Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/611

Rh River strike as the best and almost the only good principle established there. The municipal and military power promptly restored order and left the trades-unionists their peaceable and natural powers of resistance, all which any association of this sort can legitimately claim.

The fundamental truths cannot be too deeply impressed on both employers and employed. Let no employer busy himself in politics or jurisprudence, about unionist combinations or conspiracies. We have laws enough now, if we will obey and enforce them. If any striker or unionist trespasses on the rights at common law of his employer or brother laborer, punish him with humane haste and compassionate severity. One labor-leader says an employer has no more right to discharge a man than to dungeon him. That is their business individually, and can only be controlled by the larger social and nobler instincts of humanity. If laborers choose to starve rather than work for less wages, or employers choose to rust out their mills rather than take less profits, let them. It is not the business of organized associations to interfere. Not even the State, the greatest of all associations, can control this complication. The issue lies among the great seething forces of the market indicated above; they are both economical and social, any external pressure will only aggravate the difficulty.

There can be only one legitimate power in an American labor association assuming to control the employed; that, in the famous words of Adam Smith, is the power of "higgling the market." On every other side its action is hedged by great social limits which I have indicated rather than stated. This, like friction in mechanics, is a necessary function, but is attainable by other means, and is it worth the social cost involved in associations using all the methods of a despotism? The general rise in wages has been equal, in countries unvisited by trades-unions, to that obtained in England, as Mr. Brassey has shown.

Higgling prices through combination is not a creative force, it is a negative accessory to creative faculties. It involves tremendous waste of social and economical forces. To quote Thornton (pages 344-346):

"A bricklayer's assistant, who by looking on has learned how to lay bricks as well as his principal, is generally doomed nevertheless to continue a laborer for life.". . . Bricks beyond Lancashire are excluded. "To enforce the exclusion, paid agents are employed; every cart of bricks coming toward Manchester is watched, and, if the contents be found to have come from without the prescribed boundary, the bricklayers at once refuse to work. . . . A master-mason at Ashton obtained some stone ready polished from a quarry near Macclesfield. His men, however, in obedience to club rules, refused to fix it until the polished part had been defaced, and they had polished it again by hand, though not so well as at first!. . . On the importation of worked stone into Barrow, the lodge demanded first that the bases should be worked over again;