Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/107

Rh a social and political factor; in fact, fitting him for membership in a democratic community."

Labor organizations, in spite of much extravagant language and many ill-advised acts, certainly aim at a better condition for the wage-earner. We fail to see the intelligence underlying industrial controversies because progress has been so rapid. Some of the methods of labor organizations are violent and the weapons used are in a great measure strikes and boycotts. That is industrial warfare and is as costly and wasteful and cruel in many ways as any warfare is, but very often these organizations seem to have no other method of making their power felt; no other way of bringing about a needed reform. And we can not say that all strikes have been or are necessarily wrong, except in the same way that all warfare is an evil. The very readiness to strike will effect a reform which a known weakness or lack of courage on the part of the organization would have prevented. Such an authority as John Stuart Mill says that "strikes, therefore, and the trade societies which render strikes possible, are for these various reasons not a mischievous, but, on the contrary, a valuable part of the existing machinery of society." Whether in a particular case a strike or boycott is right or wrong depends upon the facts of that case, and whether we have reached a point where strikes are no longer right, no matter what may have been the case in the past, is another question. Let us hope we are nearer that time, at any rate. It will depend upon the attitude of employers as well as employees.

Out of strikes themselves comes a remedy. Daniel J. Ryan, in his article on Arbitration, records that "for sixteen years the disputes of labor and capital in the rolling mills of England have been settled by arbitration, and it has been an era remarkably free from strikes. The Board of Arbitration for the north of England iron business was, as all efforts of this kind usually are, the outgrowth of a strike." Now, in this part of England before the formation of this board, strikes were chronic. The works in that section recently had 1,913 puddling furnaces—more than in all Pennsylvania, and half as many as in the entire United States.

The limits of this article will not allow a discussion of voluntary or involuntary arbitration, but let me say that in the above case we see that a simple arrangement between the parties changed all the strife to peace. Will society long tolerate a continuance of industrial warfare when it has in its own hands a preventive? For its own protection will it not tell employer and laborer, "You must settle your differences quietly by mutual agreement, or, if you can not, I will settle them for you"? It says this now to the individual. Men and women are not allowed in these days to settle their rights and wrongs by brute force. That method passed away long years ago in civilized