stamps the label on the brick as the soft clay passes under it. The label of the Printers is too well-known to need description, but it, as well as all other labels, are put on in such a manner as to prevent fraud and unfairness. Loose labels are never sold; a manufacturer is not usually allowed to put on the labels himself; an accurate account is kept of all labels, and they are numbered consecutively in order that irregularities may be detected. The label appeals both to the working classes and to general consumers, and it claims to stand, and usually does stand, for sanitary conditions, good workmanship and standard wages. When the label means sanitary conditions, it has been especially successful with the general consumer. No man desires to put upon his back a coat or shirt, or to put into his mouth a cigar, which he knows to have been made in the midst of filth and disease, and there is no guarantee against such conditions so effective as the union label. When the label stands for good workmanship, the general consumer is also interested. As a general rule, the unions endeavor to maintain a certain. standard of excellence in goods bearing the label, and the cigar makers refuse to permit the label to be put on cigars which sell for less than twenty dollars a thousand. The principal hold, however, which the union label has is the support of the working classes and their sympathizers. With each passing year the importance of the workingmen as consumers of the nation's products will increase, and with each year it will be more and more a matter of interest to the employer to appeal to this public. Through the label the workingmen of the country are organizing as consumers just as they have already organized as producers. The advertising of the label in the labor papers and other journals, in the street cars and elsewhere, the sending of lecturers to small towns, and the distribution of a vast amount of literature upon the subject, show that the workingmen are adopting business methods in increasing their strength. Like other features of the trade union movement, the label protects the scrupulous and just employer from the unfair competition of the man with less compunction. A union hat cannot be told from a non-union hat by its general appearance any more than a bushel of Iowa wheat can be distinguished from a bushel of Kansas wheat in a Chicago elevator, and the label serves the good purpose of separating the sweat-shop made goods from the goods made under fair and reasonable conditions. If the label secures the support of the working classes and continues to be issued in a fair and honest manner, and if the boycott is judiciously and temperately used, the offensive and defensive power of the workingman will increase enormously. In a strike the workingmen are in general at a disadvantage as compared with the employer, because they are in the position of sellers whose commodity, labor, will spoil on their hands, unless disposed of immediately. The employer is at the same disadvantage in the case of a boycott, since he now becomes a seller of commodities to the working classes and finds through a boycott or through the absence of a label that he cannot make terms and has his products on his hands. Especially is this true at the present time when giant companies spending millions of dollars on advertising have become especially vulnerable to the boycott and especially desirous of securing the label. The label makes the consumer for the first time a responsible agent, capable of passing judgment and knowing good from evil. It coins the public disapproval of an act and becomes to the workman as a consumer what the union scale is to him as a producer-a standard and a rallying point. If the time should come when there are millions of workingmen acting together in common upon a boycott approved of by all, the power of the organized workmen of the country will be infinitely increased. The attainment of such a strategic position by the workmen is a matter, however, of slow growth and is the result of their education to the full comprehension of the ideals of trade organizations. CHAPTER XXXIV LABOR AND CAPITAL AT WAR Strikes a Method Workmen Strike. Normal Condition of Industry is Peace. Strikes Exceptional. of Bargaining. Strikes Involve Freedom of Contract. Why Petty Grievances and the Last Straw. Strikes and Prosperity. Sympathetic Strikes and Sympathetic Lockouts. Does the Walking Delegate Cause Strikes? Labor Leaders and Labor Conflicts. The Responsibility of the Union Official. THE HE normal condition of industry is peace. While we daily read of the outbreak of strikes or the declaration of lockouts, the average workingman, engaged in industries in which strikes occur, loses less than a day a year in this manner. A strike lasts upon the average about twenty-three days, but the average employer peacefully carries on his business for thirty years without the outbreak of a strike. The average lockout lasts ninetyseven days, but of a thousand establishments, less than two declare a lockout in the course of any given year. The prevalence of strikes as of all dramatic occurrences is exaggerated. Every murder which occurs in the city of New York is reported in thousands of newspapers, and yet these crimes are so rare compared with the number of inhabitants that the average citizen has no fear or thought of such a calamity. Tragic, dramatic, or startling events are so impressed upon the mind that we fail to realize that they are highly exceptional. A strike is simply a method of bargaining. If the grocers of a city would refuse to sell their sugar for less than seven cents a pound and the consumers would refuse to pay more than six, exactly the same thing would occur as happens in an ordinary strike. A strike does not necessarily in- I volve animosity, hatred, dissension, recrimination, or any form of bitterness; it merely represents a difference between what the buyer of labor is willing to offer, and what the seller of labor is willing to accept. Until the buyer and seller of an ordinary commodity are agreed as to price and conditions, no sale can be effected. Until the wages and conditions of work are agreed upon and acceded to both by employer and workman, the industry must stop. 1 Strikes thus result from a failure to make a bargain or contract by men who are free to contract. Strikes in the true sense of the word, therefore, cannot exist before the freedom of contract is accorded. The concerted quitting of work by the Israelitish builders of the pyramids because of a refusal upon the part of their taskmasters to provide them with straw for the making of bricks was not a strike, because the workingmen were slaves and without the free power of contract. It was not for them to fix conditions of work, and their position was determined, not by contract, but by compulsion. The insurrection of the slaves at Rome and the peasant uprisings which occurred at the dawn of modern times in Germany, France, and England, were not in any true sense strikes, because the conditions of work against which these men rebelled were determined for them and not by them. Their various uprisings were met by the armed resistance of the State, since it was held that the men had no right to refuse to work in the positions assigned to them. The present conception of a strike or lockout is that of workmen or employers exercising their undoubted right to refuse to enter into contracts when the conditions are not satisfactory to them. It is frequently stated that trade unions desire strikes because, it is alleged, they are organized for this purpose. This, however, is not true. The trade union is organized for the purpose of securing better conditions of life and labor for its members, and when necessary, a strike is resorted to as a means to that end. But it can no more be said that trade unions desire strikes because they are equipped for them, than that the United States Idesires war because it has an army and navy. It is true that, in a general way, strikes occur most frequently in those countries which are most progressive and in which trade unionism is strongest. In proportion to population, there are more strikes in the United States than in Great Britain, and more in Great Britain than in France, and more in France than in Italy or Austria, and this, in general, is the order of these nations in the pros-. perity of their working classes. The same conditions which cause the creation of trade unions are equally answerable for the constant demand for improved conditions on the part of the working class population, which demand frequently voices itself in strikes. While strikes are occasionally called for senseless or trivial purposes, the great majority result from a justifiable desire on the part of workinginen to better their conditions. According to the Report of the United States Department of Labor, 41.4% of the strikes during the period from 1881 to 1900 were fought for higher wages; and 6.9% for the maintenance oi present wages. In other words, practically one-half of all strikes in the I United States during the last twenty years were declared either for the purpose of enforcing increases or preventing decreases in the rate of wages. Of the remaind of the strikes, one-half were attempts to enforce demands for a reduction the working day. These demands looked to the regulation of the working time and of payment for overtime, as well as toward the granting of a Saturday half holiday. Only one strike out of sixteen was fought out upon the question of the recognition of the union, or the demand that the employer live up to union rules, and only one strike in nineteen was declared for the purpose of excluding non-union men, members of other labor organizations, unpopular foremen, or other persons objectionable to the union. Only 1% of the strikes were called for the purpose of enforcing the reinstatement or retention of particular union employees, while less than one in a hundred were fought out upon the question of apprenticeship. Despite the oft-repeated claim that trade unions obstruct the intro- I duction of machinery, only one out of every seven hundred strikes in the United States during the last twenty years was called for the purpose of preventing or hindering the introduction or use of machinery, or other improved appliances. It is admitted on all sides that strikes are to be avoided in all cases where the object desired can be obtained by peaceful negotiation. There is nothing immoral, however, in the workingman's striking, just as there is |