Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/106

96 I have said that it was through his organization that the laborer has made the industrial and social advance he certainly has made in the last century. The trades unions, like the guilds before them, had to struggle for a legal existence, and their early days were full of violence. Dr. Brentano, in his work on Trades Unions, says: "They have fought contests quite as fierce as those of the old craftsmen against the patricians, if not fiercer. The history of their sufferings since the end of the eighteenth century, and of the privations endured for their independence, is a real record of heroism." May not we hope with him that now they may cease using the arms of violence which belong to former times and use the legal means which belong to our days?

We can not approve of their violence, but let us not be unduly alarmed by it. If society becomes so ossified in its usages and habits and thinking that a newer and better thought can not get in, a nobler way of living for all be entered upon, it sometimes seems as if in the very nature of things violence must come to rend away the obstructions. I believe that labor organizations are as much the instruments of progress as the town guilds and craft guilds of old. They will do their work, and the world will be the better for it. They tend to make society more democratic industrially as well as politically, as their predecessors did, and therefore better. For what is democracy but a practical recognition of the brotherhood of man? If Christianity amounts to anything, what higher aim should we have than that?

Many students of the problems involved state that in the long run labor still does not receive its full share of the profits; that in order to keep up the standard of living which the wage-earner already has reached he must have a larger reserve fund. In other words, he must be able to save more. To do that and still live as he claims he ought, his share in the profits, his wages, must be larger than now. We can not claim that the standard is too high because admittedly it is higher than ever before. Hon, Carroll D, Wright, in a recent address, says: "Under the iron law of wages as announced by Ricardo, it [the labor question] is a struggle simply to secure barely enough of food and raiment and shelter to preserve the working physical machine, the rule being that wages ought not to be paid over the bare necessities. To-day the standard of living of the ordinary wage receiver involves margins above the iron law of from ten to fifteen per cent, out of which margin is to be found what are now called spiritual necessities, means of leisure, reading, music, recreation, etc, so that the demand of the worker in all civilized countries is for the expansion of this margin, lie feels entitled to this because society has insisted upon educating him, giving him a taste for higher things, making him