ASSOCIATION- IiY ITS RELATION TO LABOR. 593 



River strike as the best and almost the only good principle estab- 

 lished there. The municipal and military power promptly restored 

 order and left the trades-unionists their peaceable and natural powers 

 of resistance, all which any association of this sort can legitimately 

 claim. 



The fundamental truths cannot be too deeply impressed on both 

 employers and employed. Let no employer busy himself in politics 

 or jurisprudence, about unionist combinations or conspiracies. We 

 have laws enough now, if we will obey and enforce them. If any 

 striker or unionist trespasses on the rights at common law of his em- 

 ployer or brother laborer, punish him with humane haste and com- 

 passionate severity. One labor-leader says an employer has no more 

 rio:ht to discharge a man than to dungeon him. That is their busi- 

 ness individually, and can only be controlled by the larger social and 

 nobler instincts of humanity. If laborers choose to starve rather than 

 work for less wages, or employers choose to rust out their mills rather 

 than take less profits, let them. It is not the business of organized 

 associations to interfere. Not even the State, the greatest of all asso- 

 ciations, can control this complication. The issue lies among the 

 great seething forces of the market indicated above ; they are both 

 economical aud social, any external pressure will only aggravate the 

 difficulty. 



There can be only one legitimate power in an American labor assor 

 elation assuming to control the employed ; that, in the famous words 

 of Adam Smith, is the power of " higgling the market." On every 

 other side its action is hedged by great social limits which I have 

 indicated rather than stated. This, like friction in mechanics, is a 

 necessary function, but is attainable by other means, and is it worth 

 the social cost involved in associations using all the methods of a 

 despotism? The general rise in wages has been equal, in countries 

 unvisited by trades-unions, to that obtained in England, as Mr. Bras- 

 sey has shown. 



Higgling prices through combination is not a creative force, it is 

 a negative accessory to creative faculties. It involves tremendous 

 waste of social and economical forces. To quote Thornton (pages 

 344-346): 



" A bricklayer's assistant, wlio by looking on has learned how to lay bricks 

 as well as his principal, is generally doomed nevertheless to continue a laborer 

 for life." . . . Bricks beyond Lancashire are excluded. " To enforce the ex- 

 clusion, paid agents are employed; every cart of bricks coming toward Man- 

 chester is watched, and, if the contents be found to have come from without the 

 prescribed boundary, the bricklayers at once refuse to work. ... A master- 

 mason at Ashton obtained some stone ready polished from a quarry near Mac- 

 clesfield. His men, however, in obedience to club rules, refused to fix it until 

 the polished part had been defaced, and they had polished it again by hand, 

 though not so well as at first ! . . . On the importation of worked stone into 

 Barrow, the lodge demaaded first that the bases should be worked over again ; 

 VOL. Tin. 38 



