single abuse connected with it, but the time has come when some honest attempt should be made to understand a force of such extraordinary persistence and prevalence. Without such understanding, we cannot even conceive an educational plan, to free this feeling from its abuses.

A concrete instance will give more light than an argument.

During one of the strikes I had a guide through the collieries below Wilkesbarre. I found him in a modest cottage for which he had paid, in nineteen years, all but three hundred and seventy-five dollars. He and his wife had made a garden. Flowers were abundant, and vines had been trained into a pretty arbor. Here six children had been born. Here three of them had died. If associations that knit into sensitive tissue every deeper human experience influence any of us, they are not likely to have left unmoved the owners of this simple home.

This man and his mates had struck. They asked that their grievances be considered before some fair tribunal. The employers refused to arbitrate, but began forthwith to bring in outside labor to take the place of the strikers. I give this miner's view of the situation, not as a final answer to the hard question involved; I give it, confident that no answer is worth stating which does not carefully take his view into account. "We asked for months," he said, "that certain conditions under which we work be changed. The employers would not listen to us, and we struck. Now while we are simply waiting to have our dispute fairly settled, they bring in outside men and take away our work. I was brought here by the last

foreman and urged by the company to buy our home. It cost us years of saving. Now they tell me to get out if I don't like the work here. I can't get out. This is my home, with all my friends, my church, my union. There is no other industry here except the railroads, and they won't look at a man fifty-four years old."

No fair person, with the imagination to put himself in another's place, will believe that the letter of legal justice meets all that there is in this case. Neither will such person fail to understand why this miner was bitter against the outside workman who was willing to come in to take the miner's place during the dispute.

In this special strike, who was this outside nonunion man (the scab)? Hundreds of them were men in other industries steadily at work. It was the time when republican orators were saying with much truth, "Every man is at work." These men were hired for a better wage to leave their work, to take the job of another who was for a time asking to have his demands considered. There are now men in our cities whose business it is to hire themselves out as "strike breakers." Asking no questions as to the right or wrong of the strike, they are ready to go hither and yon to take the places of other men. I have seen miners who had learned from those inside the mine that those who had taken their places were brought from a city outside the coal region where they were regularly employed. It is a terrible strain upon average human nature to look upon this with the coolness and self-restraint of the disinterested observer. In spite of the provocation, personal vio

lence should be met with the swiftest stroke consistent with justice. Scarcely a value of our civilization equals that of law and order. But the real rights of these miners are not settled in this instance, after the law has done its work.

A question remains which is not yet settled. Morally, and on grounds of good policy, we have still to meet this issue of the non-union man in time of strike. No generalization is yet possible, but in cases like the above, when troops of men have been expressly encouraged by the company to buy their houses, non-union men should not be brought in to break the strike until every fair resource of arbitration has been exhausted, even if it drives us to compulsory arbitration. To refuse arbitration, and then hire private retainers of the Pinkerton type, will not long be tolerated by a fair public. The irritants and the dangers are not only too great, they are not necessary. The joint-agreement avoids them. Under its provisions, work is not stopped until the forces of arbitration have done their work.

We repeat the phrase, "Oh, if the trade unions only had really competent leaders." Let us learn another phrase that is quite as apt, "Oh, if the great business had leaders competent enough to avoid the unnecessary sources of suspicion and bitterness among their workmen."

A wise use of the joint-agreement, made elastic and practically adapted to varying conditions, is one long, sure step toward such leadership, and toward the common educated good will upon which industrial peace depends.

CHAPTER XIII

A FINAL QUESTION

IT has been shown what is possible with labor organization when, with intelligence and open-mindedness, masters and men unite under orderly methods. We have finally to ask in what spirit another disquieting presence rising in our midst is to be met. We may save ourselves a world of trouble by trying, first of all, to bring to bear upon socialism enough intellectual sympathy to understand it. Only in rare instances have our business men, or the public generally, honestly tried to know what the immense sacrifices behind the trade union really mean. At this late day, because of compulsion and inconvenience, we are putting forth some effort to understand the industrial struggle for existence from the point of view of labor organization. It is now seen that a little of this tardy wisdom could have saved the vast waste of the coal strike by doing in the beginning what public opinion compels us to do many months afterward. The joint-agreement of the Boston Building Trades would not only have saved New York and Chicago inconceivable sums, but would meantime have educated both parties to the contract so that a sea of future ills could be avoided. The opportunity is given us to be wiser with the coming socialism than we have proved ourselves with

trade unions. The German and much more the Belgian experience which has been given, show us that socialism has now developed so that an educational coöperation with it is possible. We cannot at present have the Belgian coöperative. For a con

siderable future our battle will be in cities and with public-service corporations. For the highest educational purposes this gives us every advantage that we need. Thus the final question, as distinctly moral as it is one of self-interest, I conceive to be this: Are we as a people willing to put in practice those methods which increase this educational coöperation? I have given much evidence to show that the trade union, socialism, and business management, taken at their best, are now so far in touch, that a common working basis of industrial and administrative experiment is at least possible. It is through these experiments that our best discipline is to come. There are splendid hopes for a well-ordered industrial society if we are brave enough and generous enough to recognize these possibilities of agreement and to use them educationally.

On the need of industrial reconstruction; on the defects of the wage system; on the abuses of the trade union as well as of the trust; on the need of extending legal regulation, there is now a very remarkable consensus of opinion among able writers, economists, business men, labor leaders, and socialists trained by experience. This general acquiescence does not, of course, extend to details or to methods. It gives us, nevertheless, so broad a ground of common sympathy and understanding, that it should be made the basis of a new educational and experimental activity.