When labor is once organized on business lines and is a fair competitor of unorganized labor, it will not only be the successful competitor but will furnish the best labor obtainable. Nowhere has organized labor under such conditions so fine an opportunity or so fair a chance as in the South. But as I said before, the South is the stronghold of individual rights. The workman must respect the individual rights of the employer and the employer in return will respect the individual rights of the workman.
It is not only skilled, law-abiding laborers that are necessary to the South’s industrial success, but it is first of all necessary that employers be enlightened and abreast of the times in order that they may see clearly what their rivals are doing and what the markets of the world require. And chiefly employers must be just, wise and humane in order that they may enjoy the confidence and respect of their men.
It is indisputable that wherever there are employers who are wise and humane, working in harmony with laborers who are skilled, frugal and law-abiding, the community where the combination is found has a sure guaranty of numerical growth and of substantial material prosperity. Growth in population is gratifying to most citizens, notably so when accompanied with industrial growth as well, but substantial and lasting prosperity has too often been sacrificed in the eager desire of one community to herald to the world a larger population than its rival possessed. Increased numbers and wealth—if they bring in their train an unnatural increase in vice and crime, as we too often find to be the case,—are infinitely worse than if there were no growth. Southerners sometimes lament that the South does not grow fast enough, yet that it makes haste slowly is the South’s good fortune, since the criminal classes have not increased with the population as at the North. The Southern people, conservative always, should be in nothing so conservative as in the determination that this shall still be true; that while it is increasing in population and wealth the South shall also accomplish the more difficult and important duty of diminishing the percentage of vice and crime.
TILDY BINFORD’S ADVERTISEMENT.
By Holland Wright.
The advertising agent had done his worst. He had subsidized the county paper, crowding out valuable editorials to make room for pictures of the yawning hippopotamus and the unconventional summer girl. Every barn within five miles was decorated with big red pictures and big black letters, all telling of the wonders exhibited by the Grand Combination of Railroad Circuses.
Hodges was but an advertising agent—a ruthless purveyor of publicity. Callous to æsthetic emotions, blind to the beauties of nature, his conscience was dead to the vandalism of highway advertising. Having bedaubed the smiling face of nature in the vicinity of Johnsonville, he was ready to advance on Jonesboro.
“Hello!” he said, stepping briskly into Elrod’s livery stable, “have you got a team that can snatch me into Jonesboro in four hours?”
“That’s just what we have,” said old Bill Elrod—“Truthful Bill,” the boys called him.
“Well, I mean exactly what I say,” said Hodges. “Exactly four hours. I know it’s a hard drive, and I’m willing to pay a dollar or two extra if you can do it.”