Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/612

594 secondly, when this was refused as an impossible interference with the architects' design, that as much time as would have been required to rework them should be occupied by the Barrow masons in standing over them."

These are not mere caprices and fancies, they are the certain aberrations which misdirected, arbitrary power must cause.

This power of vagary is even more dangerous politically than it is in the industrial world. The eight-hour league lately attempted to canvass in favor of Randall for Speaker. What business has a labor league, an Odd-Fellows' lodge, or a Methodist church, as such, in the election of an officer of the United States Government? Let them consider Shay's insurrection, the slavery rebellion, and Know-Nothingism, both in its success and its failure.

Politically the genius of America welcomes every individual waif, allows him all liberty of political association or agitation; and he may make social or industrial combinations at will. Let any one of these extra-political associations lift a finger to interfere with a fold of her political garment, and she will crush it under a step heavier than the tread of Roman legions; she will smite it with an arm swifter and mightier than the embodied power of feudal or constitutional monarchies!

I would not deny the right of the individual laborer to "strike" when he is wronged beyond endurance. This inheres in him, like the right of revolution in the citizen—a dangerous power, only to be evoked in dire need, it cannot be formulated socially. As political order binds the citizen, so contract, that mystic sacrament of civilization, must ever hold the laborer fast; it can only be overcome by bitter injustice.

It may be said that trades-unionism, though vicious in direct influence, may enlarge the laborer through indirect social action. We must remember that the laborer here has social opportunities unknown in Europe. The freemasons, militia companies, Patrick's brotherhoods, and Good Templars, all found themselves on broad and benevolent ideas; higgling prices, the one effective force of a trades-union, can hardly equal these ideas in elevating the laborer. Going back to our characteristics of American citizens, it is not to be imagined that we lost all traces of old social groups because we did not represent them in our political organizations. The individual had become sufficiently socialized to be the unit of state, yet he did not lose all historic antecedents. The old groups show their traces in the American as well as in the Italian, German, and Englishman. We have not changed social laws, but given them new elasticity. Water cannot be water unless it intermingles freely with air. Society must refresh itself with new individual units, always moving, always classifying, always mingling unit and group again, like drop and stream, cloud and sea, water and air. Trades-unionism, and all socialism, in so far as it trenches on the State, is a backward step in this American