But never complained of dependence until the law began to make them independent. But I think we are all glad of this fact — glad that our newspapers, our speakers, and our writers are easily led to take a side, where they can, for the cause of labor. The world has been organized always in the interest of the clever few. No greater interest lies in life to-day than how so to regulate it as to give the multitude their chance. I assume that we all come here predispositioned to that side. I shall frankly take that position in these lectures. if we so put ourselves in the place of the laborer, or the laborer's friend, our first duty is clearly to see that no fault, no unfairness, no back-sliding into older, worse conditions be on our side. As the advocate of more equitable treatment for workingmen we should come into our court with clean hands. I say this at the start lest you should later think me over-scrupulous in showing where modern labor agencies are unjust, where they overstep the mark, where they restrict liberty— Anglo-Saxon liberty; the kind that our race alone has won and where they show a tendency to go back to the cruder remedies of earlier times, or to the less ennobling social order of inferior races. Agricultural Labor Peculiar in its Conditions. I shall not delay to speak of agricultural labor. The farmer and the husbandman have their own problems to solve; they are affected by peculiar conditions, by necessary peculiarities in the ownership of the soil, the nature and proprietorship of the land, their raw material, being the land itself. So far as their conditions can be altered by anything we can do, they are benefited by the general advance of other laborers as they are injured by their general degradation. But the fact that the problems of agricultural labor are peculiar is shown as clearly in the latest statutes of our Western States-in Nebraska, for instance, whose drastic eight-hour law did not pretend to extend itself to the people on farms—as in the earliest known condition of things in England, where the villain was appendant to the land like a tree and could only be severed from it by death or sale. Still he was never a slave. It is important to remember this, as for a long time the contrary theory was maintained; but even the agricultural laborer was never a slave in England. There was a real bargain, says Thorold Rogers, between lord and serf. The serf may have had few rights of property, but he had more rights of person, and he was at least secure from dispossession. Although he was disabled from migrating to any other habitation than the manor of his settlement, and could not bear arms in the militia, he always could bear arms in the army of the king; and, so long as he stayed at home, his relation to the lord was a definite contractual right, which might be commuted, and early was, into a small money payment, which is practically indistinguishable from rent for his land. But Slavery never Existed Among Anglo-Saxons. We start, then, here: Though slavery is the simplest labor relation, it has not existed, at least within historic times, in our race-a peculiar reason why we may claim England as the birthplace of modern industrial conditions. And if the agricultural laborer was not a slave, the artisan was still less so. No vestige, in the earliest times, of any servile relation can be found. Artisans were localized, it is true, because staying in one place was part of the general social condition of the time. The smith, the farrier, the two or three shepherds, the miller, later the carpenter, the tanner or shoemaker, later still the weaver and the baker, each belonged to one or, at most, to two or three neighboring communities, and served all indiscriminately for a fixed wage, paid at first by the day, later by the piece; and if the lord himself exacted his services and did not pay for the same with the rest, it was either a clear extortion (for we are here stating the facts, not denying that there grew up in the feudal baron a very definite notion of servile relation from his tenants to him) or supposed to be in commutation of rent. Later attempts were indeed made-one in the time of Henry II., another in that of Elizabeth-on the part of the privileged classes to put the industrial laborer also into servile relation, and their chancellors naturally endeavored to justify the step by historic precedent; but I think I have stated the best modern opinion of the fact. Earliest English Labor Relation One of Separate Contract. We start, therefore, with our industrial laborer a free individual, and his relation one of separate contract with his employer. Such is substantially the letter of the law to-day. But the very latest definition I find in one of the very latest works on labor, published only last year, is, that the essence of the modern trade-union is "collective bargaining," that is, endeavoring to enforce a relation, not of separate and separable contract between the employers and each employee, between the lord and each peasant, but a contract between the employer, or the neighboring or related bodies of employers, and the workman, or a controlling force of the workmen organized into a tradeunion. But thus far, also, we had progressed some eight hundred years ago-in the medieval guild. The substantial distinction between the oldest form of guild and the modern trade-union would appear to be that the bond of the guild was rather local, while that of the trade-union is the nature of the employment. Still, even in this particular, as we all know, the general guild of an English borough was soon differentiated into the separate guilds of the various crafts, arts, or mysteries which made up its industrial body politic. And again, just as the latest report of the British Royal Commission complains that the essence of trade-unionism is not solidarity, but protection of a special trade or part of it; so the essence of the medieval guild was monopoly. Perhaps its earliest object was to prevent the employment of strangers, and our oldest law reports are full of cases of subtle by-laws and regulations which far surpass in complexity the restrictions of the narrowest trade-union or the most exclusive modern club. The Royal Commission's report just mentioned complains that when the representatives of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers spoke of the necessity of absorbing the unemployed, they announced their intention of putting further restrictions on the admission of apprentices to their trade. In other words, they contemplated not the employment of the unemployed, but their exclusion from the organization and industry of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. Now, most of the things which seem to us to smack of slavery in medieval regulations arise from this principle, which is really one of privilege. Membership in a |