594 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



secondly, wlien this was refused as an impossible interference with the archi- 

 tects' design, that as much time as would have been required to rework them 

 should be occupied by the Barrow masons in standing over them." 



These are not mere caprices and fancies, they are the certain aber- 

 rations which misdirected, arbitrary power must cause. 



This power of vagary is even more dangerous politically than it 

 is in the industrial world. The eight-hour league lately attempted to 

 canvass in favor of Randall for Speaker. What business has a labor 

 league, an Odd-Fellows' lodge, or a Methodist church, as such, in the 

 election of an officer of the United States Government ? Let them 

 consider Shay's insurrection, the slavery rebellion, and Know-Xoth- 

 ingism, both in its success and its failure. 



Politically the genius of America welcomes every individual waif, 

 allows him all liberty of political association or agitation; and he may 

 make social or industrial combinations at will. Let any one of these 

 extra-political associations lift a finger to interfere with a fold of her 

 political garment, and she will crush it uuder a step heavier than the 

 tread of Roman legions; she will smite it with an arm swifter and 

 mightier than the embodied power of feudal or constitutional mon- 

 archies ! 



I would not deny the right of the individual laborer to " strike " 

 when he is wronged beyond endurance. This inheres in him, like the 

 right of revolution in the citizen a dangerous power, only to be 

 evoked in dire need, it cannot be formulated socially. As political 

 order binds the citizen, so contract, that mystic sacrament of civiliza- 

 tion, must ever hold the laborer fast ; it can only be overcome by bit- 

 ter injustice. 



It may be said that trades-unionism, thoxxgh vicious in direct 

 influence, may enlarge the laborer through indirect social action. We 

 must remember that the laborer here has social opportunities unknown 

 in Europe. The freemasons, militia companies, Patrick's brother- 

 hoods, and Good Templars, all found themselves on broad and benevo- 

 lent ideas ; higgling prices, the one efi*ective force of a trades-union, 

 can hardly equal these ideas in elevating the laborer. Going back to 

 our characteristics of American citizens, it is not to be imagined that 

 we lost all traces of old social groups because we did not represent 

 them in our political organizations. The individual had become suffi- 

 ciently socialized to be the unit of state, yet he did not lose all his- 

 toric antecedents. The old groups show their traces in the American 

 ,as well as in the Italian, German, and Englishman. We have not 

 changed social laws, but given them new elasticity. Water cannot 

 be water unless it intermingles freely with air. Society must refresh 

 itself with new individual units, always moving, always classifying, 

 always mingling unit and group again, like drop and stream, cloud 

 and sea, water and air. Trades-unionism, and all socialism, in so far 

 .as it trenches on the State, is a backward step in this American prog- 



