Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/751

Rh of such troubles for the future? Unfortunately, the method of settlement of labor disputes by arbitration has not gained prestige from the experience, but has rather lost it. Arbitration was never more advantageously introduced than when the initiative was taken in the engineers' strike last November by the Right Hon. T. C. Ritchie, president of the Board of Trade, and one of the most influential members of the Salisbury Cabinet. It was left for him to arrange the "pour parlers" of the conference, and the moral influence outside the committee room for a settlement was tremendous. The only result was to strengthen the position of the engineers, for they shrewdly consented to submit to their union certain propositions made by the employers, and they were rewarded by a vote of forty thousand in opposition, with only one hundred and fifty in favor of acceptance. If this had been purely a question of wages, arbitration would have doubtless settled it. Wages involve questions of fact, and conference and discussion are increasingly successful in bringing employers and employed together on a basis which knowledge of the facts shows to be mutually equitable. But bound up in this controversy was the whole question of the economic conditions of modern industrialism, both national and international, as well as the question of that indefinite, indefinable line where the rights of the employer end and those of his workmen begin. The more the conference discussed these questions, the farther apart the parties to it found themselves. They are beyond settlement, except a temporary armistice, by any scheme of arbitration under any auspices, private or governmental. There is no middle ground, in such a dispute as this one was.

But time and the sequence of events will work out a solution, as has been the case with all the great problems which have successively confronted civilization. We can not see into the future, nor can we even vaguely outline the ground upon which employer and employed will ultimately agree to live at peace with each other. But we need not despair of its finding, nor need we fear that it is hopelessly distant. The world moves faster in a modern decade than in three centuries of the middle ages. A hundred years ago the world did not dream of such a thing as the labor question in the form in which it now presents itself. This present phase is only a transitional episode of conditions quickly developed, but not yet sufficiently advanced to have worked themselves into their final forms. Every great controversy like the engineers' strike throws a flood of light upon the problem by bringing all its elements into clearer relationship, and unconsciously leads the world a step nearer to the ultimate solution. An all-sufficient reason for this hopeful view of the matter is the fact that larger knowledge is always coming to