What about the cold utility? Four millions more for an owner mean what?
Some bogus antiquities, and perhaps a bogus title brought to
America.
Another palace, with a dissatisfied owner.
A dissipated son; money spent by this son to promote vice, and by the father to corrupt legislation. Four hundred dollars more for a workman's family mean wholesome food for children. And the children go to school and have a chance.
This sum means a self-respecting life for a father, and for the mother it means everything. She can hire some woman to help her when her babies come. She can give her husband and her children good food, rejoice in their comfort, add good, healthy citizens to the nation. ——
The owner in his struggle makes various statements of which only a few must be answered, and very briefly, for the sake of the impatient reader.
"If capital goes on granting the demands of union labor there will be no more capital, no more big manufactures, our prosperity will die as England's prosperity is dying—killed by union labor!"
Thus speaks the indignant, would-be patriotic and unselfish capitalist. Let us see:
What becomes of the established FACT that a nation is prosperous in proportion as the average individual citizen (NOT its few millionaires) is prosperous? There are nowhere on earth stronger labor unions than in the United States. There are no such unions in Mexico, none such in South America, none as powerful in Canada. Why are we not eclipsed industrially by those countries?
You say that labor unions have killed English industry? No. They have kept England alive in the face of fierce competition. Millions upon millions of Englishmen live on a little foggy northern island incapable of supporting them. By their courage, their mental power, their genius, their UNION, they have kept the nation great. It is as though in one corner of New York State we had the greatest industrial power on earth. What the Gulf Stream has been to England's agriculture, labor unionism has been to England's industry.