Violence in Industrial Relations 261 



competitors that an army has over a mob. At times, 

 well within memory, the contest has narrowed down 

 to a conflict almost personal, at times quite personal, 

 between concentrated financial powers, ending at 

 times in a disabling reverse or a disastrous overthrow 

 to one or the other. As the disadvantage of such 

 contests has become apparent to the greater com- 

 petitors, there has succeeded a disposition to co- 

 operation, corresponding to alliance between political 

 entities for their mutual benefit. 



In recent years the philosophy of force has 

 become the dominant philosophy in the relations 

 between capital and labour. ^ Revolutionary syndi- 

 calism, sabotage and "direct action," dynamite me- 

 thods of trade-unionism and machine-gun methods 

 of mine owners, epidemics of strikes and lockouts, 

 are all manifestations of the belief in the effective- 

 ness of force to solve industrial problems on the 

 basis of compulsory co-operation. 



Socialism, with its splendid ideals of the co- 

 operative commonwealth and the rational or- 

 ganization of society, has suffered severely from 

 the distortion due to the philosophy of force, 

 especially in its early period. Its chief error con- 

 sists in the failure to see (i) that the basis of human 

 society, now as from the beginning, is that mutual 

 aid and solidarity of the human race which it 



* See Violence and the Labour Movement, by Robert Hunter 

 (Macmillan, 1914), for a survey of anarchism and syndicalism in 

 relation to labour, and for a study of the place of force in modern 

 industrial relations. See also, John Graham Brooks, American 

 Syndicalism: The I. W. W. (Macmillan, New York, 19 13). 



