AN INDUSTRIAL OBJECT LESSON. 729 



tion of such troubles for the future? Unfortunately, the method 

 of settlement of labor disputes by arbitration has not gained prestige 

 from the experience, but has rather lost it. Arbitration was never 

 more advantageously introduced than when the initiative was taken 

 in the engineers' strike last November by the Right Hon. T. C. 

 Ritchie, president of the Board of Trade, and one of the most influ- 

 ential members of the Salisbury Cabinet. It was left for him to 

 arrange the " pour parlers " of the conference, and the moral influ- 

 ence outside the committee room for a settlement was tremendous. 

 The only result was to strengthen the position of the engineers, for 

 they shrewdly consented to submit to their union certain proposi- 

 tions made by the employers, and they were rewarded by a vote of 

 forty thousand in opposition, with only one hundred and fifty in 

 favor of acceptance. If this had been purely a question of wages, 

 arbitration would have doubtless settled it. Wages involve ques- 

 tions of fact, and conference and discussion are increasingly suc- 

 cessful in bringing employers and employed together on a basis 

 which knowledge of the facts shows to be mutually equitable. But 

 bound up in this controversy was the whole question of the economic 

 conditions of modern industrialism, both national and international, 

 as well as the question of that indefinite, indefinable line where the 

 rights of the employer end and those of his workmen begin. The 

 more the conference discussed these questions, the farther apart the 

 parties to it found themselves. They are beyond settlement, except 

 a temporary armistice, by any scheme of arbitration under any 

 auspices, private or governmental. There is no middle ground, in 

 such a dispute as this one was. 



But time and the sequence of events will work out a solution, as 

 has been the case with all the great problems which have successively 

 confronted civilization. We can not see into the future, nor can we 

 even vaguely outline the ground upon which employer and em- 

 ployed will ultimately agree to live at peace with each other. But 

 we need not despair of its finding, nor need we fear that it is hope- 

 lessly distant. The world moves faster in a modern decade than in 

 three centuries of the middle ages. A hundred years ago the world 

 did not dream of such a thing as the labor question in the form in 

 which it now presents itself. This present phase is only a transi- 

 tional episode of conditions quickly developed, but not yet suffi- 

 ciently advanced to have worked themselves into their final forms. 

 Every great controversy like the engineers' strike throws a flood of 

 light upon the problem by bringing all its elements into clearer 

 relationship, and unconsciously leads the world a step nearer to the 

 ultimate solution. An all-sufficient reason for this hopeful view of 

 the matter is the fact that larger knowledge is always coming to 



VOL. LII. 54 



