Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/479

 TRADES UNIONS AND PUBLIC DUTY 459

the time being, in the grasp of a great social passion, which is making for the emancipation of the wage-earner, as, in another time, a great social passion insisted upon the emancipation of the slave. We study other great movements toward human free- dom, and fail to comprehend that the consciences of our con- temporaries are aroused to a participation in the same great struggle.

We condemn in trades unions what we praise when under- taken by the state, when it enters into a prolonged civil war to rid itself of slavery, or finds itself involved in international complications and expensive warfare for the sake of securing political freedom for the Cubans. If the United States under- took the war with Spain for the reasons alleged, the govern- ment has certainly taken part in a great sympathetic strike. Concerning the action of the state, we have all been educated by years of discussion and a sense of participation and respon- sibility. Concerning the action of the trades unions, we allow ourselves to remain singularly ignorant, and insist that they shall bear forward a great movement toward social amelioration, not only without our sympathetic understanding, but with the added burden of public disapproval.

After all, the state, the nation, as Mazzini pointed out, repre- sents no more than a mass of principles in which the universality of its citizens were agreed at the time of its foundation. But we would not have the state remain motionless and chained to the degree of civilization attained at the moment the state was founded. We would have a rational development of the truths and principles which gave vitality to the state at first. If the' objects of trades unions could find quiet and orderly expression in legislative enactment, and if their measures could be sub- mitted to the examination and judgment of the whole without a sense of division or of warfare, we should have the ideal devel- opment of the democratic state.

Probably the labor organizations come nearer to expressing moral striving in political action than any other portion of the community, for their political efforts in most instances have been stimulated by a desire to secure some degree of improvement in