Page:American Syndicalism (Brooks 1913).djvu/27

Rh we must at least try to "regulate" them, is now admitted. This implies the necessity of organization. It also implies its justification. But why should street car systems, express companies, telegraph and mining corporations require organization, while the wage labor connected with them is deprived of it? Capital asks for organization because an unchecked competition raises plain havoc with its undertakings. Organization brings these pillaging disorders under conscious control which helps to steady and maintain price standards. But what of labor at the bottom? Is it less mercilessly beset by competition than is the employer?

With its mobility, with its facilities and habits of moving from place to place, and, above all, with the inpouring of multitudinous immigrants, is it to be held for an instant that labor stands in less urgent need of organization than capital? I have just put this question to an employer tormented by a strike over this very issue. He admits that "in theory perhaps" his men should have what he has and must have, organization. But "practically," he adds, "it is impossible. The men will misuse it. There will be constant and intolerable interference with our management."

Yes, there would be interference, precisely as society had been forced, in its own defense, to interfere with organized capital. We had a century of interference to create the whole structure of factory legislation, and now again begins another struggle to devise the agencies of regulating lawless propensities in the "trusts." There is not an aspect of our social policy that does not assume the fact and the necessity