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commerce and to the promotion of a better acquaintance and friendship between men of different climes.

I believe in the union of forces whether religious or social as in church and state, or commercial and economic as in business and labor. What is government but unity of action by individuals? And the Catholic Church is the most perfect organized body in the world. The era of universal love ardently desired by every true Christian awaits the confederation of nations when the whole world will be one country and every man a brother.

While far from approving some of their methods and policy, I believe in the fundamental principles of labor unions. Their

The workman who refuses to join a union helps to retard the betterment of all wage earners, and superintendents who refuse to deal with the union's representatives during a strike do not promote the best interests of stockholders. The best paying concerns in the world employ union labor, and make periodical contracts with the unions' representatives.

Senator Elkins has recently stated that we have solved the problem of the production of wealth but not its distribution. Advance wages sufficiently and the latter problem will be solved also. If every wage earner was a union worker and the unions were led by the brains and trained intelligence which capital employs, wages

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would soon reach their highest possible limit. Outside of the economic reconstruction of society there is no other way to remove the injustice complained of by Senator Elkins.

The oldest engineer on the Arkansas Div. of the C. O. & G. (Rock Island System). He was a charter member of Subdivision 554, which was named for him. Brother Cobb was engineer on one of the excursion trains from Memphis to Hot Springs during the Convention.-Courtesy Bro. G. C. Moore, Div. 554. primary aim is to secure good wages, and good wages means prosperity for merchant and banker, and larger offerings to the church and charity. Labor unions are a country's best anti-poverty society, since good wages and prosperity are synonymous. Low paid labor is a fruitful cause of poverty. As a rule men who feel sure of steady work at fair pay are temperate and moral. Union workmen ought to be, and I believe are, our highest type of workmen, as regards moral habits as well as industrial efficiency.

The theory that trades unions by establishing a uniform rate of wages discourage the better men and produce a dull mediocrity, is, as one of the professors of political economy at Johns Hopkins University has said, "only a theory and has never received statistical demonstration." Even if it were a fact it would yet be better

that 100 men should receive $5 per day than that ten men should get $10 per day and the other 90 men only $2 per day. It is better to strengthen 90 weak men then to increase the strength of 10 strong

men.

It has been said that labor unions are trusts. Rightly administered there is nothing objectionable in a trust, whether of labor or business. If men shaped their conduct in industrial and public life in accordance with the teachings of Christ, or even with the ethical principles generally lived upto in private life, there would be less objection to trusts than to competition. Industrial competition by its needless duplications of the same work means an enormous waste of effort and

ing of competitive concerns under one management as in the case of the Standard Oil Company and the Steel Trust has, by eliminating the needless duplication of human labor, augmented the country's wealth and indirectly benefited the workingman. Temporarily men may be thrown out of employment as happened when the sewing machine and steam engine were introduced, but eventually all workers get better wages and shorter hours. However, until men become less selfish and less indolent, social welfare will require large combinations of capital in some businesses and competition in othNeither monopoly nor competition then is to be indiscriminately condemned, but each kind of business, whether trust,

ers.

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OLD TYPE BOSTON & MAINE LOCOMOTIVE.-Courtesy Bro. H. A. Webber, Div. 63. material whose ultimate effect is to increase the burden upon the shoulders of labor. It violates the fundamental principle of the economy and preservation of energy, and posits the selfishness and indolence of man as its sole justification. Broadly speaking it is war and is opposed to the Christian idea of brotherhood. A parent does not send a half dozen children to perform the same errand. Why should a nation, which may be regarded as one huge family, employ a half dozen railroads, pipe lines or factories to do the work of one?

union or competitive concern, should be judged upon its individual merits.

A combination or trust that enables one man or machine to do the work of two, should, if rightly managed, benefit society as much as the growing of two_blades of grass where one grew before. The merg

The radicals who advocate the destruction of trusts or labor unions are as illogical as they who inveigh against the state, the church or marriage. What the trusts need is correction rather than annihilation, restraint and regulation instead of license and arbitrary power. A liberal profit should be allowed upon a just and reasonable valuation of a corporation's property, but it should be made impossible to exact exorbitant prices or to collect tribute from the public in order to pay dividends upon watered stock and juggled securities. With such a law in operation the specter of socialism would soon vanish.

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As an exemplar of all trusts whether of capital or labor, I point with pride to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. Its members possess a monopoly of the labor of American engineers, but they have never once abused their vast power. They have demanded and secured exceedingly high pay, yet unlike their capitalistic employers and certain trades unions, they have never been charged with unreasonableness, extortion, tyranny or the corruption of legislatures. They have formed no secret alliances with the most influential and menacing of all trusts the machines of the two great political parties. They have met their employers in friendly conference and settled their disagreements expeditiously and without cost. Their motto has been

if necessary the late Abram S. Hewitt of New York who permitted the books of his factory to be inspected and thus averted a strike of iron workers for higher wages which the business of the company did not then warrant. Let them remember that almost every concession granted by the railroad companies to the demands of trainmen has proved a benefit to the companies. Laws requiring air brakes and improved car couplers and other recent examples. Employers should keep before them the motto of "Live and let live" and imagining themselves in the place of their workers deal with them as they them selves would wish to be treated. Most of our unfairness is due to failure to use the imagination and to put ourselves in each other's places. If engineers changed the

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The 1061 is run by Bro. W. V. Fisk, member Div. 63.-Courtesy Bro. H. A. Webber, Div. 63.

the

"Give and take." They recognize that employers have rights which the employed are bound to respect. They know there is a limit to the increase of wages because there is a limit to the profits and dividends of their employers. Their general policy has been one of moderation and square dealing, based upon Golden Rule and the principles of Christianity. They have rarely, if ever, resorted to that weapon of barbarism, the strike, and in their struggles to obtain better pay and shorter hours they have withheld no vital fact from the public, thus inspiring confidence in the justice of their claims.

Let corporations and employers take the public into their confidence, imitating

figures on their wage bills at the end of the month from thirty to one hundred and demanded pay for seventy days of fictitious work or "water" they would have no right to complain of the execration of an indignant public. Yet the unsophisticated layman sees little ethical difference between such a transaction and issuing $100,000 in stock for a mile of railroad that cost $30,000 to construct, thus making the public pay for $70,000 worth of workthat was never performed. In both cases the work for which money is asked exists only on paper.

Just a brief word in reference to another topic. Last week I wrote to a railroad official whose duties oblige him to ride in engine cabs every day. I asked

him if there was any drinking among the engineers and promised that his answer should be kept confidential. I am going to violate my pledge, however, and make known his reply. "There is no excessive drinking among engineers, and many of them are temperance men,' " he wrote. God bless you locomotive_engineers of whom that tribute is true. I congratulate you upon your intelligence and sanity. A man who drinks to excess, even though he may never have been drunk, is defective in his intelligence or mental balance. Before acquiring the alcoholic habit, he probably had a menta! twist or cloudiness which later became a disease putting him in the same class pathologically as the insane although regarded by his friends as sane.

I congratulate your wives. If there is any woman to whom my heart goes out in deepest sympathy it is a refined woman who is the wife of a drunkard. A woman is better dead than married to a drinking man. I congratulate your children who have not inherited disordered nerves or feeble minds from alcoholic parents. Only last month a noted alienist told me that a large percentage of feeble-minded children and of the insane had alcoholic parents. Many an innocent young man or woman who is afflicted with some nervous disorder or enfeebled constitution is merely paying the penalty of the self-indulgence enjoyed by a bibulous ancestor, thus verifying the scriptural declaration that the sins of the father shall be visited upon the children and the children's children.

I congratulate the railroad companies. The perfectly sobriety of trainmen means the prevention of many accidents and the consequent saving to the companies of thousands if not millions of dollars. Every engineer who is a total abstainer ought to receive extra pay. It would be an extremely profitable investment for the companies. I congratulate the gen. eral public, whose beloved ones are daily placed in the safe keeping of these noble men at the throttle. Every day 2,000,000 people, or 1 in every 40 of our population, rides upon the steam cars in this country. What a responsibility? The personal safety and lives of 2,000,000 people intrusted daily to the care of our engineers, under whose guidance passengers are as helpless as a babe in its nurse's arms. Total abstinence is a small price to pay for such a tribute of confidence, and is the necessary consequence of an engineer's hazardous employment. Nowhere is it so necessary to have a cool head and steady nerve. No other man-not even a minister of the gospel-has reasons of such a tremendous force to be a total abstainer. A moment's inattention, a mis

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calculation, the faintest feeling of lethargy on the part of the engineer and a wreck ensues, shrouding a score homes in the black pall of death. A network of telephone and telegraph wires is not more sensitive to an electrical storm than the delicate mechanism of the human brain to an ounce of alcohol. Who doubts that many a disastrous railroad wreck would have been prevented and many a dead engineer be alive tonight had it not been for the one drink taken by the trainmen, the switchmen or the telegraph operator before entering upon his daily work.

Restriction by Trade Unions.

[As seen by John R. Commons, professor of political economy in the University of Wisconsin.-In the November Outlook.]

Some employers say, "We should have no objections to trade unions if they would organize to increase production instead of restricting production." Economists and critics have shown that unions, by their restrictive_policies, stand in the way of progress. The unions, in deference to a public opinion that judges measure maiuly by their effects on production, defend themselves by denying that their policies are restrictive. But their arguments are indirect; they look towards the ultimate effects of unions, and not to their immediate effects. Ultimately, the unions may be said to increase production when their policies force employers to adopt labor-saving devices; but this is plainly an indirect result brought about by the employer to counteract the direct result of the union. Ultimately, also, their social effects may contribute to social progress by shortening the hours of labor and maintaing more expensive standards of life; but these, again, are indirect results, preceded by policies which, so far as production is concerned, are essentially restrictive. In truth, the characteristic policies of unions imply restrictions of some kind upon employers.

The success of unions has come about only as they have abandoned the field of production and have confined themselves to distribution. It is with the distribution of wealth that they are necessarily concerned, and the irrepressible conflict of capital and labor is found in the difference between production and distribution. In modern industry it is the employerthe one who assumes the risks of business - upon whom the responsibility of production is placed. To meet this responsibility he offers inducements to the other factors to join with him- to the capitalists or landowner he offers interest or rent, to patentees he offers royalties, to experts

and managers he offers salaries, to workmen he offers wages. It is his business to combine these factors and to afford inducements such that each will yield its largest and best contribution to the joint product. But with the other contributors the first question is the return they will get from their productive energies, and a trade union is simply a combination to get a larger return.

Such a combination, in the nature of the case, can operate only by means of obstacles placed in the way of the free action of employers. As individuals the several contributors can secure the return they wish only to the extent to which they can hold back in the bargain, and this is limited by the freedom which the employer has of turning from one to an

here it is conceivable that government might adopt this policy and relieve individuals of enforcing it, as government has already done in the case of factory protection and child labor, and as government has done in Australasia along the entire line of trade union policy. The essential parallel is the fact that both lines of industrial philosophy proceed along restrictions on freedom of trade and bargaining, and that neither is primarily an agency for the production, but rather an agency for the distribution of wealth. If they increase production, it is because they set other forces at work to overbalance their restrictions.

Consider the changes necessary in the character of a union if it should direct its energies to the production of wealth.

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C. B. & Q. HELPER ON CRAWFORD HILL, CRAWFORD, NEB. BRO. P. B. RICKARD, DIV. 183, AT THROTTLE.

other. As a combination they direct their efforts towards limiting this kind of freedom, and this is the primary object underlying all the restrictions of a trade union. The aim is mutual protectionor perhaps mutual aggrandizement-and the methods are restrictive in the same sense that a protective tariff on imports is restrictive. In both cases some of the arguments advanced may be fallacious, such as the argument that by restricting trade you increase the amount of work to be done. I do not hold that protectionism and trade unionism are parallel in all respects. One is the policy of government, supposed to stand for all of the people; the other is the policy of individuals acting for themselves. But even

Courtesy J. A. Bacon, Crawford, Neb.

It would in so far cease to be a trade union, and would become either a society for technical education, or an association for sharing profits, or a co-operative association.

Now, it might be well for unions to give more attention than they do to the technical or trade education of their members. But, apart from incidental instruction in their trade journals, their efforts in this direction are confined almost solely to securing opportunity for apprentices to learn all branches of their trade. And here, strangely enough, it is only by way of restrictions the most onerous to employers that the apprentices are granted such opportunities. The union restricts the number of apprentices to the shop

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