In private, President Roosevelt has expressed his unbounded admiration for the courage of that business statesmanship which, within a generation, has so mastered the West as to make its prairies rich in harvests and its population continuous and thriving between the Atlantic and the Pacific. But he has quite as much admiration for the native qualities, and for the stern training and disciplining of those qualities, whereby a coal-miner succeeded in organizing for a common purpose a vast army of men whose toil is hidden from the sunlight, and whose faces are blackened as they come, with lanterns on their caps, from the dismal caverns where they delve.
Mr. George W. Perkins has spoken to his friends of the impression made by the President upon the capitalists whom he met at these interviews in which the way was prepared for a settlement of the anthracite coal strike. Mr. Roosevelt made it clear that he was no respecter of persons by reason of the incidental power any one might possess, but was only a respecter and admirer of manhood.
The second of the executive opportunities came when a demand was made that none but a member of the labor organization should be employed in one of the government departments. The President's reply was emphatic. The government as a government could not, he said, recognize either labor organizations as against an individual or an individual as against a labor organization. At one meeting between Mr. Roosevelt and some of those who were of the labor world, he declared that no combination, whether of capital, or of credit, or any wherein the bond of union is a common kind of labor, can in the long run prosper if it forgets the rights of the individual. He has over and over again inculcated the doctrine of individual right of judgment, deeming that to contain the very spirit of American institutions.
The Enjoyment in Labor.
The President is quoted by his friends as having recently expressed his confident belief that the labor organizations are coming to see the wisdom of the view that the right to exercise individual judgment must not be forgotten or ignored. He has no doubt that ultimately, if wisely and justly handled, they will give the fullest opportunity for the perfection of the individual morally, intellectually, and physically.
The time, he thinks, is not far distant when the sense of individuality may be sufficient to teach the lesson that in every kind of labor the laborer may find enjoyment—the florist and the harvester in the mystery of the growth and coloring of the products of the field, the granite-worker in the tracings of geology, the carpenter in the beauty of geometry and in the fine penciling which nature has left in the native wood. Work undertaken in this spirit is no longer mere mercenary drudgery, but partakes of the inspiration that follows high appeal to the intellectual and moral faculty of the worker.
To give a final summing up of President Roosevelt's view of trade-unions and labor organizations, it may be said that he believes in them because he sees in such combinations the greater opportunity for each individual to develop the best that is in him.
A Descent Into the Maelström.
BY EDGAR ALLAN POE.