Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/602

582 susceptible as they are of an organization and discipline as perfect and efficient as distinguished the greatest armies of history.

If further proof of the utility of such action is desired, it can be had by observing the result attained by one of our Eastern trunk lines—the management of which has made itself prominent in organizing for its employés protection against financial distress resulting from sickness, accidents, old age, and other vicissitudes of life and death—which will be noticed further on—as also in the fact that such measures have actually and uniformly been found to compensate for material differences in wages; to put the service offering them at a premium, and ultimately to secure it the best and steadiest men at relatively insignificant outlay.

But it has often been asserted that corporations, no more than individuals, should enter into the philanthropy business, and that railroad companies are not more than other employers interested in the personal welfare of their people. Such assertions convict their authors of ignorance of social science and lack of forethought unpardonable in this advanced age in those intrusted with the overshadowing interests of our great American railways. In defense of such assertions it is alleged that individuals and classes of men are in the market representing labor, and other individuals or combinations of men representing capital are likewise in the market; that the one is perfectly justifiable in purchasing the other at its market value, and, when capital ceases to be able to pay the market value of labor, the other will naturally seek other purchasers, and that there the claims of one upon the other cease; that as labor is never held bound to maintain its connection with capital to the laborer's disadvantage, so, when labor ceases to make profit for capital, the latter must be allowed to exercise the same right to sever their associations.

While as a broad proposition this must be admitted to be true, railroads are, more than most other employers, interested in the prosperity of their employés, and, like all other corporations whose work is dangerous, are partly answerable for the misfortunes of their employés, and peculiarly interested in providing means for lessening liabilities to accident, and in relieving the suffering and hardships caused by injuries received in their service. In partial recognition of this principle, many individuals and corporations employing small bodies of labor continue the pay of their men when sick, but where large masses are to be dealt with such a course would entail an expenditure beyond all reason. As an illustration of this, on one of our Eastern trunk lines, the employés of which number something over twenty thousand (and several of its rivals have more than double this force), the sick and disabled from all causes have, within the writer's knowledge, numbered continuously more than six hundred per annum for at least four consecutive years. Increased remuneration for labor will not alone solve the problem under discussion, for railroad men are