Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/319

Rh other, from which can not but come a more reasonable and equitable solution of the problems that are continually presented to each.

And notwithstanding all the attacks that have been made upon them, labor organizations survive. Like the other trusts, they are the product of natural forces; like the other trusts, they fulfill a natural function. As men of greater knowledge and broader views come to their control, the directors of great industrial organizations who want to be just toward their employees find it advantageous to communicate with them through such representatives. The situation can be gone over with them more frankly and thoroughly and in shorter time than would be possible with each of the workingmen separately, or with all of them jointly, and the report and recommendations of these representatives to the workingmen can be met and received as the result of the best judgment of competent minds acting in their behalf. It is to be hoped that in time the perception of a common interest and a common sense of justice between employer and employee will render the labor organizations unnecessary. It is likewise to be hoped that advancing civilization will reach a plane whereon all political government will be unnecessary.

An assertion that has been used with great vehemence against industrial aggregations is that they are instruments for ensnaring and misappropriating the funds of the weak and unwary. Condemnation on this ground was made of the minor industrial and financial combinations. The cry against corporations a generation ago was as bitter as that against the trusts of the present. It has arisen from the fact that the multiplicity of means that have been developed for borrowing capital, the giving of mortgages, the issue of stock certificates and bonds of different kinds and forms, with the attendant manipulation in stock markets, has given men with predominating desire for personal gain opportunity for obtaining money in excess of the needs of their business, or of the value of the property which they can offer as security, and complicated methods of bookkeeping have concealed its unjustifiable application and the misuse of profits. Instances of such defection have been so numerous as to breed in the minds of a considerable portion of the population a certain distrust of all that pertains to the buying and selling of stocks and bonds, and this distrust in many places with many people is so deeply rooted that the advantages to the entire community gained by honestly and discreetly managed industrial combinations are overlooked. It is the men of largest brains and keenest wit that in the fields of finance and industry conceive and control enterprises of magnitude, and when this keenness of wit has been combined with lack of scruple they have often been able to envelop the conduct of their enterprises