Tendency of Legislation and Courts Favorable to Labor.

It has been necessary to cover a large field in this lecture to give even an outline sketch of the history of English labor questions, as treated by Legislatures and the law up to date. We are now prepared to take up the more concrete subjects which are pressing for immediate solution, but I think we must admit after making this review that the industrial laborer to-day has succeeded in getting the ear of the public and of the Legislatures. He has a common and regrettable notion that the courts are against him. It is true that timid judges have sometimes flown to the Constitution, much as a child runs to its mother, and that angry judges have invoked the aid of armed deputies in enforcing equity processes, which otherwise would have been of no effect; but in many cases the occasion justified it, and, at all events, the Legislatures have not been slow to help the cause of labor. While asking the earnest attention and sympathy of all thoughtful men, the industrial laborer must not be led to believe that he belongs to a privileged class, and certainly the statutes recently passed have gone far to justify such an impression in his mind. No other American citizen has his contracts regulated by the State, his times of payment fixed, his liberty to break them secured by law, his property freed from judgment, while upon the property of his debtors he

is given a prior lien. In no other occupation than that of personal labor is a man left free to perform his own contracts or not, while the other side is held to them. No other class have their prosperity made specially the subject of legislative consideration, and their political power carefully guarded by express statute, and every opportunity given for its use. When he has a just grievance the public bears good-naturedly the inconvenience caused even by the most sudden and arbitrary action on his part. Let us recognize then that however evil were the conditions in the past, the law has done much for the laboring man to-day and is ready, backed by public sentiment, to do more, provided only that what he asks is limited to that which is reasonable, possible, and not inconsistent with our inherited liberties.

II

THE EMPLOYMENT CONTRACT

Two Public Questions Concerning Labor Prominent To-day.

Our last lecture attempted to give a bird's-eye view of the general subject of labor in its relation to law, sufficient to enable us now to pick out what are the important points, the key-positions, in the country we have surveyed; and I may say at once that they appear to be two in number: First, the general question of the labor contract, and how far the law shall restrain, modify, or amend it; second, the question of the acts and remedies permissible both to employers and employees in their effort to better their position relative to each other, and how far the State shall restrain, sanction, or enforce these.

The Labor Contract, its History.

I think to-day it will be quite enough if we endeavor to consider the labor contract. Now, first I wish to call your attention to the fact that it is now generally admitted by radicals as well as

I

conservatives, that the great story of the historical development of the labor question has been that from artificial control to freedom of contract. do not wish to prejudice you with any notion that this freedom of contract is now, or in the future, necessarily, a thing to be preserved; but it is necessary for us to note this great historical fact.

State Control Asked.

Many labor leaders are again asking for an effectual control of the labor contract or relation, and this not only as it was controlled in old times in the interest of the laborer, by the guilds, that is, not now by trades-unions or combined action alone, but by the direct legislation of the State. That is, they wish to substitute the will of a presumable majority, or at least of a majority of those persons who for any year happen to be members of the State legislature, for the individual judgment of the citizen. They wish to prohibit the right of the employee to make his own contract with the employer, and this not alone separately, but as applied to what we have called collective bargaining; that is, even to the contracts of all employers in a given trade with all the employees in such trade embodied in a labor union. I repeat that I do not now wish to consider whether this is wise or not, whether it is beneficial to the employee or not, whether on the

whole it is for the greatest good of the greatest number or not; but I do wish strongly to point. out that this is a distinct change of sides and a surrender of the ground for which labor had been fighting from the earliest historic times down to a very few years ago. On this fact every one is agreed. It is as clearly set forth in the compilation of labor history made under the auspices of Mr. Powderly as it is in Adam Smith, as clearly in the history of Brentano of Leipsic-who represents the later German school, which objects to Adam Smith and the laissez-faire idea-as in Thorold Rogers. Brentano is most emphatic on this point, and his phrase for it is, "the growth of labor from the system of authority to the system of contract." Brentano himself is for the yet newer view, which he terms "association; but the history of his own subject, as told by himself up to the date of his book, is simply the history of the successful effort of labor to be relieved of compulsion by law or by guild, and its arrival at the stage known to us in the nineteenth century, where— to quote Brentano's words—"labor is regarded as a commodity to be sold, and the greatest possible liberty, both of individual bargaining and of combination, is given to the laborer in selling it." On August 4, 1789, as Brentano tells us, the abolition of the old guild control in France was welcomed by laborers with the wildest rejoicings