Labor Movement Not a War

No

O more profound mistake can be made than to call the labor movement a labor war.

War is hell. And this whether upon the battlefield or within the purlieus of industry.

War means destruction. The word has no place in the business of production.

War, anywhere, calls out all the baser passions of the human heart.

There can be no war without hate. And hate cannot be controlled when once let loose. It must burn, hurt, destroy.

All about war, hovers constantly a flock of vultures, and hyenas crawl attendant. There never was a noble war. Crime, treachery, blood-lust, cruelty, and heartbreak are the inevitable fringe, if not the very substance, of war.

The march of the laborer toward his rights is not a war.

THE

HE only thing that ever has brought, ever will bring permanent betterment to the laborer is the improvement of the conscience of the world.

It is time that labor opened its eyes to see its true friends and its real enemies.

Whatever strengthens the love of humanity is the friend of labor; whatever reinforces the feeling of class is the friend of privilege and capital.

Whatever makes keener the feeling of altruism among the populace is the friend of labor.

Whatever makes men more humane, more noble-minded, more sensitive to one another's pain, more responsive to the demands of justice, is the friend of labor.

Hate and all its allies are the enemies of labor.

Those who are the real criminals in the McNamara case are all those who have aided in the making of class bitterness.

The labor union officials and the officers of the capitalistic combinations may wash their hands as ostentatiously as Pilate, claiming that they had no part in the crime that sent twenty-one innocent people to death; but the truth needs to be rubbed in that such outbreaks of violence occur naturally in an atmosphere surcharged with class bitterness.

Vindictiveness, vituperation, vicious accusation, and the appeal to vengeance bring forth the certain crop of crime.

The intelligent leaders may say that they never meant to go so far, but some weak will or perverted head is sure to do the deed they darkly hinted.

Lincoln Steffens asks this question: "What are we Americans going to do about conditions which are breeding up healthy, good-tempered boys, like these McNamara boys, really to believe, as they most sincerely do they and a growing group of labor-that the only recourse they have for improving the conditions of the wage worker is the use of dynamite against property and life?”

A

LA

Law the Friend of Labor

AWLESSNESS is an enemy of labor. Whatever tends to supersede the due process of law plays into the hands of the shrewder class, the class with the power of money at its hand.

Only in an orderly state can the weaker element get protection and freedom.

Misrule, fraud, graft, riot, and rebellion mean harvest time for the strong and unprincipled.

The police and detectives, the militia and United States troops are not "guardians of capitalistic privilege."

Never was a more misleading creed.

On the contrary, they are the umpires in the great game of business. To slug the umpire is to precipitate a general mêlée, and there might always makes right.

Only in a community where law restrains violence, prohibits private redress, and secures peace, can plain, common folks get anything like justice.

Nothing disgusts the real well-wishers of labor more than the too frequent outcry against the law and its agents.

These agents may in specific instances. sustain unjust capital in its position, and protect property that certain strikers want

to demolish, but in the long run, it is the existence of law of some kind that guarantees the workingman any rights at all.

But the most vital truth that labor ought to learn is that its cause is to be won only by an appeal to the highest moral convictions of the world.

Only as the nation as a whole is improved, refined, and made less selfish and brutal can labor thrive.

The very enjoyment of fatted wealth implies a certain coarseness, a numbness to finer sentiment, a moral obtuseness, which

it should be the aim of those who love the race to remove.

Jesus gives us the story of Dives, who lived in excess while Lazarus lay covered with sores at his gate, as an example of perfect obtuseness of the altruistic nerve. And Maeterlinck speaks of how the slightest indulgence stings the conscience of him who knows that his fellow-man is in want.

It is the development of this nerve that is the hope of mankind.

It is the spread of education, the stability of free institutions, the growth of democracy, the liveliness of the moral sense, the vigor of altruistic sentiment, and the deepening of the hold of real religion over men's hearts, that spell hope for labor.

Religion remains to-day the most tremendous dynamic among human forces.

Almighty God, Jesus Christ, and all the ultimate ideas implied in these two names, are not negligible quantities in the struggle for universal fairness among men.

The church question need not be discussed. The church lies so completely under the "dead hand" of the past that it appears, just now, impractical to enlist it in the cause of human rights.

But the material of which the church is presumed to have a monopoly lies really at the command of the leaders of labor, if they had eyes to see.

The Bible is the poor man's book.

The prophets of the Old Testament cry out unceasingly against greed, selfish riches, and oppression. From Moses to Malachi, not one "crooked the pregnant hinges of the knee" to privilege or power.

And Jesus, himself a day laborer, distinctly allied himself with the laboring class, though he justly spoke of them not as a class, but as humanity.

Here is a book seething with social justice, saturated with altruism, drenched with equity, the whole shot through with the idea that the love of humanity is the will of God and that the criterion on the Day of Judgment will be one's treatment of one's neighbor.

Why Not Preach to Capital?

Τ

IT may be asked: “Why don't you preach to the capitalists? Why not prate morality to those who have the goods? Let them begin to be noble and we will reply in kind. So long as they are grasping, we will fight fire with fire!"

The answer is simple. The cause of the endowed class is not a moral one. Capitalism stands or falls with the rights of property; labor with the rights of man.

The altruistic dynamic is all in the labor camp.

Why they do not use it more is one of the strange things of this twisted world.

It was not bayonets that abolished slavery; it was public opinion that overwhelmed it.

Sentiment, vague and formless as it seems, is the mightiest agency in doing away with child labor, unsanitary factories, deadly mines, poor pay, and long hours.

The laborer to-day can send his child, to the free public schools, he can worship as he pleases, he can vote, he can speak his mind freely, he has the right of assembly and protest, he has the privilege of trial by jury, and he is not a chattel.

Every one of these advantages is due to an improved moral sensitiveness of the world.

Let the laborer plan the future by the wisdom of the past!

Let him leave the low ground of class hate, and use the mightiest forces in the realm of human motives!

Let him "hitch his wagon to a star!"

Remember, the aristocrat wins by force. or endowment, the professional class wins by intellect and cunning, the laborer wins only as he lifts himself and the world up into the light.

For him there can be no victory but a moral victory.

N

OT later than last month, the country witnessed the spectacle of the responsible head of the world's largest corporation earnestly advocating government supervision of industrial corporations, a supervision that is to supervise production and the fixing of prices. This is a long step forward-on the part of a greatly interested capitalist-from the public utilities control idea. To be sure, E. H. Gary was not socialistically inspired. What he probably had in mind was the disastrous. experience of the railways in the bad old. competitive times; an experience destructive to the average business man as well as to railway security holders and enriching only to certain trusts that could exact rebates.

In its practical application, Gary's theory is in a general way a duplication of the Interstate Commerce Commission. He would have an interstate commerce commission

for the industrials as well as for railroads, with deputy commissioners to study details. To assume that what is good for the corporation is bad for the public is a superstition that the successful regulation of the railways should banish.

It is tremendously important to bear in mind the rapid and imperceptible changes that are taking place in the department of economics. This great human question is studied as never before. Not only are the Garys themselves advocating a sort of higher collectivism, but the church press is devoting its best thought to it. In the December number of a conservative religious weekly there appeared these lines:

Revolutions, said Mirabeau, begin in the best brains and filter down from them to the masses. The revolution that is now in actual process among us has followed that law. The conditions under which multitudes of our poor live have become more intolerable to the really great among us than to the people themselves. We are to-day in the presence of an idealism, a Christianism, we will say, that

refuses to enjoy itself except in procuring a general enjoyment. It does not want to live in palaces while other men herd in hovels. If the comfort of the whole means sacrificing the luxury of the few, it will call for that sacrifice. It sees with an everclearing vision how little of this world's goods are needed as requirements of the fullest, freest, noblest life. Give a man his work, his friends, his love, his faith; give him art and beauty; the splendor of the heavens and of the earth; the love in his heart answered by the love of all other hearts, and what more does he want? These are the things that are becoming growingly clear to high and low, to rich and poor.

What would have been thought of such words in such a place thirty years ago? Probably, just what President Taft thinks to-day; for notwithstanding the general unanimity of opinion on the subject among men in widely different spheres of activityWilliam Randolph Hearst, E. H. Gary, Andrew Carnegie, and many economic authorities-Mr. Taft wants to destroy in order to compete and to compete in order to bring back the frightful economic inequalities, and their accompanying miseries, of a quarter of a century ago.

That is the only danger in the financial prospect-the antiquated and wholly mistaken policy of the Administration. Congressional investigation of "money trusts,' investigations here and investigations there, they are the customary exudations of every Congressional session. The country is accustomed and has adjusted itself to them. There is something in the Washington atmosphere that provokes action inimical to finance. But while the House and Senate have many members, there is only one attorney-general and he cannot be checked in a destructive course, especially when he has the propelling power of the President back of him; for Mr. Taft in his message to Congress on so-called trust matters did not recede from his fixed idea, the competitive hobby. He stood firmly pat. The communication was not apologetic as the bulls on stocks would have it nor conciliatory as the conservatives.

read it: it was a prolongation of the propaganda of economic reaction.

BUT

Revival of Business

OUT while the Administration-as distinguished from Congress-may keep corporations uneasy in the sense of not letting them know what is coming next, its effect on business in general is waning, if it has not altogether disappeared. With the steel and iron trade leading, practically all lines of trade are in a process of prosperous revival. The steel industry revived quite abruptly. From a 60 per cent. capacity, the Steel Corporation, within a few weeks, operated to an 85 per cent. capacity. Independents were as suddenly inundated with orders. The Republic Iron & Steel Company, in a fortnight, found itself with commands amounting to 300 per cent. of capacity.

A moderate rise in the production prices was the natural result. Quotations had been ruling low for some time. Profits were limited. If old-time conditions prevailed, a boom would be in being-with its attendant danger of collapse any day. Fortunately, despite the suit against the Steel Corporation, there is a "reasonable" understanding among the companies, a tacit compact that holds quotations in "restraint" and thereby insures permanence to the improvement in the industry.

Sequentially, the betterment in business, regarded as an entirety, has made a favorable difference in railway revenues. In the South, the roads had shown a slight increment for several months past. The weak section was the Northwest, where the wheat crop failure in the Dakotas had a depressing effect. But the increase in revenue contributed by other states traversed by the Hill lines, the St. Paul, and by the Chicago & Northwestern, have more than offset the losses in the Dakotas; so that there is now less nervousness among stockholders in these properties regarding dividend reductions.

Passing from the general to the specific, there had been little doubt about the Chicago & Northwestern maintaining its disbursement rate. The anxiety had to do

with Great Northern, greater with North

ern Pacific, greatest with St. Paul. All, however, have surpluses extending from safe to sumptuous. In the face of better business, all were justified in paying the

rate of the prosperous years. In the case of the St. Paul, it is expected that a stock market expediency is involved. The dominating interest is known to have liquidated its holdings when quotations ruled between 150 and 160. Opportunities to repurchase have been numerous and inviting. The question is, Has advantage been taken of these opportunities? If the answer be in the affirmative, outside stockholders are needlessly uneasy, though the betimes liquidators are Standard Oil men whose experience in the immediate past has not been conducive to optimism.

In sharp contrast to the Northwestern group of roads are certain railways that are expected to yield plums more or less large and luscious. Promisingly prominent here is the Union Pacific. Expectations were heightened by the submission of the yearly statement, which showed a profit and loss item of $186,914,930. Of this, $75,000,000 is in cash money that has been lent on time and on call. A large part of the overplus represents profits from investments in the securities of other companies, prominently the equity in the dissolved Northern Securities Company.

The latest annual report, put out last month, confesses to an addition of some $56,000,000 to the huge item divisible among stockholders. For four years, it appears, the values in other enterprises held in the treasury of the Union Pacific had been booked at an arbitrary figure and not at their real or market value.

The rectification coincided with rising discussions as to the intentions of the management in continuing to pay 10 per cent. indefinitely. When a company shows a distributable surplus that is equal to 86 per cent. of the par value of all its common stock outstanding, it should prompt a guessing contest as to the time and amount of an extra distribution; for it is an essential point in this phase of railway finance that the surplus of the Union Pacific is the exclusive property of the common shares—the preferred has no equity therein.

French Money Hard to Get

Tinaccessible to the American promoter, speaking relatively. Of course, FrancoAmerican firms dispose of a certain amount of Yankee values in France yearly. But of

HE great French reservoir still remains

the immense sum of reinvestment money that France yields annually, America gets very little.

A conscienceless cynic might make the observation that Americans do not know how to get more of French money; or, if they know, are too inelastic morally to submit to the stipulation. The perplexing point is susceptible of illustration:

An American who has a flotation in hand steps into a newspaper office in Paris with an advertisement of his plan. His "copy" is peremptorily refused. No reason is given. He tries another and still another journal with the same bluntly negative result. Being a patient, persistent, and inquisitive fellow, he starts an investigation, which ends in the Paris bourse. There-the bourseis where the money articles in most of the Paris papers are controlled. They are "rented" at so much a year to this and that syndicate. Every kartel of any importance has the absolute control of the financial columns of one or more journals. The reviews and comments are dictated by the pool that has bought the page for a year. And all advertisements must be indorsed by the yearly proprietors.

These syndicates include some of the leading bankers of France. The French banker is consulted and trusted by the frugal Frenchman as the banker of no other nation is consulted and trusted by his countrymen. He is the Frenchman's financial father confessor. No move is made without the advice-or, indeed, the sanction-of the banker. The moves, moreover, are few and unimportant, for such things are left to the banker. The French investor is in reality a depositor. He simply deposits his money. The banker does the rest.

This "rest" has many meanings. Among them, perhaps not always the minor one,

the best commissions on a reasonably safe placement. When a French combination accepts a reasonably secured loan, its interest provisions are less exacting than the percentage for "services"; for the interest goes to the bond buyer-an impersonal entity-while the percentage for services goes to the syndicate a very vivid and personal personality; which explains among other things the oceans of French money that have gone into not only Russian government bonds, but into Russian companies. In money matters, the Russian is notoriously liberal. He was so in the time of Macaulay, whose description of the Muscovite nobleman-a combination of diamonds and rags-still is apposite. He is even more so to-day, now that he has had a longer taste of western luxury. He does not bother much about interest, and about commissions not at all. The Algerian entrepreneur, the South American embrasseur des affaires, the Asiatic promoter, pay the French loan negotiator his own price.

Not that the French kartels place money indiscriminately. Their managers are shrewd and careful. The greater part of them. are conservative. With them, safety is a fundamental principle. But they see to it that the vast savings of the Frenchman are diverted into channels that pay well, at the outset, to the diverters.

With the banker in complete control of the confidence of the people and with his syndicates in charge of the money page of the French press, it may be divined why comparatively little French money has gone into high class American securities. The floater of wildcat American issues could not get a hearing in France at any price, and the disposer of first-rate American values will not pay the price. He can do better in London, or Berlin, or in Amsterdam.

Question:-A party claiming to represent the Americana Company, No. 225 Fifth Avenue, New York, in which I have some stock, called on me a few days ago to suggest that I exchange my stock for Scientific American Compiling Department. Would you advise such a change?

O. P. M., ST. LOUIS, MO.

Answer:-The majority interests in the Americana Company, publishers of the Encyclopedia Americana, some time ago voted to change the name of the company to the Scientific American Compiling Department. Frederick C. Beach, editor of the Scientific American, is president of the corporation. Stock of the Scientific American Compiling