Page:Challenge of Facts and Other Essays.djvu/112

 INDUSTRIAL WAR

[1886]

who has attentively read the discussion of the so-called labor question during the past few months, must have observed that a strict definition of terms and phrases is the first thing needed in the discussion, and the one thing that has most been wanting. The loose use of terms tolerated by the economists has been extended by the newspapers, adopted erroneously by the preachers, abused by the professional labor reformers, and finally entirely misunderstood by the employed, until the popular notion of the matter has become little else than a tangle of fallacies and misconceptions of social facts, relations, and possibilities. He who says "social," nowadays, takes license to promulgate vague and whimsical notions or projects, having for their general aim to bridge the traditional gulf between meum and tuum, or to take from one of his neighbors and give to another, according to his good judgment of what would be more "just." As an illustration of misuse of terms I mention the use of "capital and labor" to designate employer and employee, and as an illustration of the abuse of catch phrases I refer to the almost suicidal misuse of "An injury to one is an injury to all" in the south-western strike.

The only attempt I have met with, in this discussion, to define what the labor question is, formulated it in this way: "With the growth of democracy the political power has passed into the hands of a numerical majority, while