440 MUNICIPAL ADMINISTRATION 



craving for enjoyment, the pushing of vital forces, the very right 

 of every citizen to be what he is, without pretense or assumption of 

 virtues which he does not really admire himself, but which he 

 imagines to have been set up as a standard somewhere else by the 

 virtuous whom he does not know. That old Frankenstein, that 

 ideal man of the eighteenth century, is still haunting us, although 

 he never existed save in the brain of the doctrinaire. 



This dramatic and feverish triumph of the self-seeker, see-sawing 

 with that of the interested reformer, does more than anything else, 

 perhaps, to keep the American citizen aw r ay from the ideals of genu- 

 ine evolutionary democracy. Whereas repressive government, from 

 the nature of the case, has to do with the wicked, who are happily 

 alw r ays in a minority in the community, a normal government 

 would have to do with the great majority of the population in their 

 normal relations to each other. 



After all, the daring of the so-called " slum politician," when he 

 ventures his success upon an appeal to human sentiment and gener- 

 osity, has something fine about it. It often results in an alliance of 

 the popular politician with the least desirable type of trade-unionist 

 as the reformer who stands for an honest business administration 

 becomes allied with the type of business man whose chief concern 

 it is to guard his treasure and to prevent a rise in taxation. 



May I use, in illustration of the last two statements, the great 

 strike in the Chicago Stock Yards, which occurred a few weeks 

 ago? The immediate object of the strike was the protection of the 

 wages of the unskilled men from a cut of one cent per hour, although 

 of course the unions of skilled men felt that this first invasion of 

 the wages, increased through the efforts of the unions, would be 

 but the entering-wedge of an attempt to cut wages in all the trades 

 represented in the Stock Yards. Owing to the refusal on the 'part 

 of the unions to accept the arbitration very tardily offered by the 

 packers, and to their failure to carry out the terms of the contract 

 which they made ten days later, the strike in its early stages com- 

 pletely lost the sympathy of that large part of the public dominated 

 by ide&ls of business honor and fair dealing, and of that growing 

 body of organized labor which is steadily advancing in a regard for 

 the validity of the contract and cherishing the hope that in time 

 the trades-unions may universally attain an accredited business 

 standing. 



The leaders, after the first ten days, were therefore forced to 

 make the most of the purely human appeal which lay in the situa- 

 tion itself, that thirty thousand men, including the allied trades, 

 were losing weeks of wages and savings, with a possible chance of 

 the destruction of their unions, on behalf of the unskilled, the newly 

 arrhed Poles and Lithuanians who had not yet learned to look out 



