nothing immoral in his wanting higher wages.

People with no interest in a labor conflict and inconvenienced by a strike, are liable to display an impatient irritation at workmen, who seem to be striking all the time and for no sufficient cause. It is true that strikes are occasionally called for light and trivial reasons, but the cause of a strike may be far deeper and far more important than the immediate incidents or occasions which precipitate the struggle. People frequently claim that workmen should never strike when the injury to be avoided or the gain to be secured is less than the cost of the strike, but if men were not willing, at least occasionally, to make great sacrifices to prevent even small losses, unscrupulous employers would take advantage of their unwillingness to strike. The principle of trade unions, as of all other organizations, should be "Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute." Frequently workmen are subjected to a long series of petty aggressions by employers, who believe that no single one of these encroachments will be sufficient to provoke the men to strike. I is the last straw that breaks the camel's back, and a strike attributed to an apparently insignificant incident may be the outburst of pent-up feelings, resulting from months or years of repeated aggressions. The man who, in his haste, declares that a strike is ill-considered, because its immediate cause is slight, may be as wrong as the judge who, to discourage useless litigation, might decide against all plaintiffs in small cases, and would thus hold back the poor from the fountain of justice.

Trade unions are also frequently accused of lack of wisdom in calling strikes in prosperous times. The comic papers are filled with cartoons representing the foolish workman upsetting, by strikes, the precious jar of prosperity. But no matter when he strikes, the workman is called foolish. If times are bad and reduction of wages is tlireatened, the immutable law of supply and demand is quoted against him; if times are good, he is destroying prosperity; if times are normal, he is advised to leave well enough | alone. As a matter of fact, if workingmen are to secure any advance or even to retain their present position, they are obliged to strike in good times. It is in good times that the prices of the necessaries of life rise; and it is at

such times that employers are best able to grant fair conditions of work, for, if in good times the workingmen do not secure, either by strikes or negotiation, a share of the prosperity of the nation, the excessive profits of the employer will be capitalized, and the day for securing increased wages and better conditions of work will be indefinitely postponed.

While opposition to strikes as such is diminishing, there is still much disapproval of sympathetic conflicts, in which men strike, not to better their own conditions, but in order to express sympathy and grant aid to men unconnected with them, who are engaged in an industrial conflict. The public feels in a general way that sympathetic strikes are vicious and foolish and that they should be put down on all occasions.

To a certain extent and to a certain extent only, the public is justified in this attitude. Of course there are sympathetic lockouts as well as sympathetic strikes, though less is heard of the former. The opposition to sympathetic strikes arises from the fact that in actual practice they sometimes involve a breach of contract and from the further fact that the sympathetic strike is usually too remote and has too little bearing upon the main point at issue. Where a sympathetic strike involves a violation of a contract, it should under no circumstances take place, and this is true also of a strike which is not sympathetic. The right to strike, to strike sympathetically, or to boycott can never exist where such action involves a violation of an agreement with employers.

Another objection to the sympathetic strike is the fact of its remoteness. The public may sympathize with oppressed tailors who are struggling for better conditions, but it will not sympathize with waiters, teamsters, bricklayers, or railroad employees, if by any chance, they strike sympathetically with the Garment Workers. The public finds in the original quarrel no justification for the intervention of the new unions, and it fears that by means of sympathetic strikes a conflict originally limited in scope may become extended so as needlessly to involve the entire labor world.

Upon the whole, therefore, sympathetic strikes should not be encouraged. The caution which a wise labor leader exercises before involving

his union in a strike should be multiplied manyfold in the case of an intended sympathetic strike. There are times, however, when sympathetic strikes are not only justifiable, but actually noble. A wise sympathetic strike which involves no violation of contract, and is of such a nature as directly and powerfully to influence the result of the original conflict, a strike carried out, not for the immediate good of the members of the union, but for that of other workmen, emphasizes, as no other event in industrial life, the universal brotherhood and solidarity of labor. There is nothing inherently and necessarily wrong in doing for others what we would that they should do for us, and a strike is not made immoral by the fact that the strikers permit others than themselves to be the gainers thereby. It sometimes happens that the weaker organizations, composed of oppressed workmen (and the more oppressed they are, the weaker their unions are apt to be), can only secure reasonable and humane conditions by and through the assistance of workingmen in other unions. In certain trades, moreover, where the unions whose members are engaged upon the same work are not affiliated, it may be necessary to involve all workers in a strike in which any one union is engaged, although, in such cases, it is better to secure uniformity by federation and by agreements binding all the unions equally. Some unions, in order to preserve their right to strike sympathetically-where such action is deemed essential to the welfare of the whole communitycontract especially for this contingency and reserve this privilege in making their agreements. This is not unlike the strike clauses in contracts which one employer makes with another and which renders the contract or certain of its conditions void in case one of the parties thereto has a strike. There can be no doubt, however, that upon the whole and in the long run, the policy of striking in sympathy should be frowned upon and discouraged. It should not be permitted at all where it involves a violation of a contract or where its influence will not be direct, powerful, immediate, and beneficent, not only to the men on strike, but to the community. Finally, in any and every instance, sympathetic strikes should be resorted to only in the most extreme cases and where the conditions fully and clearly

indicate the necessity of making an exception to a settled policy. The number of sympathetic strikes appear to be small and diminishing, only 3% of the strikes occurring in the United States between the years 1880 and 1900 being sympathetic strikes.

It is frequently stated that the strikes in which unions engage are in cited and brought on by the officials. There are many people who believe that labor leaders gain when strikes are declared, and that the men throw up their positions in order in some mysterious way to benefit "the labor agitators." As a matter of fact, the shoe is entirely upon the other foot. The work of the union official doubles and trebles as soon as a strike is declared, and, as likely as not, his salary is lessened. The remuneration of the union official is not unlike that of the Chinese physician, who, it is said, receives pay only while his patient is well. During the Coal Strike of 1902, the officials of the United Mine Workers contributed 35% of their monthly salaries to the strike fund, and officers of the union who had been slowly saving money on a salary of $70 or $75 a month, ran into debt while working for the union from twelve to fifteen and more hours per day. Unless, therefore, the union official stands for the principle of more work and less pay, he will not call strikes for his own selfish purposes, and what is more important, he cannot, if he will. The statement that strikes are caused by walking delegates is as naïve as the childish belief that it is the gong which makes the train move. Strikes, it is true, have sometimes been called for organization purposes, for propaganda, but no strike of this sort could be successful unless it were at the same time a protest against intolerable conditions, and unless it were generally desired and demanded by the men. In nearly all unions, the officials, from the local business agent or walking delegate to the international president, are elements for peace, not for war, and in actual practice the aggressive element is represented by the members of the union, and the steadying and conservative element, by the officers. The pecuniary loss which strikes may inflict upon a union official is the least of his difficulties.

I can conceive of few positions so unenviable, so filled with the peril

of an evil choice as that of a labor leader on the eve of a great industrial conflict. Under the democratic constitutions of our unions, the decision to strike or not to strike rests in the final instance with the men themselves; but in the case of a particularly difficult problem, conditions may be such that the decision will depend upon votes cast under the influence of a single leader. The sobering sense of responsibility which under these circumstances comes to the union official, is radically different from the reckless spirit in which, it is claimed, the leaders of labor in this country evoke strikes. The potentialities of suffering, of want and destitution, the dread cf a coming winter of idleness, bear with almost crushing force upon the man who is responsible. Either choice is fraught with the possibility, the absolute assurance even, of great evil. On the one hand, the leader feels the growing discontent, the increasing recklessness, the sullen irritation of idle men, the hatred between the men who strike and the men who work; he fears the clash between the more reckless on both sides; he fears blows and violence, perhaps even murder; he dreads the hardships, the suffering, the privation, the anguish of men whose wives and children are famished and freezing, the despair that comes at the end and destroys the slow patient work of long years. On the other hand, he sees unfolded before him, the whole history of labor; the upward striving through effort and courage and sacrifice; the temporary losses through cowardice or shrinking from the fear of evils, a movement ever upward and onward, but ever beset with difficulties, with danger, with suffering, and, it may be, with loss of life. A leader who in wanton recklessness and without thoughtful calculation of all the possible good and evil, a leader who makes his decision to strike, or not to strike, from any but the highest, the noblest, the most disinterested motives, is guilty of a crime against labor comparable to the treachery of a Benedict Arnold.