"My country, 'tis of thee!" / Or, the United States of America; past, present and future. A philosophic view of American history and of our present status, to be seen in the Columbian exhibition.

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

Will any unions, guilds, Knights of Labor, help the workingmen to maintain such rights as they have and gain such as they need? Yes, if there are brains behind them. “In union is strength,” but strength may be just as effective in a bad sense as a good one, and the more of it there is the worse will be the showing made if the cause is not just. If workingmen were divine, all their past efforts would have done a great deal of good, but they are only human, and there is no getting away from the fact that when any lot of men first are brought together through sense of wrong, their first thought is revenge, which never meets the public’s views. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” is an expression from authority so high that we are obliged to treat it with respect, and it is certain that during the present generation a desire for vengeance by any one or for any reason whatever has never called forth the sympathy of the public.

Human nature is a very weak article. No one knows this better than the wise man who has a great deal of it himself; so in all quarrels he assumes that there is a great deal of right on both sides and that reconciliation or adjustment must be brought about by conciliation and compromise. The laboring man on strike is not given to either conciliation or compromise. Whatever his wrongs may be, he has first endured them for a long time and when he has begun to complain of them his complaints have never been made directly, but simply are voiced among his fellows, then increased in volume. The argument on the other side has never been brought to his attention, and consequently he regards himself as the only person wronged and almost as the only person who has any interest in the matter in any way. It never occurs to him that his employer, like nineteen in twenty of all the employers of the United States, is doing his business on the basis of general confidence and borrowed capital, and that what might seem fair to the employer as an individual may be utterly impossible when demanded of the employer as a business man.

In all the manufacturing centres outside of large cities the majority of employers do business with money borrowed from savings banks which have obtained this money by deposits from the laboring men themselves. An injury done to one is an injury to all. If labor goes back upon the employer, the banks also must go back upon him, and after this nothing but a very wise head can prevent injury to both. When upon such a complication there comes the spirit of revenge nothing but a special interposition of Providence can prevent injury for everybody.

One fact that should be constantly borne in mind is that trades unions, no matter what their titular name may be, can never be sure of support from men in the same trade who have most sense and influence. Protests, whether with words or blows, are always made by the discontented, but the better class of workingmen are not of that variety. They either have better sense than their associates or make better use of the sense they have, so they are in positions with which they are fairly contented. Men who have been “inside” of a great many labor movements are no less vigorous in their denunciation of the stupidity of labor than the most earnest or most hypocritical employer that can be named. They say or they have said to newspaper men whose business it has been to interrogate them closely that “if” so-and-so had happened the results would have been different, but A or B or C, each of whom had a number of personal retainers, thought differently, and consequently the trouble was prolonged. Had certain other men in the business belonged to the unions or guilds, or whatever associations made the formal protest against wages or hours, or whatever the grievances might have been, there would have been a chance for compromise, or arbitration, or some other method which would have brought the conflicting interests into harmony. But these men “stayed out,” as the saying is. They were men who saw opportunities for something better before them; consequently they did not intend to compromise their own position and future prospects by taking part in a fight.

Neither can the unions depend upon support from mechanics and laborers outside of the large cities and of villages and manufacturing centres which are tributary to large cities. The carpenter, mason and blacksmith in a country town feels insulted when asked to organize or join a trade union. He does not feel the need of any protection. He, with good right, considers himself as smart as any merchant or manufacturer or capitalist in his vicinity, and he not only does not see the need of any protection against such people, but he thinks himself smart enough to overcome them all in matters pertaining to his own business. Experience proves that he is right. Such a man slowly but surely becomes a proprietor, and thus an employer himself. The idea that he is always to be a laborer is extremely distasteful to him, and even if he were convinced that such were to be the fact he would not admit it. He would feel that he would be voluntarily taking a lower level by making any such admission. The natural consequences may be seen by any man who has done business in a number of small towns or villages. The journeyman workman in any trade whom he knew ten or fifteen years ago, in his beginning, is probably now an employer and a proprietor himself. Quite possibly he has “struck a big thing,” as the saying goes, and has money of his own; his sons are being as well educated, his daughters as well dressed, as those of any of his neighbors, and his wife associates on terms of equality with the families of the judge or Congressman or whosoever else the local magnate may be.

So far as labor expects to be helped by public sympathy, which is always on the side of the unfortunate and oppressed, it cuts its own throat by denying the right of any laborer to work at cheaper rates than his fellows. The abuses and indignities to which so-called scabs have been subjected have alienated public “sympathy” from labor movements to a most deplorable degree. No American, not even the millionaire, is free from the influence of competition in business, and the richest are sometimes those who suffer the most. Competition has been defined as the soul of business, and no one yet has been skilful enough to deny or modify the assertion. If employers may compete, if clerks, teachers, salesmen, lawyers, physicians, even clergymen, may compete with one another for wages or compensation for their services, why may not workmen? Can any one imagine a body of clerks, or dry-goods salesmen, or lawyers, forming a clique and standing at dark corners with clubs and pistols to bully other men of their own profession into demanding certain wages on penalty of refusing to do any business at all?

“What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” If one class of labor is entitled to take as much wages as it may get for such services as it can render, why should not another be entitled to the same privilege? It is very true that the laboring man often sees in free competition by a large number of men a possibility that he shall be deprived of his daily occupation. But whose fault is it? That of the competitor who will work for lower wages or of the man who has done so little outside of his daily stint of labor as to be obliged to stand in the position of a highwayman or bully toward any one who can do the same work for less money than he?

Can law improve the condition of the workingman? Can you make a horse drink by leading him to the water? The law has done a great deal for the laborers in many States by giving workmen a first lien upon the results of their work, but it cannot and will not compel the community to regard the inefficient worker as the equal of the good one, which is the point upon which some trade unions and other organizations seem inclined to insist. Neither will it allow the employee to manage his employer’s business. The employer may occasionally find himself “in a hole,” where he must submit to any terms imposed by the only men who can help him out, but if he gets in any such fix a second time his bankers and customers will go back upon him, after which he will have no use for labor at any price.

Then can law and public opinion do more for laboring men than they have done? Not much. Why? Because law and public opinion are made by people who themselves work—people who stand just as much of this world’s wear and tear as any common dirt-shoveller, to say nothing of any skilled mechanic. There are more farmers than mechanical laborers, and they work longer hours, but how often do they demand help of the law or the public? In every large city there are tens of thousands of clerks who are driven to their utmost capacity at less compensation per day than the common laborer receives. It has been ascertained that a bank-teller who recently defaulted was getting a salary of only six dollars per week, though he had long hours and great responsibility.

Does not underpaid labor, outside the mechanical arts, frequently improve its own condition? Yes, frequently. Well, how? Why, by using its brains. If it were to insist that its whole duty was done when its daily work was over the public would laugh at it. The clerk, the teacher, the salesman considers it his duty to continually improve himself in order to be fit for such opportunities as may arise. A man in any one of these positions who would spend his non-working hours in indulgence, carelessness, or, worse still, at the nearest beer-shop, would be considered by his employers as unfit for confidence and by his associates as a man who never would rise. If such men are so badly paid, so severely worked, yet are skilful enough to rise from the low financial level upon which their work places them, why should not the laboring class in general rise in the same manner? It is useless to say they cannot, because thousands upon thousands have done it for years. It has already been said that the mechanics of a few years ago are the employers and managers of to-day. A great deal more might be said in the same direction, for there are great mills, factories and industries of the United States to-day controlled by men who were merely poor laborers at day wages a few years ago. The question is not one of a class or of an industry; it is entirely one of individual manhood, and the man stands or falls by himself. The more he depends upon an association or his fellow-men the less strength there is in himself to resist injury or to make his way upward.