Januabt 8, 1904.] 



SCIENCE. 



51 



be treated, and ought to be treated, accord- 

 ing to its independent merit. It is impos- 

 sible to generalize far beyond tbe right of 

 workmen to organize, a right which no sane 

 student of industrial affairs and no intel- 

 ligent employer of labor ever now disputes. 

 Workmen have the right to organize and to 

 do so on such terms and for such lawful 

 purposes as seem good to them, but em- 

 ployers have an equal right to refuse to 

 deal with organizations whose purposes or 

 methods would lead to a loss in efficiency 

 and to reject particular overtures whose ac- 

 ceptance would have that effect. Employ- 

 ers who earnestly desire to accord to a 

 movement, the persistence of which against 

 ;great opposition and in spite of enormous 

 obstacles of internal origin, establishes the 

 economic soundness of its central principle, 

 will always strain a point in favor of deal- 

 ing with labor organizations. Indeed, no 

 employer ought to decide to refuse to con- 

 sider an offer to make a collective bargain 

 on the part of his employees except on the 

 most convincing grounds and with the 

 greatest reluctance. To destroy one labor 

 organization is but to prepare the way for 

 another, and the elimination of one set of 

 labor leaders will never be more than the 

 signal for others to enter upon the scene. 

 Nor are the new organizations and the new 

 leaders always to be preferred to the old. 



PAIR TREATMENT FOR PAIR EMPLOYERS. 



The character of a labor organization is 

 to be measured by its acts and by the prin- 

 ciples to which it adheres. The most com- 

 mon tests of character relate to the treat- 

 ment of non-union men, restriction of out- 

 put and the strike. Before any of these, 

 but not detracting from their importance, 

 I should put the attitude of the organiza- 

 tion toward the fair employer. What ob- 

 •jection can be raised to the declaration that 

 neither a fair workman nor a just organiza- 

 tion will enter into an agreement which 



may compel unfair treatment of a fair em- 

 ployer. Yet this principle, so obviously 

 just, is openly and constantly violated by 

 organized labor. Before the recent An- 

 thracite Coal Strike Commission, witness 

 after witness among those called on behalf 

 of the striking mine employees, testified 

 that prior to the great strike of 1902, he 

 had no grievance against his employer, the 

 Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron 

 Company. This great company enjoyed 

 an unimpeachable record for fairness to its 

 employees, and among them there existed 

 no doubt that should unintentional wrong 

 occur it could readily be brought to the 

 attention of its mining superintendent and 

 would be promptly and completely reme- 

 died. The man who holds this position, 

 John Vieth, has spent more than half a 

 century in the anthracite mines, beginning 

 as a day laborer. He knows the mines and 

 the miners as probably no other man has 

 ever known or can ever know them; his 

 sympathies are broad; his maimer, frank; 

 his honesty, rugged; his fidelity to the in- 

 dustry and every man in it, impartial and 

 unbreakable. The Reading company re- 

 duced the price of powder a full decade 

 before its competitors; it established the 

 sliding scale of wages; it never owned a 

 company store; it long ago established an 

 employees' insurance fund, and it pays its 

 miners on the simple per-ear and per-linear- 

 yard systems. Yet the organizers, who 

 were sent to the anthracite fields from Illi- 

 nois in the early part of 1900, were able 

 to induce the employees of the Reading to 

 pledge themselves to an agreement binding 

 them to desert their fair and generous em- 

 ployers whenever the miners in the north- 

 em and western anthracite regions should 

 feel sufficiently dissatisfied with the wages 

 or conditions in their fields to demand a 

 general strike. This is precisely what hap- 

 pened in May, 1902. The satisfied em- 

 ployees of the Schuylkill region had no 



