FROM SERFDOM TO FREEDOM. 97 



a social and political factor; in fact, fitting him for membership in a 

 democratic community." 



Labor organizations, in spite of much extravagant language and 

 many ill-advised acts, certainly aim at a better condition for the wage- 

 earner. We fail to see the intelligence underlying industrial con- 

 troversies because progress has been so rapid. Some of the methods 

 of labor organizations are violent and the weapons used are in a great 

 measure strikes and boycotts. That is industrial warfare and is as 

 costly and wasteful and cruel in many ways as any warfare is, but 

 very often these organizations seem to have no other method of mak- 

 ing their power felt; no other way of bringing about a needed reform. 

 And we can not say that all strikes have been or are necessarily wrong, 

 except in the same way that all warfare is an evil. The very readiness 

 to strike will effect a reform which a known weakness or lack of cour- 

 age on the part of the organization would have prevented. Such an 

 authority as John Stuart Mill says that " strikes, therefore, and the 

 trade societies which render strikes possible, are for these various 

 reasons not a mischievous, but, on the contrary, a valuable part of 

 the existing machinery of society." Whether in a particular case a 

 strike or boycott is right or wrong depends upon the facts of that case, 

 and whether we have reached a point where strikes are no longer right, 

 no matter what may have been the case in the past, is another question. 

 Let us hope we are nearer that time, at any rate. It will depend upon 

 the attitude of employers as well as employees. 



Out of strikes themselves comes a remedy. Daniel J. Ryan, in 

 his article on Arbitration, records that " for sixteen years the disputes 

 of labor and capital in the rolling mills of England have been settled 

 by arbitration, and it has been an era remarkably free from strikes. 

 The Board of Arbitration for the north of England iron business was, 

 as all efforts of this kind usually are, the outgrowth of a strike." Now, 

 in this part of England before the formation of this board, strikes were 

 chronic. The works in that section recently had 1,913 puddling 

 furnaces more than in all Pennsylvania, and half as many as in the 

 entire United States. 



The limits of this article will not allow a discussion of voluntary 

 or involuntary arbitration, but let me say that in the above case we 

 see that a simple arrangement between the parties changed all the 

 strife to peace. Will society long tolerate a continuance of industrial 

 warfare when it has in its own hands a preventive? For its own 

 protection will it not tell employer and laborer, " You must settle your 

 differences quietly by mutual agreement, or, if you can not, I will 

 settle them for you " ? It says this now to the individual. Men and 

 women are not allowed in these days to settle their rights and wrongs 

 by brute force. That method passed away long years ago in civilized 



VOL. LV. 8 



