96 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



I have said that it was through his organization that the laborer 

 has made the industrial and social advance he certainly has made in 

 the last century. The trades unions, like the guilds before them, had 

 to struggle for a legal existence, and their early days were full of 

 violence. Dr. Brentano, in his work on Trades Unions, says: " They 

 have fought contests quite as fierce as those of the old craftsmen 

 against the patricians, if not fiercer. The history of their sufferings 

 since the end of the eighteenth century, and of the privations endured 

 for their independence, is a real record of heroism." May not we hope 

 with him that now they may cease using the arms of violence which 

 belong to former times and use the legal means which belong to our 

 days? 



We can not approve of their violence, but let us not be unduly 

 alarmed by it. If society becomes so ossified in its usages and habits 

 and thinking that a newer and better thought can not get in, a nobler 

 way of living for all be entered upon, it sometimes seems as if in the 

 very nature of things violence must come to rend away the obstruc- 

 tions. I believe that labor organizations are as much the instruments 

 of progress as the town guilds and craft guilds of old. They will do 

 their work, and the world will be the better for it. They tend to make 

 society more democratic industrially as well as politically, as their 

 predecessors did, and therefore better. For what is democracy 

 but a practical recognition of the brotherhood of man? If Chris- 

 tianity amounts to anything, what higher aim should we have than 

 that? 



Many students of the problems involved state that in the long 

 run labor still does not receive its full share of the profits; that in 

 order to keep up the standard of living which the wage-earner already 

 has reached he must have a larger reserve fund. In other words, he 

 must be able to save more. To do that and still live as he claims he 

 ought, his share in the profits, his wages, must be larger than now. 

 We can not claim that the standard is too high because admittedly it is 

 higher than ever before. Hon. Carroll D. Wright, in a recent address, 

 says : " Tinder the iron law of wages as announced by Eicardo, it [the 

 labor question] is a struggle simply to secure barely enough of food 

 and raiment and shelter to preserve the working physical machine, 

 the rule being that wages ought not to be paid over the bare neces- 

 sities. To-day the standard of living of the ordinary wage receiver 

 involves margins above the iron law of from ten to fifteen per cent, 

 out of which margin is to be found what are now called spiritual neces- 

 sities, means of leisure, reading, music, recreation, etc., so that the 

 demand of the worker in all civilized countries is for the expansion of 

 this margin. He feels entitled to this because society has insisted 

 upon educating him, giving him a taste for higher things, making him 



