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because by the application of progressive rates any result in the direction of preventing the transmission of unduly large accumulations can be accomplished which the legislature shall from time to time deem advisable. Without some legislative regulation of this character there is no check upon the accelerating growth of wealth in the hands of the few; nothing to cause its distribution except the spirit of benevolence and the proverbial profligacy of the owners of inherited means. It is poor morality, as well as economics, to intrust the distribution of the world's wealth either to. folly or philanthropy.

In this conflict of argument and opinion certain facts remain unchallenged. First, the legal power of Congress to impose a graduated inheritance tax has been sustained by the Supreme Court and is therefore not an open question. Second, progressive inheritance taxes have been tried with satisfactory results both in Australia and New Zealand, the region of experiments, and in England, the home of conservatism. With the constitutionality of the tax established. and its utility tested by experience, it is clear that the question is largely one of the rates which should be fixed. Should small legacies be exempted? Should the tax be progressive? If so, what should be the scale of progression? Ought the highest rate to be five per cent. as now provided by some State laws, or fifty per cent. as was proposed by Edward Bellamy? Should the legislature adopt the views of Andrew Carnegie-reaffirmed in a recent utterance of exceptional significance—and exact from every large estate "a tremendous share, a progressive share"? What tribute might the Russell Sage millions properly have paid? What part of the colossal bequest held in trust for a grandson of Marshall Field and accumulating for his benefit, or injury, might the Government wisely have appropriated to the use of its citizens?

It is in the highest degree important that any such tax should be kept within conservative bounds, but what these bounds shall be-what is fair and wise, and what is unreasonable and confiscatory-must necessarily be left to the

judgment of Congress. If it be argued against the tax that there is danger of unreasonable and radical legislation on the subject, such a contention, as was pointed out by Justice White in his scholarly and luminous decision upholding the Inheritance Tax of 1898,1 "involves in its ultimate aspect the mere assertion that free and representative government is a failure.”

In dealing with the problem of concentrated wealth, the progressive inheritance tax very naturally presents itself as a partial solution. Its sponsors have for years earnestly, but with indifferent success in attracting public attention, urged its adoption as a convenient method of raising revenue and an efficient means for reducing" swollen fortunes." By the sudden appearance of the President as its champion this proposition is now receiving that degree of public consideration which it well deserves. Why should it anywhere, even among the very rich, arouse fear and amazement? Is it not rather surprising that in democratic America the unqualified moral right to inherit regal fortunes should not long since have been assailed? How absurd now ap pears the doctrine of the divine right of kings, rulership over one's fellow-men, vested as a thing of private property in lineage, the grave responsibilities of the crown blindly intrusted to an unborn child! Yet power resides not alone in hereditary monarchs. The ownership of ten million dollars is a power greater than possessed by many a potentate. The use or misuse of such a fortune is fraught with far-reaching consequences, moral and economic, to whole communities and to thousands of human beings; yet without astonishment or doubt we have seen such fortunes, with all their latent possibilities of good or evil, pass to the heir-at-law, regardless of his capacity to administer the great trust. May not a future generation regard the present doctrine of unlimited inheritance in the same light with which men trained in democracy now view the transfer of the crown from the monarch to his next of kin ?

In the light of considerations such as these, the progressive inheritance tax loses its destructive and ominous aspect. 1 Knowlton vs. Moore, 178 U. S., 41.

Rather does it appear as a safeguard of private ownership. If our capitalists who "exhibit a singular stupidity in resisting every attempt to impose upon them their proper share of the public burdens" realized its ultimate effect, they would welcome this tax as a protection instead of viewing it as a threat. Let this tax limit, even in a slight degree, these gigantic fortunes, and compel them to contribute directly to the National revenue; let it thus become evident that the rich are bearing their proportion of the burdens of government, and the popular realization of this condition will be a bulwark to private property and vested interests.

Here is proposed a system of Federal taxation which must appeal strongly to the popular imagination. It adds no burden to the poor, but permits those who have much to contribute to the government somewhat in proportion to their ability to pay. It invades no natural rights. It violates no maxim of the law. It overleaps no constitutional barriers.

It weakens none of the sound timbers of our social structure. Rather does this proposed tax-with its ultimate purpose of a more equitable distribution of public burdens and private wealthtend to strengthen and make firm the entire structure of the State. True democratic institutions need a broader basis than free and equal political rights; there must be at least reasonable economic freedom and equality. This tax aims to level up life's chances, to give every man a fairer start, to produce a greater "equality of opportunity," which, no less than equality of legal rights, should inhere in a republic as one of its essential attributes.

A reasonable inheritance tax, wisely imposed by Congress, under its ample powers, is neither revolutionary nor socialistic; it is, on the contrary, a measure of practical wisdom and of social justice. This tax has been styled "an institution of democracy." May it not indeed prove to be one of the head stones of the corner?

U

INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY

TRADE UNIONS AND POLITICS'

BY JOHN GRAHAM BROOKS

NTIL very recent years the trade union has been a bulwark against Socialism. That well-to-do people have not seen in the trade union one of the most powerful conservative influences shows unfairness. The attention has been fixed upon the points of friction with employers. Compared to the movement as a whole, this friction has been incidental and relatively unimportant. It has even been the source of innumerable labor-saving inventions from which society has received great advantage. But, wholly beyond the fighting line between employer and employed, the unions have done as much for education as any college. They have not only

This is the twelfth article in the series on Indus trial Democracy. A former article by Mr. Brooks, who is known to most of our readers as the author of the book "The Social Unrest," will be found in The Outlook of November 17 last, under the title "The Trade Union and Democracy."-THE EDITORS.

forced up and maintained their standard of living (which was as good for society as for themselves); they have carried on for a full century a system of group discipline that is educational in the highest sense.

The internal history of unions like those of the printers, cigar-makers, ironmolders, miners, shoemakers, is one long dramatic story of struggle to discipline the membership. It is strictly true that this inner conflict has been quite as severe as the conflict with the employer. To train millions of wage-earners to habits of submission to democratic organization; to inspire them to the continuous sacrifices necessary to this end; to train up such multitudes to that rare virtue in a democracy, obedience, stands for an immense educational influence. Even to create a local union, to make

it conscious of common interests, to secure permanent committees and develop effective parliamentary procedure, is not only educational in the best sense, but it is precisely the kind of education those citizens most need. It is, however, when these locals begin to affiliate with State and National bodies that we see the full measure of this discipline. One of our ablest presidents of a National organization once told me, "It costs me far more time, anxiety, and tact to keep our local unions reasonable than all our differences with employers. I have much more to do in stopping strikes than in carrying them on. The local is so near the sources of trouble, there are so many green men and so many hotheads, besides no end of bitter rivalry in the organization, that our National body is on the strain all the time to keep the locals in order."

The single question of "jurisdictional fights" among different unions is of itself one of the most baffling problems with which the National body has to

cope.

Perhaps one best of all sees the results of this long interior discipline by sitting two or three days in a convention of the Federation of Labor. I have heard very competent men assert that one saw there an average of parliamentary capacity which was distinctly above that of the best of our State Legislatures.

I repeat that so far as Socialism is thought to be a danger, this trade union tradition is not only conservative, but it has been the most active and sturdy exponent of Socialism in this country. The reason of this is that unionism practically accepts and co-operates with the competitive wage system. To uproot and cast out this system is of course one chief object of Socialism. That unionism should enter into partnership with the hated thing, should even make one of its highest aims the formation of joint agreements with employers, thereby making the partnership completer and more permanent, constitutes an offense which Socialists do not forgive. There is a body of Socialist literature containing far more bitterness of tone toward trade unions than toward the capitalists.

It is at this point that one of the most

difficult as well as one of the gravest of labor and social questions arises. Has the wage system elasticity enough to retain its hold on organized labor? Within that system can labor continue to secure what it will insist upon-a rising standard of income in conformity to general progress? Or can a competitive system in a world market afford to give the income which labor will ask? In New Zealand and Australian colonies labor concluded that it could not get these advantages within the wage system as now constituted, and therefore it turned deliberately to the open field of general politics. When Sir Charles Dilke wrote his book on "Greater Britain," he was impressed by the fact that Australian trade unions had so long put their trust in the old political parties. This confidence assumes that the interests of labor are safe in the hands of politicians who represent the capitalistic interests of the time, as our own Republican party now does in this country. Sixteen years ago capitalism, backed by its own politics, inflicted upon unionism in Australia a defeat so humiliating that labor turned in solid phalanxes to form a party of its

own.

After years of hesitation, a strong contingent in England now boldly adopts the same policy. The powerful unions in Belgium long since turned from the wage system to politics, with signal advantage to themselves. It is the only country where one is quite certain yet that it was an advantage.

Is labor in the United States to follow these tactics, or are we to work out policies of our own, still within the economic field marked off by the old wage payment?

That the world's business in different leading countries is every year being done more and more alike and more and more under pressure of vast currents common to all, would seem to mean that the United States cannot maintain a difference in labor method so sharp as this. Yet two facts of extraordinary significance will aid capitalism in holding labor to the wage system in something like its present form. The first is the fact of race variations, including the negro; the second, the extent and

significance of our immigration. This need not be left merely as theory. At hundreds of points one may now see the competitive ways in which these races, with fewer wants, are pitted against those with higher wants so as to check the demand of the union except for the stronger and more skilled worker. These are often deliberately selected and given a higher than the union wage, in order to cripple the men's organization. Strictly from the point of view of the average worker, it may become a terrible weapon, as one may see at the present moment in certain plants of the Steel Corporation, into which multitudes of South and East European laborers are being rushed. What this will mean in some future period of sharp and prolonged business depression suggests very ugly possibilities. But meantime, together with the growth of employers' organizations, it unquestionably tightens the grip of the wage system on labor and weakens the power of the trade union to act politically-to act politically in the new and not in the old sense. For two generations our unions have been in politics in the sense that they have been upon the field to secure specific benefits through legislation: shortened hours, prevention of imported contract labor, adequate factory and mine inspection, restricted child labor, and the like. They have again and again flirted with general politics, but invariably to their own undoing, as with the Knights of Labor, until the strongest of the unions united in keeping questions of party politics out of their councils.

Year after year the Socialists have fought the unions on this point, urging that the old parties in no sense represented the real interests of labor. The Socialists' glee at Mr. Gompers's apparent change of attitude is natural enough.

A Socialist friend tells me with exultation, "We all knew the Federation of Labor would sooner or later get its lesson. President Roosevelt and Speaker Cannon have given it the first shock. When Gompers and his friends left that conference, they saw for the first time, what Socialists have all along known, that trade-unionism must break with the stupid tradition of avoiding politics,

For several years the fight has been hot between us on this point. The sleepers have at last got out of bed."

Is this unconcealed purpose of President Gompers and his followers the first momentous step in removing the barriers between Socialist and trade union policy in this country? My friend thinks it rather absurd to question this. He points gleefully to the obdurate facts, first, of accumulated defeats of labor legislation in Congress, together with injunctions that grow in number and severity, and, second, to the high enthusiasm inspired by triumphs of labor in the English Parliament.

Labor organization in that country avoided party politics until convinced that its economic existence was threatened by laws made too exclusively in the interests of capital. The recent Socialistic vote of two great bodies of miners, together with the uncompromising attitude of some thirty of the fiftyfour labor members, has for the first time shocked English Liberals into some sense of the situation. That the politicians representing the employers should have shown no recognition of this seriousness has its partial explanation (as in our own country) in the current belief that Socialism is a bugaboo-a mere conjured specter casting its spell upon faddists and upon many queer and unsuccessful people here and there. That Socialism was to be thought of as an alternative to anything has not yet been really faced by the successful business man. He thinks the trade union an organization chiefly to create trouble and obstruct prosperity. Yet the contention of these unions has been to accept the present wage system, to co-operate with it, working out common agreements under which the two organizations of capital and labor could continue to do the world's work together.

Here, then, capitalism itself has had a powerful if very irritating colleague, one ready to work with it along its own lines. Is this protection now to be withdrawn? For organized labor to "go into politics" in the sense now threatened by Mr. Gompers is to strengthen every revolutionary specific which Socialists have at heart. One of the hardiest and most seasoned of our politicians, com

menting on the Speaker's snub to labor, said, "The old war-horse showed his usual sense. These labor mouthers are eternally bluffing about going into politics. They have scared us now and then just as the Prohibitionists have done, but the labor vote is as little dangerous to the old parties as Christian Science." The stubborn fact on the side of this scoffing politician is the past history of labor in general politics. But what of the future? We cannot decide with any confidence between the gay certainty of this Socialist and the grim cynicism of the party hack.

Since 1900, however, great things have come to pass in the United States. No event since the Civil War is half so momentous as the recent moral outbreak of indignant judgment against this same capitalistic politics in the United States. To make popularly known just what relations the various kinds of party boss sustain to speculative and privileged forms of business is the elementary achievement that will make reform both in business and politics at last possible. To do this, a form of moral and intellectual slavery has to be destroyed. It is the slavery of our stand-pat party politics. As its commercial alliances have strengthened, it has crippled the spirit of freedom in this country as effectually as did slave labor in the South before the war. That strong and enlightened men now cower before issues like that of reciprocity, which deals with specific monstrosities in the tariff, or are afraid to take sides against men like Quay and Penrose, gauges the intellectual subserviency. The extent of our revolt against this slavery measures also our hope of freedom and reform. That the people are waking both to the fact and the obligations which the fact implies may be seen at a score of centers just now in the United States.

That this situation offers a chance for organized political independence is too obvious for comment. It presents an issue as commanding and as distinct as that about which the Republican party drew its first inspiration and greatness. That the issues at present are so conspicuously economic is the reason why labor is likely to see its chance and

follow it. When John Mitchell published his book, "Organized Labor," he said cautiously that the immediate policy of the unions was to avoid politics, but the time might be near when they would be forced to act. The breathless succession of disturbing investigations since then reads like a cogent list of reasons why independent politics has at last become both a duty and good strategy. The saner heads in the labor movement had experience enough to know that the time had not come even to break ground for an independent party, for the sufficient reason that organized labor was too isolated and too weak in voting strength. The changes in the last few years have converted to belief in political action a formidable host from all classes, including the many modest business interests that may set themselves against political and business spongers as doggedly as labor.

Nor do I forget that the unions themselves sorely need purging. There is not a vice of our political and business tyranny which has left them unsmirched. But who has set before them the open and flaunting example of these vicious practices? Their first effective schooling was from the same alliance of privileged business and party politics. The most dangerous corruption of trade unions begins with City Hall affiliations, and here business and politics had long before set up their partnership of public exploitation. This is but another illustration of the common responsibility for these evils which lies so heavily upon every section of the community; most, perhaps, on those who do not vote at all.

The saying that we have not had a government by the people is now worn to a platitude. We have had government by professional political cliques working in sympathetic partnership with specific privileged interests. Practically every signal victory since the "awakening has sprung from this new spirit of political independence. This new spirit is the strict measure of our achievement up to date.

Now, if labor organization be considered as a whole-Germany, France, England, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand—– no influence matches it in bringing in this

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