II. ORGANIZED LABOR AND LIBERTY. [ADDRESS TO CARPENTERS' UNION.] WORKIN ORKINGMEN have suffered much at the hands of unwise friends. Beautiful schemes and fanciful solutions without number have been offered the laborer as the fruition of his hopes. Accepted, they have proven puerile or pernicious. It is evidently not sufficient that a man's sympathics be right, for no great and difficult question can be settled by sympathy alone. A clear understanding of the problem in all its phases must direct the feeling that demands redress. False reasoning and foolish conduct, coupled with good intentions, jeopardize the grandest reform of the age. In discussing the attitude of organized labor toward individual liberty, and the methods by which workingmen may surely better their condition, I shall endeavor to dismiss all ambitious programs of wholesale reform, and to utter by way of counsel nothing that might not safely be reduced to practice. Working That the organization of labor was a step in advance of old-time weakness and isolation, no fair man denies. men's societies have gathered within their ranks vast numbers just because they answered to an imperative necessity. They have come when the relation between employer and employed was no longer a personal relation. Master and man-under the old order, acquaintances, often friends-were, under the new conditions, strangers. Incorporated and organized capital on the one hand. The unprotected and friendless workman on the other. Conditions better calculated to provoke tyranny and result in slavery can not be imagined. Under conditions thus perilous to labor, and in obedience to the law of self-preservation, organizations of work ingmen came into existence, and they have come to stay. Present organizations may indeed decline. Many of them seem in danger of adopting methods that can end only in disaster. The But should this be the case and present organizations fail, new and better ones will arise. The day of ignorant, isolated unorganized labor is over. laborer is no longer a tool. Let indiffer-, ence and injustice take heed. He is a man, with the brain and heart of a man, determined to secure a man's chance in life. But let the laborer also remember that the reform he proposes to effect through his organization is difficult, and far reaching; that his leaders are men oftentimes wholly inexperienced in conducting large enterprises of any kind; that the temptation to be rash, and the disposition to be dictatorial, is usually too much for uninstructed men suddenly in possession of authority; that it is possible for American workmen to escape from the injustice of corporations only to fall under bondage to organizations controlled by a majority too ignorant and too un-American to regard either the law of justice or of liberty. The central principle of labor associations I suppose to be this, that labor, under present conditions, does not receive a just proportion of the wealth it creates, and that by united effort it is possible to compel a greater degree of equity than would otherwise prevail. The favorite method of compulsion thus far employed has been the "strike," frequently including violent interference with fellow laborers who ventured to fill positions thus vacated. This method is war. It has the advantage of being direct, rapid and sometimes effective in securing a definite result. Moreover it calls the attention of a thoughtless public to existing evils. But the strike, accompanied by violence, will be found in the long run to have the immense disadvantage of arraying against "organized labor" that public . (D) opinion which is, in this country, the court of last resort. Public opinion, which all men and movements must win-or failing to win suffer defeat is nothing other than the sober second thought of the middle class. The future of the workingmen's cause depends upon the final attitude of this great middle class toward the principles and methods upon which your reform is conducted. I understand the middle class to include farmers, professional men, business men, small capitalists, workingmen—not dependent upon daily earnings for daily bread-in brief, that vast body of our people to whom want and luxury are alike unknown. These constitute the center of the social army. Society gains and holds only what this central body approves. Labor must win the middle class to win the country. Certain principles control in all crises the great body of the American people. In "piping times of peace," principle |