Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/749

Rh the dominant idea, strongly accentuated in all unionist literature, that there is a given amount of work to be done in this world, and not enough to go around; that the unionist, by arbitrarily limiting individual output, can thereby increase the demand for labor, and thus increase the number and the wages of the employed. This postulate of trades-unionism is as old as trades-unionism itself. It has a basis in humanitarianism which renders it praiseworthy as an abstract proposition. But it is an abstraction which belongs to the past century; which had its origin in the days when England held undisputed supremacy in the industrial world, and no combination of events seemed likely to dislodge her from that vantage. It has become an anachronism, just as England's supremacy has become a myth; and the same causes have produced the two results. If the commercial isolation of nations which formerly existed continued, the postulate of the engineers would be understandable. If English workmen still made machines for all the world, these hard-headed workmen might well have staked their all upon such an issue with hopeful hearts. But the direct results of their six months' idleness help to illustrate how far beyond their position the world has moved. The suspension of work has been an enormously expensive affair, not merely to the masters and the men, but to the nation. A great hole has been made in British commerce, and it will never be filled. Orders for machinery which the idle works in England could not fill have gone to the continent, and in many instances have come to the United States. The work has been done as well as in England; in most instances it has been done cheaper than England could have done it. The trade thus lost has gone for good. The engineers have not merely lost six months' wages; they have seriously crippled the wage-paying power of their industry. From their own standpoint, instead of increasing the opportunities for labor in England, they have reduced them. The abstract thing they fought for they have lost; but their ultimate loss would have been even greater had they won their battle instead of losing it.

The difficulty with the English trades-unionist view, then, is the failure to realize that the march of civilization has made the labor question an international question. Their contest was not so much with their employers as with their fellow-laborers in other lands. It is the competition of the latter which makes it impossible for the English iron masters to grant the eight-hour day, or to drag behind the rest of the world in the application of labor-saving machinery.

One writer, commenting upon the outcome of this strike, declares that trades-unionism has lost by its defeat all that it has gained by fifty years of constant contest. On the contrary, it would seem possible that it may gain, by reason of its defeat, a clearer