APPLETONS' 



POPULAE SCIENCE 



MONTHLY. 



APRIL, 1898. 



AN LNDUSTKIAL OBJECT LESSON. 



By S. N. D. NOETH. 



THE past year was one of unusual disturbance in England, in 

 the relations of labor and capital, and the chief of these indus- 

 trial conflicts possessed a significance never anywhere surpassed. 

 The lockout of the engineers — we call them machinists in this coun- 

 try — marks the new alignment of organized labor and organized 

 capital — what may be called the secondary stage of the labor ques- 

 tion — more sharply, more tensely, than ever before. A glance at 

 the underlying causes of the engineering lockout will afford a clear 

 conception of the form in which " the labor question " presents itself 

 for the solution of the twentieth century. 



There have been strikes that involved a larger number of work- 

 ers, as the great coal strike of 1893, and the London dock strike; 

 strikes that have lasted longer; strikes that have been costlier; 

 strikes that have developed more bitterness of feeling. There has 

 been no previous collision which, brushing aside all questions as to 

 wages, reached down so closely to the root of the problem, and 

 spread open to public knowledge the real essence of the difference 

 which threatens the productive forces of modern times. The en- 

 gineers' strike furnishes a concrete illustration of the immensity and 

 the perplexity of the unsettled issue of modern industrialism. 



Broadly speaking, labor strikes are of two kinds. The great 

 mass of them, hitherto, have belonged in the simpler group, and have 

 had to do with the wage question only; they are simple, however 

 serious and complicated they may outwardly be, because they turn 

 upon a single economic fact. When employers insist that certain 

 rates of wages are necessitated by existing business conditions, and 



TOL. LII. 53 



