Each employe is now allowed one day off in seven, and ten days' vacation every year with full pay—which is perfectly right.
The young men employed on the road are compelled to do twenty days' work in the army each year. Their wages are paid while they are doing this compulsory military work—which is perfectly right.
If a man is ill through no fault or vice of his own he gets his pay as long as he is ill up to three hundred and sixty-five days, and the company in whose service he has become ill pays his doctor's bill, his drug store bill and any extra expenses involved—which is perfectly just and fair.
No striker is to be dismissed because of having taken part in the strike. A benefit fund is provided for the employes of this Government enterprise—and the company pays the membership subscription to the benefit fund with NO DEDUCTION FROM THE WORKMEN'S PAY.
The above seems a horrible narrative to the energetic American exploiter of labor.
It would have seemed very stupid, in fact quite incomprehensible, to the French Government at any time before the Revolution.
But the Revolution taught France and some other people that a nation, like any other structure, is insecure when its foundation is agitated. The foundation of a nation is the enormous mass of working people, and that foundation the French have learned to respect and treat well.
We shall learn as much here some day. Let us hope we shall learn it more peaceably than the French did.
UNION MEN AS SLAVE OWNERS WHAT PLANS HAS THE FIVE-DOLLAR-A-DAY MAN MADE TO HELP HIS POORER FELLOW-CREATURES?
Every addition within reason to wages, every reasonable reduction of working hours, must help the whole nation. Working human beings have been looked upon through the ages as slaves, either on an actual slave-owning basis or on an insufficient wage basis—which is about the same thing. Each recognition of the worker's rights moves us a little farther from slave days. Every time a new class earns decent treatment by hard fighting we see increased the number of those who may properly be called men.