Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/324

308 rebuke which, has ended in legislative enactment designed to prevent a continuance of the real or apparent abuse. The discharge of employees, the reduction of wages, the raising of prices, the decrease of production, whether justifiable or not, antagonize the immediate interests of a greater or less proportion of the population whose discontent often finds voice through men who, whether sincere or guided by self-interest in their protestations, are utterly unable to trace the ramifications of cause and effect throughout the complications of the industrial and commercial web. And such men, clothed with the power of legal enactment, have given force to statutes that have tended to kill instead of to cure. But it can not be denied that the desire for gain, without due regard for justice, has led men charged with the administration of industrial organizations into actions that have abundantly justified public complaint and severe punishment, and many organizations have been formed because of the facility for public aggression attained by combined action and the absence of individual responsibility; and all that has been reprehensible in the acts of such organizations, gaining a greater or less publicity, has tended to obscure the perception of the benefits of industrial combination as a whole.

The enumeration of the evils attendant upon combined action leads to the perception that they did not spring into existence at any one period of industrial development, but that they are the outgrowth of not properly restrained actions, arising from motives that exist in individuals, and were manifested in the actions of individuals before the tendency toward combination became noticeable, and have been manifested with increasing conspicuity at each of the stages of combination. In other words, the vices and virtues of aggregations of men are but the vices and virtues of individual men, and vice and virtue alike become intensified as they are manifested in the actions of an aggregation of men controlled by leaders of whom they are characteristic. Opportunity for dispute as to the rate of wages and the hours of labor arose when there were first employer and employee. It is the very trading instinct to sell at the highest price and purchase at the lowest. The mean and the crafty have ever sought to obtain money without repaying it, to obtain privilege without compensation, to gain advantage over others by fair means or foul. As it has been the increase of intelligence and morality and accumulated experience that has led to a wider justice between individual men, so must it be the increase of intelligence, morality, and accumulated experience that will lead to the allotment of justice between individual man and an aggregation of men, and between aggregation and aggregation.

The very hugeness of the more recent industrial combinations