72 8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ception of the real forces against which labor has to contend, in the 

 realignment of industrial conditions. If this shall come, the gain 

 will be greater than the loss. At the bottom of the engineers' move- 

 ment was a remarkable misreading of the operation of economic 

 cause and effect. The labor question of to-day is not the labor ques- 

 tion of fifty years ago; it turns now on broader considerations than 

 those which local environment can control. It is no longer a ques- 

 tion that has chiefly to do with the relative share of the proceeds 

 of industry which shall go to labor and to capital. In the prelimi- 

 nary stages of the evolution which has brought the factory system to 

 its present perfection, this was practically the only question which 

 underlaid the strike; and it may safely be conceded that in many 

 instances of conflict which arose over this question the strikers were 

 right, even when they failed. The law of industrial competition 

 under which this evolution has progressed has so operated that profits 

 have decreased as wages have increased; and so rapid has been the 

 evolution, so strenuous has become the competition which the in- 

 crease of capital has brought about in all industries and in all manu- 

 facturing nations, and more particularly in England, that the point 

 is already reached where the problem has come to be largely one of 

 how to keep the earnings of capital and the earnings of labor in that 

 status of equilibrium which shall be equitable to both. It is a devel- 

 opment in industry which was not dreamed of when trades-unionism 

 was getting under way; a development the end of which no man 

 can to-day foresee; a development which has brought about an in- 

 crease in the producing capacity of the world which has far out- 

 stripped the increase in population, and with which consumption 

 can keep abreast only in spasms and by jerks. Under these new 

 conditions, wherever and whenever an oligarchy of labor succeeds 

 in so fortifying itself that it can establish terms under which it is no 

 longer possible for the capital employing it to earn a fair return, then 

 it will have killed the goose which lays the golden egg. 



The English engineers resolutely shut their eyes to this aspect of 

 the case. Erom their point of view it had nothing to do with the 

 controversy. From the masters' point of view it was all there was 

 of the controversy. To the masters it was purely an economic ques- 

 tion; to the engineers it was one which vitally involved the social 

 advance of the wage-earning classes. It is not necessary to be- 

 lieve that this social advance and economics are hopelesssly at vari- 

 ance in the present stage of industrialism. It is better to say that 

 while employers have much to learn from the humanitarian point of 

 view, trades-unionism is equally in need of instruction from the 

 economic point of view. • 



Does this great strike throw any new light upon the possible solu- 



