Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/201

 SOCIAL DISCONTENT AND LABOR TROUBLES 1 87

rumbling of unrest that is everywhere heard. On the other hand, it cannot be said that all workingmen are honest, consistent, temperate, and industrious. Professor Sombart, a philosophical socialistic writer, speaks of the "arrogance of wealth," and also calls trade unions "exclusive, narrow, brutal toward those beneath them toward four-fifths of the outsiders the poorer classes of workmen." 1

It is generally recognized that unions have an important and, on the whole, a beneficent function in economic development, but the true friends of labor most deeply deplore the violence, cruelty, and wanton waste that follow in the wake of ill-advised agitation, the restriction of apprentices, and the limitation of production, by which the amount available for distribution is lessened and all suffer.

Summing up, it may be asserted that we have, in this country, under a fairly harmonious working of the existing order, gained the mastery of modern production, increased the earnings of workingmen, raised all classes to a higher level of general com- fort ; have broadened the avenues through which the employed become employers, the dependent independent; have made edu- cation common, and, nearer than any other nation, maintained equal justice between the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor ; have endowed men with nobler altruism, and dotted the land all over with great institutions for the elevation and amelio- ration of the conditions of the people. It must be apparent to the most casual student of social problems that our country's continued contributions to the cause of human progress depend largely upon the good-will, real community of interests, and harmonious activities of its people; and to invoke and cultivate the spirit of envy, class prejudice, hate, and anarchy must inevitably tend to undermine the foundation upon which our institutions rest.

WILLIAM A. GILES.

1 Socialism, p. 79.