Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/108

98 communities. And society must continue to suffer from the violence and waste of strikes until it teaches employers and workingmen and itself a higher and better way.

May not it be possible that the outcome will be that associations of wage-earners are to be treated as the equals of the employer? Will not the democratic spirit of the age to come so permeate the industrial as well as the political world that the laborer and the employer will each have a share in the business they together carry on?

I have tried to make a very broad sketch of the change which has taken place in the condition of the laborer, with a consideration of some of the means by which that has come about. No longer is he a serf—no longer even the servant of a ruling class. He at length has risen to a share in the government of his town and country. No longer are laws passed against him specially, but in his favor. The laborer has become free—free to follow along the path of his predecessors, to gain full justice, but not to oppress others. Before the law at least he is the equal of his employer. I have implied at least that he has but followed the spirit which led his older brother of the middle class up from practical subjection to power. The craft guilds of the one, the labor unions of the other, are in the same line as the old town guilds. They all are manifestations of that democratic independence which seems necessary for political freedom. They all imply the capacity for organization as they all have shown its power. Let us believe that, like the old guilds, these labor organizations are helpful parts of the machinery of human progress. They force upon us the fact that there have been and are injustices which must be righted. "We are beginning to learn that we can not depend upon one side alone for our political economy or our facts; that we need an organization strong enough to compel respect in order to protect those who without it would be, as they have been, helpless.

All the smoke and clash of industrial warfare seem terrifying; the innocent victims shock our sense of justice, but it is leading to the perfect peace. The true democracy—the brotherhood of man—is forcing itself upon mankind. If we in our prejudice, our selfishness, our ignorance, defy the signs of its coming, try to prevent its growth, or find only license in liberty, we shall continue to suffer all the ills which an obstruction of progress or a violation of its laws always brings with it. Is it not true that never in the history of the world has there been an agrarian rising, a peasant revolt, a labor war, that back of it we do not find as a main cause the injustice, the oppression, the selfishness of a more powerful class? And will there be perfect peace, perfect prosperity, until the divine harmony—the real brotherhood of man—is the rule of life? Wrong always breeds violence. But out of that violence, when the wrong is made right, comes peace.