But let us take a birdseye view of the situation and see whether we are advancing or going backward. I think you will agree with me that the following bare outline of a few of the important achievements and the work now being done by organizations and movements of public-spirited citizens is inspiring and encouraging.
Let us start with the industrial gains.
The American Federation of Labor and the railway brotherhoods have in the past twenty-five years secured better wages and working conditions for millions of wage-earners and the eight-hour day for hundreds of thousands, and they have developed a system of collective bargaining and methods of conciliation and arbitration that are reducing the number of industrial disturbances. To get a clear idea of what this means in terms of progress, let us consider that while in the past six months 500,000 coal miners and their employers have made contracts covering wages, hours and conditions of employment for a term of four years; all the railroads east of Chicago are arbitrating their differences with their thousands and thousands of engineers, trainmen, conductors and so on; the hundreds of thousands of carpenters, bricklayers, painters, plasterers and others of the thirty-five crafts involved in the building industry have made contracts with associations of builders all over the land from Maine to California; while the publishers of the great daily newspapers throughout the United States have made a five-year contract with their printers, pressmen, stereotypers, etc.; and the street railway employes in many great cities and many others of the 135 crafts belonging to the American Federation of Labor have made satisfactory contracts with their employers—I say, let us consider that while this is what is going on today in this country, we shall not have to go very far back into history to find the time when it was a penal offense for a man to join a labor organization, or for workers to ask collectively for an increase in wages, and to find that, while we are now legislating in the interest of the employe for a minimum wage, at that time the effort of legislation was for a maximum wage in the interest of the employer.
In the meantime, the State factory legislation has revolutionized the methods of sanitation in the workshops of the country and is safeguarding better and better the lives and limbs of the workers.
Employers are making increased provision for the welfare of their employes through sanitary and safe work places, opportunities for recreation and education, model homes rented or sold, and relief funds for sickness, accident and death benefits, as well as old age pensions, all affecting millions of railroad, factory, mine and department store workers.
The National Child Labor Committee has led a campaign that in ten years has secured wholesome legislation in practically every State in the Union, reducing hours of labor, prohibiting children under fourteen years of age from working in factories, mines and mills, and preventing night work for women and children in many places.
The tenement house reform movement in New York alone, where the problems are greatest, has made seventy-five per cent. improvement in fifteen years; and as an example of the growing recognition of big business of its social responsibility, it may be pointed out that when the Supreme Court upset the Tenement House Law, and by a decision wiped out all that had been accomplished in twelve years through the tenement house agitation, the allied real estate interests in New York joined with the tenement house reformers in securing the passage of a State law and a city ordinance correcting the defects.
Amazing in magnitude and usefulness are the health organizations, public and private, devoted to securing more efficient methods of sanitation and the prevention of disease, recent statistics in New York City showing as a result of such work that the mortality rate has decreased fifty per cent. in fifty years.
There are various national and local organizations devoted to the protection and education of the millions of immigrants from all parts of the world who have landed on these shores in the past ten years, and whose assimilation and adaptation to American standards and conditions have constituted one of the problems of the age.
There are thousands of non-sectarian hospitals and institutions for the scientific care of dependents, defectives and delinquents.