It is not the English WORKINGMAN who has been beaten. The
English workmen did not sell the English mercantile navy to J.P.
Morgan. English capitalists did that.
Get this in your heads, you who talk against unions. Morgan and his fellow American capitalists have formed themselves into financial UNIONS, which we call trusts. And they have beaten the English capitalist, who did not know enough to take lessons from his workman and form unions of his own.
The American FINANCIAL union, not the English LABOR union, has beaten England in the race for industrial supremacy.
Union is strength everywhere and forever. The remaining strength of England is in her labor unions, which give men time to think, food to grow on, and give real men to the nation. You say that powerful unions kill nations.
Why is not China a great industrial power?
She has vast fortunes and no unions. Li Hung Chang was richer than Morgan, and could cut off the head of any striker. His coolies got five cents a day and worked fourteen hours—is THAT your ideal system? ——
Last of all (and we apologize for this unforgivably long editorial), let us discuss the question of foreign labor. The capitalist complains that the Hungarian, "the brutal, ignorant foreigner," makes much of the trouble, and "wants as much as an American."
Loud is this cry against the foreign laborer. And the ignorant, know-nothing American workman joins in the cry only too willingly.
Who brings in those foreign laborers by the shipload, Mr.
Mineowner?
Who rounds up cargoes of Slavs on the other side and brings them here to cut the wages and the living of the native-born?