Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/744

722 the employed deny this, there is a definite fact at issue; and such strikes are coming more and more to be settled in accordance with what that fact is found to be. It is not often that a strike succeeds, when the employers are able to show that the wages demanded can only be paid by carrying on business at a loss. We can prognosticate with certainty about capital, that it will not carry on business indefinitely at a loss—if for no other reason, because it soon eats itself up. Another thing quite as certain is that capital will not indefinitely prolong a conflict with labor at a time when it is possible to effect adjustments by which it can continue to produce at a fair profit. These are two laws which experience has evolved out of this class of labor disputes.

The engineers' strike presented an entirely different phase of the labor problem. It was never a direct quarrel over dollars and cents; the question of wages, while indirectly involved, was subordinated to another, which, if we analyze it carefully, we shall find to be this: Which of the two parties in interest shall control the business that labor and capital jointly carry on? The labor problem in England has reached precisely this stage, and the engineers' strike was, in fact and in essence, a contest for the control of the management of the works, and the conditions under which these enterprises shall be carried on. This is a very broad way of stating the case, but it is essentially fair to both parties. It is always easy to recognize, in any labor dispute, the difference between contention for redress of legitimate grievance, as to wages or otherwise, and contention for control and direction and limitation over the management and conduct of manufacturing enterprises. This difference has distinguished and differentiated the engineers' strike from most of the great labor conflicts which have preceded it in England. It was, from start to finish, a contest over a great economic principle—a principle which lies at the foundation of modern industrialism. The whole long struggle has been singularly free from any collateral questions tending to hide or minimize its real significance. Both sides understood it; both prepared for a battle royal; both were ready to wage it to the bitter end; and thus it has been a dogged, determined, remorseless test of endurance over a vital issue of business economics, while the world looking on has only vaguely sensed its true meaning, or has missed it altogether.

It is impossible not to admire the splendid fidelity with which the engineers carried themselves through the six months in which they locked horns with their employers. Of all the labor organizations in England, the best equipped for such a struggle, both in men and in money, was the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. The organization is quite the aristocracy of English trade unionism.