The trade agreement is the bridge between labor and capital. It restores, so far as it is possible to do so, the personal relationship, the mutual interest which existed prior to the advent of the factory system. It is an acknowledgment of the inter-dependence of labor and capital,
a recognition of the reciprocal interest of employer and employe. When the right of organization among workmen and employers is fully recognized and freely conceded, and when these forces adopt and practice the policy of collective bargaining, the day of the strike and the lockout, of the boycott and the blacklist, with their attendant evils, losses, and hardships, will have largely passed away.
THE UNEMPLOYED.
BY JOHN BASCOM, D. D., LL. D.
[Formerly President University of Wisconsin.]
A striking feature of the industrial world and one well fitted to occasion alarm is the large number of persons thrown, from time to time, out of employment. We are forced by it to accept one or other of two conclusions; that the economic world is mismade, incapable of a quiet and successful run, or that our handling of it has been in some way unskillful and misapplied. This fact of unemployment has become very conspicuous, and to those who suffer from it, and to those who sympathize with them, exceedingly grevious. A certain portion of the human family, and that in the most progressive nations, find themselves superfluous, out of connection with the means of living though others are obtaining support, comfort and luxury. They have nothing to do but to die in their tracks. Like the feeble ones in a forced march through an enemy’s country they first fall behind and then perish. This state of the case does not arise by accident and then pass away, it has periods of severity which frequently return, and stands among those constant dangers which may at any time overtake a few. This evil comes especially to industrious countries, like England, and to portions of our own country, like Pittsburg, noted for their enlarged production. The causes and remedies of this state of things become, therefore, subjects of anxious inquiry. We may assert that the want of employment is due in a general way, to the deficiencies and vices of men, but this assertion does not sufficiently point out the immediate occasion of the difficulty, nor furnish us its remedies.
Failure of the means of livelihood arises from indolence, ignorance, vice and unfavorable conditions on the part of those who suffer from it, conditions often of the nature of accident. But while the recipients of this disaster are plainly recognized, the disaster itself comes to them in a measure independent of their failures. We need to know not only those who are likely to suffer from a given disease, but how the disease itself arises. The central and most productive cause in this series of provocations is indolence; the others accompany indolence and more or less arise from it. By indolence we mean a want of life and hence a weakness of all the functions of life. We may mean physical inactivity or intellectual sluggishness or moral indifference, or may mean them all blended in one or other of the various ways in which a weak and perverted life manifests itself. The tramp is physically indolent, he hates work. This indolence readily extends to intellectual activity; the indolent person is ignorant of the value of success, of its motives and of its means. The world reveals few incentives to him and makes few appeals. This indolence and ignorance do not wholly arrest the wants and desires of men, and hence vice, as in the case of the thief, enters as the most ready and immediate means of gratification. The torpid nature of the moral judgment lends itself to this result, and nothing but fear, itself weak and vacillating, stands between the indolent man and habits of gross indulgence, inconsistent with personal and with social welfare.
The accidents, misjudgments and disappointments which are liable to overtake us all owe the injury which they inflict to the weak personality on which they fall, and so misfortune seems to follow and persecute those who are least able to bear it. The indolent, passive mood is a good medium for the accumulation and transfer of every form of disaster. The class of the helpless is much enlarged by
this flow of every form of evil to these low places in conduct and character.
We may clearly recognize these facts and suppose them a sufficient explanation of the farther fact, that so many are thrown out of employment and find themselves the waifs of society with no secure attachment to it. They do, indeed, make conspicuous the failure of occupation and determine the direction it will take. Their numbers are seriously increased by it, and their very presence gives the conditions of its recurrence. They are both causes and effects. They stand on terms of action and reaction with all the embarrassments of production. They help to reduce wages, and when wages are reduced, they are the first to be driven out of employment. They are the symptoms of the disease, the product of the disease and the means by which it is carried farther. All failures in the productive process extend, in their worst results, to this class of defectives. They are the recipients of past evils, of present and of coming evils. They arise in connection with a false form of production, must be treated with it and removed with it. They are a composite product, their faults not being wholly their own but in part the faults of the economic system with which they are associated. They are not the scapegoat on whose head the sins of the people may be laid and then be borne into the wilderness.