unions are suspicious of the courts, and will not trust their verdicts in arbitration cases.1

If, then, it is "a fight and is likely to remain so"; if the great forces of capitalism are to be so used as to defeat the complete organization of labor along lines that capital is taking for its own protection; if the devices of applied profit sharing, stock distribution, and arbitration are to be narrowed to the exceptional and less important instances, must we in the last resort trust to the educated magnanimity of the rich?

The Le Play societies in France, as well as the brilliant group of English positivists, have urged this remedy for a generation, "the moralization of the employer." The masses, they tell us, are too difficult to manage, therefore concentrate upon the employer. Teach him that he is a trustee of public as well as of private interests. There is great nobility in this teaching, and signs are everywhere that individual magnates are responding to this public expectation. Hospitals, colleges, libraries, largesses of all sorts, add rare distinction to our age.

Two observations must however be made. (1) If one go to that list, which all have seen, of four thousand multi-millionnaires whose combined possessions are believed to be beyond sixteen thousand millions, it will be found that a startlingly small minority has apparently ever heard of this fair gospel of public trusteeship. In many other cases of princely grants to public objects, it is certain that, at most, but a part

1 In a copy of the National Labor Tribune I find these words, Compulsory arbitration is a dream of fools when it is not a pawn of knaves."

of the yearly income has been parted with. (2) The other observation, weightier still, is that no possible munificence in public donations affects or has any relation to the sources of trouble in which the social question has its origin. We suffer for want of a wise and patient organization between employer and employed by means of which labor shall have the same rights as capital. The managers tell us that free competition is their ruin. They must have federated organizations to protect them from capricious and unmanageable cutting of prices. Economist and business man alike admit upon the whole the justice of the claim. But if the facts of the labor market are really faced, the immensity of our immigration choking the avenues of unskilled labor, who can deny that competition among laborers may be turned against them with the same killing effect as that under which capital suffers? Labor's need of some conscious control of competition is in every point as true and as easily justified as that of capital. For this the trade union stands. The man who defeats this right with one hand, while he builds with the other a public institution, does not render the service for which our need is most urgent. We are glad of his charity and good will; we should rejoice far more, if he were to recognize among his helpers every right of combination which he himself claims, and give of his superior strength to make the complete organization effective.

It is the writer's belief that, for reasons already given, efficient and regulative legislation will be too long defeated by competing local interests and by consequent political timidities. If, then, we are to

expect so little from the other remedies noted; if these failures are likely to be the occasion, and even the instigator, of an unceasing social unrest, to what hopes can we look? It is here assumed that the unrest will become more consciously and more definitely socialistic. Socialism will become an influence among us that will compel much more than dilettante curiosity and academic discussion. Whether its increase is to bring us blessings or curses turns largely upon the spirit in which it is met. No strong people will yield to it without a long and desperate struggle. But with what weapons shall the conflict be waged? It is the writer's chief hope in these studies to show that every claim of socialism may be challenged and opposed in ways that are not only free from danger, but are in their very nature educational and fortifying at the very points where our citizenship is weakest. For the first time in history it is possible to subject socialistic experiments to the tests of experience. Toward the close of the nineteenth century something like a final judgment had been passed upon the socialism of the Utopias. None more than the abler socialists now condemn the "dream excursion" of the separate colony.

During the last twenty years, experience has been accumulating which enables one to reach another and still more important judgment about collectivist ideals. At least seven countries have now entered upon a conflict with those whose propaganda is to substitute the collective ownership of the means of production for private ownership. In every instance where socialists have been given or have won for themselves specific and continuous responsibilities,

some remarkable results are now clearly observable. It is with these, and with conclusions based upon them, that the final chapters on Socialism deal.

But every radical change that socialistic reorganization implies, cannot be understood apart from its relation to certain questions of fact and of speculation. These will therefore first claim our attention.

CHAPTER II

POLITICS AND BUSINESS

THERE are roughly three points of view in the social question that of the employer, that of the laborer, and that of the public which includes them both. "Social politics" takes for granted that the social welfare is above either of these partial interests. It is politics of the common good rather than that of any class or party. Into it has entered all those regulative measures which extend and adapt what was first called factory legislation.

In no country of the first rank is this legislation so weak as in the United States. Nowhere is there such fatal lack of unity, and nowhere is it so easy to discredit sound legislative proposals by the fear that local business will suffer. This half paralysis of legislation that is really social; that guards labor as carefully as it guards capital, is the more unhappy in its results because large commercial interests never used the government for its private ends with more unconcealed audacity than among ourselves. Here, too, the laborer is learning the uses to which government and politics may be put. Looking to the city and government for help has been taught to the common people by the most successful business men in this country.

Our magnates of industry have not preached pater