Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/605

Rh sider it in the relations of organized labor, which include the so-called labor and capital (or capital and labor) disputes. The same principles of association prevail here which dominate all social action. What are the powers, the rights, and the limits of association, whether it be of the employers or the employed? I shall resolve the question of rights into that of powers. If there be a legitimate power inherent in these associations, I will not maintain any vested right against it. This is not strictly accurate, but sufficiently so for this discussion.

In treating of association we must first consider the materials which make it; the characteristics of the individuals who associate themselves together. And here we must remember that the individual is a social entity of quite recent growth. The Roman, German, Anglo-Saxon societies knew nothing of individual men and women. The Roman family, gens, or house and tribe, the German benefice, commendation, and guild, the Anglo-Saxon ceorl and eorl castes, with their tithings and hundreds—all these institutions, mingling in the stream of history, made each individual into a part of something other than himself. Society as well as government was classified into groups, which were further classified and subdivided. The single individual had no place; under the Saxon laws he was outlawed, and might be killed. These groups gradually broke up, under the friction of modern life. America, as we have been frequently told in the centennial reminiscences of this period, for two hundred years received the germinal ideas of Europe. We received, through immigration, the most characteristic and modern ideas, and incorporated them into a new political and social life, freed from many restraints still prevailing in the old countries. Politically, the individual was fully recognized for the first time; socially, he was raised into freer activity than any society had ever developed; yet, socially, the individual was more limited by the influence of the old grouping than he was in his political relations. These distinctions are important, because they modify all the subsequent relations of employers and employed, and control the character of associations in this country.

The associations of employers in America thus far have been loosely formed, and their action on the labor question has been indirect. The associations of laborers have been modeled after those prevailing in England, and known as trades-unions. If we would comprehend the principles of any association of laborers in America, we must first study the history of these English unions, for the results achieved by these powerful organizations govern the movements of all labor agitators, whether they are conscious of it or not. The whole principle of trades-unionism has been set forth carefully and candidly by Mr. Thornton in his work "On Labor." Mr. Thornton is neither a communist nor a socialist, but an acute and thoughtful Englishman, with large sympathies, who, whenever his sense of justice will allow, leans to the side of labor in its struggles with capital. He sees in