complaints, acquaintance with and accessibility to them, frank discussion of all reasons for or against raising pay, and scrupulous justice in discharge and promotion, without thought of using power unfairly by retaliating on a man leading in a complaint having any basis in reason,-these will remove the workers' need for the walking delegate, and for a strong union kept ready for the fray. Why cannot a plane be reached (it has been in many cases) without a union, on which the employer and his own men collectively can have the honest conference and mutual truth telling which Mr. Mitchell says will prevent any strike, and can maintain the human relationship far more healthfully for both sides than under unionism? In the same line are the right kind of welfare institutions, talked over with and largely managed by the workers, and in some cases partly supported by them, but with the maximum of freedom to participate or not.1 For many years without a strike the Midvale steel company at Philadelphia has promoted peace and progress for itself and its men by encouraging personal ambition-training up apprentices to recruit its force, and having a premium system by which many of its men are said to reach an efficiency yielding each in wages $40 a week. This company and the

'The Highest Sagacity of the Employer has been identified with use of best appliances and best methods, but none the less does it include the best care of his human machinery. A lady employed as social secretary by the McCormick harvester company at Chicago, studying deeply the conditions, improved them so substantially, and with such increase of the workers' good will and efficiency as perhaps largely to over-balance the cost, that in a strike the employees of the Deering company demanded and secured, among other things, the same welfare system for themselves. (Rev. of Rev, July, 1903.) Unionists will not oppose proper welfare institutions when clearly the employer tries to be fair, and has no desire to make them dependent and then take advantage of them. Nearly any employer, with gain to himself, can give safe quarters, just hours and wages, and general treatment that will be received as right. The cash register company at Dayton (with nearly 4,000 employees and 24 unions), having accepted unionism in settlement of the strike of 1901, has an expert who, with a committee from the management, hears complaints, seeks to render exact justice, and induces the men to be active in the union and make it intelligent and just. (See Engineering Magazine for April and Munsey's for June, 1903.) Would opposition to the effect of such a policy to reduce unionism's importance be less blamable than that attitude of militarism which makes the war it prepares for?

immensely successful Baldwin locomotive concern, whose close relations with employees are due somewhat to its being a partnership of men that rose from the ranks of its own workers, have avoided all trouble from unionism and strikes-not by suppression of unionism, it seems, but by making it a superfluous burden. In the recent spread of unionism the workers in some factories have refused to embrace it because of unwillingness to unite against an employer considerate and just.1 To have this justice in an employer, and in the workers a capability that precludes anything else, is the "rational industrial method" looked forward to.

In Ideal Conditions of Society there would be the minimum of the individual helplessness that drove Utah people into coöperation (page 91), and that drives workers into unionism. It is well to get good in these ways, but where practicable it is a great deal better to get it without the sinking of individuality into the mass, especially when this involves a struggle of classes. Class consciousness is to be desired where needed for removal of wrongs, but far better is its absence by reason of easy passage and friendly association up the industrial scale, as was the general rule in America not long ago. To a large extent this can be made the rule again. Avoidance of that

1Individual Ambition. The Baldwin firm trains up its own men, and so gains by promoting their ambition and their earning that no contest arises over division of product. President Fry of the glass combination told the Industrial Commission of a Rochester concern that prospered greatly by encouraging individual ambition, and graduated more men of success than any other concern in the glass trade. (See his testimony in Vol. VII., and that of President Harrah, of the Midvale company, in Vol. XIV.) As was discussed in the chapter on learning a trade, encouragement of individual ambition will soon put an employer and his men, and the society they serve, far ahead of competitors whose resources and individuality are taxed by unionism. The difference is similar to that between industry in America and industry in Germany, where each of a million workers carries a soldier or official on his back. The employer who is good to his men in that right way upheld by ethics and economics alike is not weakened but is strengthened against competitors (page 114). 2Not Trade Militarism. Herman Justi's plan of making strikes obsolete, by having employers in each trade organize compactly and maintain a labor department, is to secure peace by Europe's system of self-consuming armament by nations. The same is partly involved in W. H. Sayward's plan of avoiding outside conciliation or arbitration by having a joint com

curse of older countries, division into hostile classes, is practicable here, with our mixed population and sensible education, separated from aristocratic traditions, and can be made another

mittee to stop disputes at the start. The desire of some employers-of many in England-to have trade unions, for the sake of discussion, mutual respect, and completeness of agreement, arises because without a union the discord would be worse. But the best way of all is to go so far back in preventing trouble that neither joint committees nor union will be worth supporting. If in the future, as Prof. J. B. Clark predicts, great unions of capital and great unions of labor will secure justice for each side, society will inevitably lose its liberty. There will be a lamentable failure to use the light we have, a base betrayal by this generation of its trust for posterity, if a cast iron system is again to be settled for centuries on society, merely from lack in employers of willingness to deal justly, and from lack in the public of the courage to frown on boycotting and undue ostracism.

For Securing the Good Will of personal contact the Coal Strike Commission said the efficient medium is the union, raised to its best by recognition, and not driven to extremes by refusal (with intention to destroy it) of the stockholders' chosen manager to meet the union official chosen with equal right by employees to represent them. But the commission also said that disputes should first be considered by the employer or manager with a committee of his own men (would not such closer contact and its good will make this consideration sufficient?), and that its (the commission's) best work would be to evoke mutual agreement to displace the existing antagonism. Is not the good will greatest, and safest too for men with some self-reliant ability to move, when it is trusted by not arming in unionism? Most employers have never had or deserved a strike.

Not Trade Blue Laws. In the Chicago joint agreement of the masonry trade the many rules, with fines up to $200 on offending workers or employers, will eventually be bad in results, like the Connecticut blue laws, and like a union's fines on its members. As the existence of morality requires voluntary abstaining from acts not directly punished, so efficiency and liberty spring from individual exercise of a general competency that makes impracticable the acts covered by these fines. Unionism is vastly better than the previous stages of slavery, serfdom, and subsistence pay, but that it is not the goal of men created just a little lower than the angels is indicated by its tendency to become only another kind of bondage. Real independence will come from nothing less than the worker's own individual doing and being. As militarism desires to make men machines for working and fighting, so unionism, whose officers naturally become partisans of the cause and incapable of judging it, desires to make men cogs in its wheel, and to stereotype that mediocrity that will hold the largest number.

All the Plagues written in C. H. Pearson's "National Life and Character," and in E. A. Ross's "Social Control," are brought upon older societies by permitting people to give up rising in wealth and efficiency by self

example of inestimable value to humanity. By reasonable recognition from the employer, unions will be turned from fighting him to coöperating with him, as in the case of the locomotive engineers, without monopolistic restriction of apprenticeship, and with liberty to join the union or not (pages 297, 327). As, from justice and merit on both sides, collective bargaining power sinks in importance, unions will become more similar to scientific and professional societies, ready to act if economic rights be endangered, but occupied chiefly with promoting efficiency and trade progress.

By Increase of Education, especially in manual training and industry, and by the employer's encouragement of efficiency, there will be a great increase of that splendid class who know and reach the whole field, getting work anywhere on merit, doing most for others by doing most for themselves, having no desire to gain by holding others back, and making in industry a democracy that is sound to remotest effects. The large field in which unionism and its coercion cannot now be permanent-the small towns in which, from lack of grievances and from easy access to farm work, men soon weary of paying dues and attending meetings, and where in much of the work unionism makes conditions worse by hardening the employer's dealing and shutting out the weak-this field will be enlarged by the addition of many hives of industry, in which employer and reliantly earning their way, and to turn to the preying of one class upon another by raising price through scarcity, by holding back the efficient, and by enfeebling all. The methods of the latter course include a brood of protections, in tariffs, labor guilds, restrictive laws, and socialism. It is the branding of healthy individual ambition as greed over competitors, instead of promoting it as good service to customers, that has so largely stratified the British working class, making them several times worse in drunkenness and gambling than American workers, whose door of individual h pe unionism has not so nearly closed. From this decay of enterprise comes largely, no doubt, the present decrease of births, and will come a lessening of healthy power in outward trade; from both these come the yielding of the higher to the lower races. It seems true to say that before America, in the matter of trade combination and labor laws, is set this day blessing and cursing, for herself and all mankind; that she must now choose whether, in cowardly yielding to the retrogressive spirit of boycotting and lynching, she will grant the demanded fettering of sound individuality, or whether, by developing it, she will preserve and increase for posterity the liberty that made the nineteenth century glorious.

worker are united by aiding one another's efficiency and progress, and by absence on each side of either opportunity or desire to render less than a full return.1 Under such conditions individual wage bargaining will come much nearer to securing perfect results for all than will collective. Individual wage bargaining now is very far from being helter-skelter; over but little of the field does unionism, in the absence of unjust exclusion, secure wage increases not individually obtainable unless the labor's output is increased nearly as much. To the extent it is true (small in America) that wages in unionized trades are rising, but in other trades are stationary or falling, the rise is no more an effect of unionism than a cause, making wind for its sails. The same is true of the comparison between states having few unions and those having many. Unions do not prove their prowess on industries not naturally affording higher pay.

A Proper Degree of the Union Spirit. Together with readiness to get the most by going individually from one employer to another, the union spirit, ready at least for temporary concerted action (37 per cent of strikes, 1880 to 1900, were not declared by unions), will still be at hand to do a needed work, such as unionism's taking within twelve years of from three to six hours from the long day of street car men in many cities, with increase of wages besides (page 134); but, owing to clearer judgment and more courage in public opinion (the courage that brooks no boycott), unionism will not have such power (in its eleventh commandment against taking another's job) as to exploit consumers and excluded workers by raising pay in one city much higher than that for the same work in a neighboring city, as is now done in building trades.

These

"The phrase "a free city" might now be used with some of the good meaning it had in Germany six centuries ago. Possibly, by Mr. Cunniff's description (World's Work, Nov. 1902), New Britain may be to some extent a city of this kind, with wealth naturally and healthfully diffused, as compared with Danbury, which he portrays as bound by close unionizing into a tight web of coercion.

'Equalizing Conditions. High pay for coal mining in one state may rightly be protected by inducing miners in other states to demand all that their labor market will yield, but they may not artificially raise that sum by monopolistic exclusion of local farm hands and Negroes-by fencing off