar" or
"bandit of the woods." While harvests rotted to the ground from lack
of hands, in the towns labor was just as scarce and equally as
independent. The landowners and wealthier craftsmen were startled and
terrified by "what seemed in their age the extravagant demands of the
new labor classes." Here we have the labor problem at once and at the
beginning. And from that time to this that problem has been with us.
With the capitalist one person and the laborer another there has been
always more or less discord. As Richard T. Ely has somewhere said,
although in theory capital and labor should be allies and not enemies,
the interests of those furnishing capital or labor are not precisely
identical. But five hundred years ago the labor class of to-day had
just come into existence. It had no organization then, and its members
few political rights. The landowners and craftsmen could appeal
effectively to the crown and Parliament through their wealth, their
political power, and the craftsmen, especially, through their
organizations. The laborer had only himself and brute force. As a
result, the legislation of that day reflects the demands of the upper
and middle classes only. The laboring class was considered only as it
affected the landowners and craftsmen. So the labor troubles of that
day were met with the Statute of Laborers. "Every man or woman," runs
this famous provision, "of whatsoever condition, free or bond, able in
body, and within the age of threescore years, ... and not having of
his own about the tillage of which he may occupy himself, and not
serving any other, shall be bound to serve the employer who shall
require him to do so, and shall take only the wages which were
accustomed to be taken in the neighborhood where he is bound to serve"
two years before the plague began. A refusal to obey was punished by
imprisonment. Here was an attempt to fix the rate of wages by statute,
and to fix them very much lower than a fair market rate; and, further,
to force the unemployed laborer to serve any man who first demanded
it. The statute failed in its object, naturally, and so sterner
measures were adopted. "Not only was the price of labor fixed by
Parliament in the next statute of 1351, but the labor class was once
more tied to the soil." It was made the servant not of one master but
of a class--the employers. "The laborer was forbidden to quit the
parish where he lived in search of better-paid employment; if he
disobeyed, he became a 'fugitive,' and subject to imprisonment at the
hands of the justices of the peace." Provisions had risen so that a
day's work at the legal wages would not purchase enough for a man's
support, and therefore no such law could be enforced literally. Still,
the landowners persisted in trying, and at last the runaway laborer,
the man looking for better wages, was branded on the forehead with a
hot iron, while the harboring of serfs in towns was rigorously put
down. As the landowners wanted all the labor they could get, the
commutation of labor service for money payments ceased, and every
effort was made and every quibble taken advantage of to annul
manumissions previously made. In the towns, under the pressure of the
craftsmen, the system of forced labor was applied with even more
rigor than in the country, and strikes and combinations became
frequent.
That is the state of things in free England at a time when labor was
not strong enough to protect itself--called upon by the law of the
land to work for less than living wages or be branded as cattle! The
irrepressible conflict between capital and labor began with the very
beginning of the existence of the labor class.
In such a condition of things as here indicated, is it any wonder that
there were labor disturbances in those days--that there was a peasant
revolt? Already the doctrine of the equality of man and social
inequality was being preached to the lower classes. In 1360 John
Ball--"a mad priest in Kent," as Froissart calls him--preached such a
communistic sermon as this to the sturdy yeomen of that day: "Good
people, things will never go well in England so long as goods be not
in common, and so long as there be villeins and gentlemen. By what
right are they whom we call lords greater folk than we? On what
grounds have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in serfage? If we
all came of the same father and mother, of Adam and Eve, how can they
say or prove that they are better than we, if it be not that they make
us gain for them by our toil what they spend in their pride? They are
clothed in velvet, and warm in their furs and their ermines, while we
are covered with rags. They have wine and spices and fair bread; and
we oatcake and straw, and water to drink. They have leisure and fine
houses; we have pain and labor, the rain and wind in the fields. And
yet it is of us and of our toil that these men hold their state." That
is the same cry against the inequality of property and social
condition which we hear to-day. And we may thank him, and men like him
and with his inspiration, that the conditions of five hundred years
ago have changed, and that the dawn of a better and higher humanity
has broken upon us. Filled with socialism and communism as the words
are, they still have a truth which appeals to every sympathetic and
thoughtful man.
And it was in those early days that the old rhyme was heard all over
the land:
"When Adam delved and Eve span.
Who was then the gentleman?"
The sermon was preached against the tyranny of property, the rhyme was
full of the democracy of the coming years.
I do not imagine that the instigators of such laws as the Statute of
Laborers were hard men as men go. They could see only their side of
the case. The laborer had become a necessity for them, and they rather
believed that the Almighty had put him on earth for their advantage. I
am afraid that something of that spirit still is left among us. The
feeling still exists that the employer and capitalist can take care
of and provide for the employees better than they can themselves; that
they should be very thankful when out of his abundance the employer
builds them a library or permits them to live in some finely ordered
village as he directs. But somehow the feeling is growing now that if
the wage-earner had a larger and fairer share in the profits he could
take care of himself better in the end and grow faster, because he
would be more his own master; and that the good things now and then
given him with more or less ostentation as gifts are bought with the
money he really ought to have and in the future hopes to have himself.
Well, the result of such laws and the general social discontent and
the levy of new taxes upon even the lower classes brought about the
Peasant Revolt in 1381. Of course, the power of the upper classes,
aided by the courage of Richard II, then only a boy, put down the
revolt, but not until the king had promised amnesty and emancipation
to the serfs. Death on the scaffold and in the field soon showed the
participants how little such promises were worth. The serfs were
subdued, but strife between the laborers and employers was not ended.
The legislation still reflects the terror and greed of the landowners,
for, in spite of all, labor was in demand and had the market at its
feet. Legislation forbade "the child of any tiller of the soil to be
apprenticed in a town," and the landowners "prayed Richard to ordain
'that no bondman or bondwoman shall place their children at school, as
has been done, so as to advance their children in the world by their
going into the church.'" But villeinage continued to disappear, and
within the next hundred and fifty years it had become "an antiquated
thing." The failure of the landowners to again fasten labor to the
soil and to fix low wages drove their energies in a new direction.
"Sheep farming required fewer hands than tillage, and the scarcity and
high price of labor tended to throw more and more land into sheep
farms." As personal service died away it became the interest of the
lord to unite the small holdings on his estate into larger ones. The
evictions consequent upon this course threw many laborers upon the
market, and the sheep farms diminished the number required, while the
smaller amount of holdings devoted to agriculture increased the price
of food. And so it is not surprising that within the course of a
comparatively few years, instead of a scarcity there was a glut of
labor; that pauperism increased, and social discontent continued; that
vagabondage with its dangers to society at large became a difficult
problem. Indeed, the poor have always been with us, but those of us
who find so much to depress us in these modern days can get new
courage by looking back to those old days and can see the real
progress which has been made. The whole lower class in England down to
the time of Elizabeth stood looking into the face of want. Henry VIII
confiscated the monasteries, but put nothing in their place, and in a
measure by so doing deprived the poor of some relief from the wealth
of the church. But Elizabeth inaugurated a system of poor-laws which,
although crude and somewhat hard, still served to ward off some of the
social danger. The course of events, however, and the rise of new
industries did more to make life for the laborer, the landless man,
less bitter. With the discovery of America and the opening of
fisheries in these western waters, and the adventurous and
buccaneering voyages of Drake and his compeers, came the gradual
development of manufacture, and a "more careful and constant
cultivation of the land." All these were new and larger avenues for
the employment of labor. By this time the laborer had grown entirely
away from serfage, had been freed from the terrible grasp of a
hopeless future, and the possibility of a degree of comfort and
independence had come into existence. We need not linger longer over
his early days. The laborer still had his peculiar trials and
hardships, but he had a future. From a subject class, the terror as
well as necessity of its employers, he has grown to be their equal
before the law, and this by his own efforts, aided, of course, by the
advance of society and the broader humanity of mankind.
The increase of manufacture brought with it a new danger to the
working class as we reach our times, and brought about a state of
things which gave rise to trades unions. Manufacture naturally in the
beginning was carried on in a small way, but in modern times,
especially as we get into this century, the small concerns grew into
large ones. Instead of one man or partnership with a comparatively
small amount of capital, the corporation or joint-stock company with
its large aggregation of capital carries on the business of
manufacture and trade. This aggregation of capital has made an entire
change in the relation between employer and employee. The corporation
came in the line of progress. Consolidation of capital has come to
stay, and properly so, but it brought with it dangers, just as every
step in advance has done. It was to meet the new dangers to the
wage-earners that trades unions came into being, for trades unions and
labor unions are really only organizations of labor as corporations
are aggregations of capital.
When industrial establishments were small, the owner, whether in trade
or manufacture, had practically absolute direction of his business. In
the industrial world what corresponds to an unlimited monarchy in the
political world has been the system. As establishments grew larger,
the autocratic power of the owner passed to the manager acting for the
owners. As one writer puts it: "Huge industrial establishments are
under the unrestrained control of a single man. At his will they are
set in motion; at his will they stand still; at his will capital and
labor unite and are fruitful; at his will they are parted and remain
barren. Men come and go at his bidding. He knows no superior and
recognizes no limitations. He calls an attempt at control 'dictation'
and resents it with anger." That is the extreme case, and is
industrial despotism. While the results doubtless are good in many
cases, and the laborer receives fair and decent treatment in most
cases, that is owing to the temperament or prudence and good judgment
of the master and not to the system. Such a condition of things is
becoming more and more modified. We have reached in many cases a
condition which may be said to correspond to a monarchy with
constitutional limitations--the master is restrained in the exercise
of his power by public opinion, the strength of the workingmen, and in
some cases by legal limitations. The organization of boards of
arbitration, and the recognition of the right of the employee to a
share in the profits, are daily extending. The tendency toward giving
the wage-earners a share in the business, some modified form of
co-operation, is daily extending. The trend is toward what may be
called industrial democracy, just as in the political world real
democracy is fast becoming the universal principle, whatever the style
of the government may be.
This advance in the industrial world has come about through the
agitation and power of labor organizations, of which, as they exist
now, trades unions were the early manifestation. The employer, as a
rule, looked after his own interests mainly, and the employee alone by
himself had to take what he could get and do as he was told. Just as
the people, after they sunk into subjection in the earlier days, had
little political power as against the nobility until they were strong
enough to take it, so the laborer still would be of little account
except as a more or less intelligent machine unless he had proved
himself a man, with a man's aspirations and a man's energy.
Labor organizations or trades unions came into existence in England.
The democratic spirit, the spirit of liberty, the Saxon spirit of
independence, which wrested from kings and the nobility all the rights
which the common people enjoy, has been doing in the industrial world
only what it did in the political world years before.
We may say that trades unions find their prototype in the _frith
guilds_ or _peace guilds_ of the Anglo-Saxon. A few words in general
about them and their successors and the spirit pervading them, the
causes of their existence and decay, will have a bearing on labor
organizations, which are like them in "being founded on similar mental
faculties and desires and as contemplating similar purposes."
These _frith guilds_ seem to have been associations of neighbors for
mutual help and protection. They replaced the older brotherhood of
kinsfolk, which had existed among the German races, "by a voluntary
association of neighbors for the same purposes of order and
self-defense." An isolated existence for a man, even a freeman, was
one of danger, especially when the feudal temper of the nobles
increased and the Danish incursions broke over England. The ties of
kindred had become weakened, and the frith guild took the place of the
family. A mutual oath bound the members together, and the monthly
guild feast became the substitute for the old gathering round the
family hearth. A member could call upon the guild in case of violence
or wrong; when charged with crime, the guild answered for him, and
when guilty, punished him; when poor, it supported him; and when dead,
buried him. When these guilds were located in towns rather than in the
country, they inevitably tended in time to combine, and eventually the
town passed from a collection of guilds into one large guild, and we
have the _town guild_. The word "town" is used in contradistinction
from the word "country," just as we say "town and country," "going to
town," and so on. The spirit of independence and freedom, kept alive
in our town meetings here, and in our local self-government, has come
down to us through those old town guilds and the boroughs of England.
It is to the towns of England and not to the country that we owe much
of our liberty to-day.
So these guilds in towns, by joining together and making a town guild,
became quite strong communities. They made demands upon the crown
itself, and took upon themselves the government of the towns where
they were located. Their members were the landowners of the town, and
the other people who came there to settle, no matter how numerous, had
no part in the government. From being democratic in the beginning, as
the frith guilds were, the towns became oligarchies.
In the course of time the differences between town and country became
more marked. The town guilds began to have less and less to do with
agriculture, although at first they were interested in it. The wealth
in the town is turned to trade and manufacture, such as there was in
those days. So, by the time of the Norman conquest, in 1066, we hear
little of town guilds, but in almost every case _merchant guilds_. The
_town guild_ has become a _merchant guild_, although composed of the
same constituency. The commercial spirit has become the ruling spirit
of the town.
As time went on and life and property became safer and trade
increased, the consequent accumulation of wealth in towns produced
important results in the character of these municipal institutions.
"In becoming a merchant guild the body of citizens who formed" the
government of "the town enlarged their powers of civic legislation by
applying them to the control of their internal trade." No longer
confining themselves to providing for public order or protection from
unjust oppression or dangers from without, they began to legislate for
their own immediate advancement and for their own pockets. "It became
their especial business to obtain from the crown or from their lords
wider commercial privileges, rights of coinage, grants of fairs, and
exemptions from tolls; while within the town itself they framed
regulations as to the sale and quality of goods, the control of
markets, and the recovery of debts." And further, the members of the
guild withdrew from the humbler trades to confine themselves to the
larger business of commerce or trades requiring large capital, leaving
the trades and traffic given up to their poorer neighbors. This ruling
class comprised only a part of the inhabitants, only the members of
the merchant guild. The great mass of the people, the artisans and the
poor, the men without land, the serfs escaped from the country and
gaining their freedom in the town, all had no voice in the government
whatever. They lived and worked and earned their daily bread
practically by permission or at least under the direct control of the
merchant guild. From a simple association, the guilds in towns had
become the governing body, and a government in the hands of a few at
that. From the need of protection on account of individual weakness,
the members of the guilds had grown to be in need of repression; and
with the demand for repression came the instrument of repression--the
_craft guild_. Against the autocratic power of the merchant guild
arose the craft guilds, or associations of workers in the various
trades, those trades abandoned by the merchants, and these guilds
"soon rose into dangerous rivalry with the original merchant guild of
the town."
These craft guilds in the old English towns, in order to attain their
objects, considered it necessary to compel the whole body of craftsmen
belonging to the trade to join the guild of that craft or trade; and
further, that the guild should have legal control over the trade
itself--who should be admitted to it, and so forth. "A royal charter
was indispensable for these purposes, and over the grant of these
charters took place the first struggle with the merchant guild, which
had till then solely exercised jurisdiction over trade within the
borough." The struggle was a fierce one and long continued, but the
spread of the craft guilds went steadily on, and the control of trade
passed into their hands. Then the next step--a share in the government
of the borough itself--was taken, and the government of the towns
passed from an oligarchy into the hands of the middle classes.
The craft guild came into being just as its predecessor had, from the
necessity of association for protection, and like it was democratic at
first; and, again like it, became in time an oligarchy as narrow as
that which it had deposed. The craft guild arose because the artisans
and tradesmen had grown to a position where they could recognize the
injustice and oppression of the merchant guild, and were strong enough
and persistent enough to assert themselves, and as long as the craft
guilds were democratic in spirit and were true to the needs for which
they were organized they flourished. But with age and success came
narrowness and bigotry and opposition to progress. They became
monopolies of employment and societies of greedy capitalists, and in
England withered away before the growth of the modern vast industrial
establishment.
I have ventured to give this general sketch of these guilds because
the same spirit and necessities which inspired them brought the trades
union into being. The trades union or labor organization was created
to protect the laborer and gain for him a better position in life, to
raise his standard of living. It is like the old guilds in being
subject to the same dangers as they were, and when it proves false to
its true objects it will pass away as did the old guilds. It will last
only so long as there is a necessity for its existence, as long as it
does the work it is born to do. And when it has come to deny freedom,
to refuse another's rights, and to repress industry, the seeds of
dissolution are already sown.
Trades unions or labor unions arose from the necessity of organization
among the laborers or wage-earners if they were to hold their own
against the aggregation of capital. The craft guild arose at a time
when trading and manufacturing concerns were small, when the interest
of both master and workman in a business were alike joined in
opposition to the exactions of a superior class--the merchant guild;
while the trades union came upon the field to protect the laborer
against his employer. Whatever other objects and aims it may have had
do not enter into my purposes in this paper. The personal relation
which had existed between the master and servant, the employer and his
few employees, the manufacturer and his half dozen workmen or
apprentices, no longer existed when the workers became scores and
hundreds, and the owner of the business was replaced by the manager or
superintendent. That personal relation was in some measure a
protection for both, but when that disappeared the temptation to
gratify owners and stockholders with big dividends became too strong
to be overcome. Against organized capital there was absolute need of
organized labor, and trades unions and labor unions and such
organizations came into existence.
There was no possibility of their existence until the laborer had
become intellectually and socially capable of organization, and until
the divine spirit of discontent drove him to association with his
brother worker. During all the years from the time of his serfdom up
to the time these organizations began he had been slowly growing in
development and gaining something in political position, but it was
not until political power came nearer and nearer to him that he gained
the strength to raise his standard of living, to make a stand for
himself. He knew the struggle would be a hard one, for everything he
gained seemed to be something taken away from those who held
themselves above him and better than he.
As a rule, we are very well content to let things alone if we
ourselves are fairly comfortable, and especially are we blind to
another's ills if the remedy for them is found in a renunciation of
part of that which we have always considered our own. There is nothing
particularly new in this. We easily can imagine some worthy burgher in
the olden time expostulating at the demand of the craft guild even to
be allowed to exist, and I do not imagine his language varied much in
spirit from the indignant disgust shown by some large employer of
labor to-day when he talks of labor unions. Doubtless these unions
to-day seem to him to have the same dangerous tendencies which the
craft guilds were talked of as having eight hundred years ago.
If there were no wrongs to right, if selfishness did not exist, if
there were a real belief in the brotherhood of man, and life were in
accordance with that belief, such organizations might not be
necessary, or if they existed have other aims; but until all men have
an equal chance for self-development, and a chance for something more
than a mere existence, labor unions or something to take their place
must exist.
And so we stand to-day with labor unions and the labor problem, so
called, with us. The laboring class is discontented. Men claim as
rights what their fathers would have been glad to get as favors. There
are violence and bad blood and waste, and so there have been from the
beginning. But there have been also injustice and oppression and greed
from the beginning. While we may condemn strongly much of the violence
and wrongdoing of labor organizations, we can find many extenuating
circumstances. The same spirit of independence, the same desire for
equal justice which animated the old guilds of England, and which have
made the Englishman and those who have sprung from him the freest as
well as most law-abiding people on the earth, are found within the
organizations of labor. We in this country hardly can find only danger
in the spirit which impels the workingman to resist every encroachment
upon his rights, to strive for that better future to which he believes
he is entitled. There were many things done in the youth of our
history which in our manhood we regret, and I hardly think, as a
nation, our own robe is so unspotted that we must draw it round us
lest it be soiled by the violence of a perhaps uneducated and
inadvisable but still earnest effort after higher and better
conditions of life. Let us read and ponder over our histories anew,
and with humble hearts try to find a better way both for the laborer
and ourselves.
I have said that it was through his organization that the laborer has
made the industrial and social advance he certainly has made in the
last century. The trades unions, like the guilds before them, had to
struggle for a legal existence, and their early days were full of
violence. Dr. Brentano, in his work on Trades Unions, says: "They have
fought contests quite as fierce as those of the old craftsmen against
the patricians, if not fiercer. The history of their sufferings since
the end of the eighteenth century, and of the privations endured for
their independence, is a real record of heroism." May not we hope with
him that now they may cease using the arms of violence which belong to
former times and use the legal means which belong to our days?
We can not approve of their violence, but let us not be unduly alarmed
by it. If society becomes so ossified in its usages and habits and
thinking that a newer and better thought can not get in, a nobler way
of living for all be entered upon, it sometimes seems as if in the
very nature of things violence must come to rend away the
obstructions. I believe that labor organizations are as much the
instruments of progress as the town guilds and craft guilds of old.
They will do their work, and the world will be the better for it. They
tend to make society more democratic industrially as well as
politically, as their predecessors did, and therefore better. For what
is democracy but a practical recognition of the brotherhood of man? If
Christianity amounts to anything, what higher aim should we have than
that?
Many students of the problems involved state that in the long run
labor still does not receive its full share of the profits; that in
order to keep up the standard of living which the wage-earner already
has reached he must have a larger reserve fund. In other words, he
must be able to save more. To do that and still live as he claims he
ought, his share in the profits, his wages, must be larger than now.
We can not claim that the standard is too high because admittedly it
is higher than ever before. Hon. Carroll D. Wright, in a recent
address, says: "Under the iron law of wages as announced by Ricardo,
it [the labor question] is a struggle simply to secure barely enough
of food and raiment and shelter to preserve the working physical
machine, the rule being that wages ought not to be paid over the bare
necessities. To-day the standard of living of the ordinary wage
receiver involves margins above the iron law of from ten to fifteen
per cent, out of which margin is to be found what are now called
spiritual necessities, means of leisure, reading, music, recreation,
etc., so that the demand of the worker in all civilized countries is
for the expansion of this margin. He feels entitled to this because
society has insisted upon educating him, giving him a taste for higher
things, making him a social and political factor; in fact, fitting
him for membership in a democratic community."
Labor organizations, in spite of much extravagant language and many
ill-advised acts, certainly aim at a better condition for the
wage-earner. We fail to see the intelligence underlying industrial
controversies because progress has been so rapid. Some of the methods
of labor organizations are violent and the weapons used are in a great
measure strikes and boycotts. That is industrial warfare and is as
costly and wasteful and cruel in many ways as any warfare is, but very
often these organizations seem to have no other method of making their
power felt; no other way of bringing about a needed reform. And we can
not say that all strikes have been or are necessarily wrong, except in
the same way that all warfare is an evil. The very readiness to strike
will effect a reform which a known weakness or lack of courage on the
part of the organization would have prevented. Such an authority as
John Stuart Mill says that "strikes, therefore, and the trade
societies which render strikes possible, are for these various reasons
not a mischievous, but, on the contrary, a valuable part of the
existing machinery of society." Whether in a particular case a strike
or boycott is right or wrong depends upon the facts of that case, and
whether we have reached a point where strikes are no longer right, no
matter what may have been the case in the past, is another question.
Let us hope we are nearer that time, at any rate. It will depend upon
the attitude of employers as well as employees.
Out of strikes themselves comes a remedy. Daniel J. Ryan, in his
article on Arbitration, records that "for sixteen years the disputes
of labor and capital in the rolling mills of England have been settled
by arbitration, and it has been an era remarkably free from strikes.
The Board of Arbitration for the north of England iron business was,
as all efforts of this kind usually are, the outgrowth of a strike."
Now, in this part of England before the formation of this board,
strikes were chronic. The works in that section recently had 1,913
puddling furnaces--more than in all Pennsylvania, and half as many as
in the entire United States.
The limits of this article will not allow a discussion of voluntary or
involuntary arbitration, but let me say that in the above case we see
that a simple arrangement between the parties changed all the strife
to peace. Will society long tolerate a continuance of industrial
warfare when it has in its own hands a preventive? For its own
protection will it not tell employer and laborer, "You must settle
your differences quietly by mutual agreement, or, if you can not, I
will settle them for you"? It says this now to the individual. Men and
women are not allowed in these days to settle their rights and wrongs
by brute force. That method passed away long years ago in civilized
communities. And society must continue to suffer from the violence and
waste of strikes until it teaches employers and workingmen and itself
a higher and better way.
May not it be possible that the outcome will be that associations of
wage-earners are to be treated as the equals of the employer? Will not
the democratic spirit of the age to come so permeate the industrial as
well as the political world that the laborer and the employer will
each have a share in the business they together carry on?
I have tried to make a very broad sketch of the change which has taken
place in the condition of the laborer, with a consideration of some of
the means by which that has come about. No longer is he a serf--no
longer even the servant of a ruling class. He at length has risen to a
share in the government of his town and country. No longer are laws
passed against him specially, but in his favor. The laborer has become
free--free to follow along the path of his predecessors, to gain full
justice, but not to oppress others. Before the law at least he is the
equal of his employer. I have implied at least that he has but
followed the spirit which led his older brother of the middle class up
from practical subjection to power. The craft guilds of the one, the
labor unions of the other, are in the same line as the old town
guilds. They all are manifestations of that democratic independence
which seems necessary for political freedom. They all imply the
capacity for organization as they all have shown its power. Let us
believe that, like the old guilds, these labor organizations are
helpful parts of the machinery of human progress. They force upon us
the fact that there have been and are injustices which must be
righted. We are beginning to learn that we can not depend upon one
side alone for our political economy or our facts; that we need an
organization strong enough to compel respect in order to protect those
who without it would be, as they have been, helpless.
All the smoke and clash of industrial warfare seem terrifying; the
innocent victims shock our sense of justice, but it is leading to the
perfect peace. The true democracy--the brotherhood of man--is forcing
itself upon mankind. If we in our prejudice, our selfishness, our
ignorance, defy the signs of its coming, try to prevent its growth, or
find only license in liberty, we shall continue to suffer all the ills
which an obstruction of progress or a violation of its laws always
brings with it. Is it not true that never in the history of the world
has there been an agrarian rising, a peasant revolt, a labor war, that
back of it we do not find as a main cause the injustice, the
oppression, the selfishness of a more powerful class? And will there
be perfect peace, perfect prosperity, until the divine harmony--the
real brotherhood of man--is the rule of life? Wrong always breeds
violence. But out of that violence, when the wrong is made right,
comes peace. Massachusetts in her motto declares that "by the sword
she seeks peace," and, to use Richard T. Ely's words, "the Prince of
Peace proclaimed, 'Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I
came not to send peace, but a sword'; and yet truly was he called the
Prince of Peace." Often is war the price of peace. And no one, no
class of men, deserve their freedom unless, when all other means fail,
they have the courage and energy to pay the price.
Therefore, we will not be alarmed at struggles which in the end will
bring about a better condition of life for all. Rather let us try to
end those struggles by pushing bravely on toward the end mankind is
striving for. We, with such a past as ours, must not be false to the
ideal which is our birthright; we should not be incapable of finding
the true way. If we will forget our merely partisan strife, our petty
jealousies, our class distinctions, and have only one aim, justice for
all, an equal chance for self-development for all, whether he be born
rich or poor, the ruling spirit of the next century will keep America
still true to her high calling, and mankind still will find in her the
inspiration to raise the disheartened and lowly of other lands. The
truest patriotism is broad enough to help the unfortunate everywhere,
and with courage, intelligence, and a faith in true democracy we shall
not fail.