back to work immediately. If they had any grievances, he told them, their agreement provided means of hearing and redressing them through the impartial chairman. By quitting work they were violating the agreement, and neither the union nor the chairman could take up their case. The pressers demurred; but, after being out a day or two, they went back to work and filed a complaint that the employer had violated the agreement by substituting machines for handpressing without consulting the pressers and the union. At the same time the employer filed a complaint asking that the pressers be disciplined for engaging in a stoppage, contrary to the agreement. All the pressers came to the hearing, which was held after working-hours. The impartial chairman's courtroom would accommodate comfortably only about forty people, yet more than sixty crowded into it. There was tensity in the atmosphere. The employer and his labor-manager felt that the action of the pressers was entirely unjustified, and that they had been caused unnecessary losses by the stoppage. The workmen, knowing they were wrong in the matter of the stoppage, were all the more incensed at the employer, and at the machines, which they feared threatened their livelihood. 'Since there can be no dispute about the stoppage,' I said, in opening the hearing, 'we will dispose of that issue first. The agreement prohibits stoppages. It also provides means of redressing all grievances, and particularly in the matter of improved machinery it is very clear in stating how the workers' interests shall be protected and what the employers' rights and duties shall be. The usual punishment for such an infraction of the agreement will therefore have to be given. The men will make up, by working overtime, the production lost to the employer on account of the stoppage, and they will do this overtime work at straight-time pay.' (Under ordinary circumstances the pay for overtime was at the rate of time and one half.) 'Now we will take up the off-pressers' complaint.' But this punishment, which most of the men knew was coming, seemed to increase their anger. Their complaints against the employer for introducing the machines became more vehement. One after another they expressed their opposition to the machines in ardent protests, voicing their fears, but giving little consideration to the protection that the union agreement guaranteed them. The employer's labor-manager was not slow in calling attention to this. 'Mr. Chairman,' he said, 'it seems to me these men are entirely unreasonable. What are they afraid of? No man has lost a job on account of the machines. No man's wages were reduced. The agreement gives us the right to introduce labor-saving machinery, and we are not doing it at their expense. On the contrary, they get some of the benefits, too, for we relinquish part of the savings due to the machines in order to protect their interests. Hand-pressing is skilled work, which takes years to learn, but men can be broken in on the new steam-machines in a few months. At best the latter is but semiskilled work, and we could easily get men to do it for $25 or $30 a week. But we do not propose to discharge any of our hand-pressers and hire other men at lower wages. Every one of these pressers is to be given work at one of the machines, and he will continue to receive his present wages of $41 a week. True, on the machine each man will have to press more coats, and therein will be our saving; but we divide some of this gain with him when we continue 'I want ask question,' he repeated. 'When we break agreement by making stoppage, you fine us. That's right. I understand agreement. All right. If we break boss's machines we get arrested. That his property no must break. That all right, too. But I want ask Mr. Chairman why boss can break up my trade and he no get arrested. I take five years to learn trade that my property. Now boss he come along and say no more "off-presser" press whole coat. He break up with machine. One machine press sleeve, one press collar, another press back, another press front. Anybody can do that. Get man from street, $30 a week, maybe $25. No need off-presser any more. My trade all smashed to pieces. Boss do it, but he no get arrested. 'I know, Mr. Chairman, you no can do nothing. Boss keep all pressers and pay scale $41 like agreement says, then we must work on machines you decide like that. But labor-manager say afterward - maybe one year, maybe two years he get men with no trade and pay them $25 a week. I want, Mr. Chairman, you explain why boss not get arrested because he break up my trade- my property.' VI Reading an essay recently on "The Conflict between Labor and Capitalist Historically Considered,' I came to this concluding paragraph: There has been no wrong, nor misery, nor injustice recorded here that has not sprung from ignoring the fact that the capitalist and the laborer are, after all, brethren. Let us restore the Brotherhood, and the problem is solved. But what does brotherhood require in a case like that of the pressing machines? To guarantee that men will not be discharged because of the introduction of machinery and that their wages will not be reduced as the Rochester Clothing Agreement now guarantees would seem like brotherhood to the millions of wage-earners who have no such protection. In fact, with respect to labor-saving machinery, this is the protection for which most unions are fighting. Neverthless, the Rochester pressers did not think that justice was done them. And who will say that the presser's question in the last case did not present a real grievance? Who will give him a satisfactory answer? We protect investments by depreciation funds against losses from new devices and new machinery which render the old equipment obsolete. Electric light and power companies insist that they must have a high obsolescence-charge in their operatingexpenses, because inventions are so rapidly making out-of-date the equipment of their power houses, into which the investors' money has been put. Our courts and public commissions have upheld this contention and the obsolescence depreciation fund protects the investors' property when the equipment has to be scrapped. Why, then, should not the presser's property in his trade be equally protected? One answer is given by the manufacturers, who find that they cannot afford to use improved methods of production and labor-saving machinery if they have to keep all their old employees and continue to pay them the higher wages of skilled hand-labor. If they are compelled to do this, they can make but little reduction in price to the consumer, there is less buying than there might be under improved methods with lower costs, and the wage-earners, as well as the employers, have less work. But another answer is given by our state and municipal governments, and by our courts, when they refuse to permit motor-buses to compete with street and interurban railways. As with the skilled presser whose trade is destroyed by the steam-machines, electric railways are threatened by the improved methods of motor-transportation. Before these improved methods can be used to compete with the old, however, a certificate of convenience and necessity must be secured from the state or city government; and in order to protect the property of the investor these certificates are often refused. Motorbuses are thus in many cases kept off the roads and streets, and the inferior service of electric railways is maintained, for a time at least. It is well to remember that a workman has as much reason to fear the machinery that threatens the trade by which he earns a livelihood as the railroad or electric company has to fear motor-bus transportation. brotherhood will solve the problems of the relation between employers and wage-earners. What are 'brothers' in such relationships supposed to do? Too simple are the remedies that tell the employer to deal fairly, justly, and honestly with his employees, and tell wage-earners to give an honest day's work and be fair and just to their employer. What do honor, fairness, and justice require of us in cases like those described above? Equally good and honest people were on both sides of those cases, and equally good and honest 'impartial chairmen' might have rendered quite different decisions. Moreover, I have no doubt that among the readers of this paper there will be many opinions as to the decisions that should have been made in these cases to ensure exact justice. However bitter the conflicts between employers and wage-earners, I have found it rare indeed that anyone concerned in them consciously wanted to do the wrong or unjust thing. The conflicts came because it is so difficult to tell what is right in these industrial affairs. The standards by which employers, managers, wage-earners, investors, and consumers measure industrial justice are not the same. And until a common standard is attained none of us can be sure that he knows what is right and wrong in labor relations. But out of the hundreds of disputes decided every day in many of our industries, as the cases above were decided, a common standard of indus Too simple, then, is the answer that trial justice is slowly being achieved. TWIN PEAS IN A POD BY EARNEST ELMO CALKINS IN the First Baptist Sunday School, where I was a reluctant but regular scholar, the session was sometimes prolonged by a talk from a returned missionary, back from the foreign field to drum up funds to carry the light to millions sitting in darkness. His appeal did not move me. Indeed it quite spoiled my day. It was already long past the usual First Baptist Sunday dinner hour, which under ordinary circumstances was two hours later than the week-day meal. I was hungry and skeptical. Had n't the Chinese as much right to be heathen as we had to be Baptists? As the missionary described them, they seemed far more interesting in their heathen wickedness and strange clothes, sitting in darkness, than transformed into neat rows of near-Christians, sitting on hard benches on a hot Sunday in their best clothes, with their shoes blacked and their hair slicked. I meditated that if I should contribute the penny clutched in my sweaty fist to his propaganda I should be the means of establishing more Baptist Sunday Schools in China and blighting the lives of more Chinese boys and girls, who, though undoubtedly heathen, had never done me any harm. Besides, there were other uses for a penny. But I was weak, and a victim of the system under which I lived. When the collection was taken up, in an instrument something like a dumb ukulele, my contribution went in with the rest. I Now I know that if I am ever so fortunate as to visit China I shall suffer from the fruits of my indiscretion. For I shall find it neither Chinese nor Baptist. What might have been a jolly Oriental country will be diluted with a thin stream of what we complacently call our Western civilization, evident from the flotsam and jetsam on the surface, mainly hard-boiled derby hats, which look so funny on Oriental heads -and, for that matter, on Nordic heads also. Fancy exchanging the mellowed philosophy of Confucius for the ethical standards of the First Baptist Church of Galesburg, or the flowery, flowing silks of the Celestial Kingdom for long pants! In the course of time I became an advertising man, and with the proceeds and profits of my occupation I traveled. The rebellious state of mind engendered by waiting too long for dinner, together with the diversion of pennies from their legitimate use, has been strengthened rather than diminished by what I have seen. There has been too much missionary work. When it was not religion, it was business. I regard without enthusiasm the signs so visible in European countries that they are earnestly striving to make themselves acceptable in the eyes of American tourists by adopting, or at least offering, American comforts and conveniences, -installing bathrooms, opening American bars, dispensing nut sundaes, serving ice with drink, contriving tiny elevators in stair wells, but chiefly by abandoning costumes intrinsically picturesque and admirably adapted to their daily needs for the ugly and commonplace garments of the Western world. How well I remember my first trip abroad, my first sight of England! I was fearful it would not come up to the advance notices. I savored every scene and incident that was peculiarly and indubitably English. I relished even the discomforts. I should have been disappointed if the rooms had been warm, the beer cold, or the coffee good. I drank tea for breakfast, scorned the Paris edition of the New York Herald, and took in the Morning Post. I rejoiced that a sensational murder-story should be hidden behind so noncommittal a head as "The Pimlico Affair.' At Tilbury where we docked was a P. & O. steamship tied up alongside. From a porthole protruded a gayly turbaned head, with a black-bearded East Indian face beneath it, a timely symbol of Britain's far-flung empire. I felt as if this gorgeously illuminated footnote had been set just here at the beginning of the very first chapter of my English experiences for my sole delectation. As we rode up to London I regarded the landscape with a jealous eye. I was delighted with the haycocks standing in the fields, each wearing a tidy hairnet of rope, weighted at each corner with a stone. In London the bobby with the mysterious striped cuff on the outside of his right coat-sleeve, the 'clarks' with shabby top-hats and tightly rolled umbrellas, the Horse Guardsmen with their preposterous bearskin shakos, sights so familiar and so new, helped me to chant with thankfulness, 'So this is England.' It was England, the England I had known from boyhood, familiar from years of reading, from inherited tradition, from Mother Goose, from the toys I had played with - London Bridge, Banbury Cross, Tooley Street, Wapping Old Stairs, Tottenham Court Road, names so packed with meaning and association they resembled those tightly rolled Chinese paper flowers which so mysteriously open and expand when thrown into water. Even then I was already late. Progress had ripped out whole chapters of Dickens and built modern and sanitary structures in their stead. But Crosby Hall still stood. Hansom cabs still plied. The Charterhouse school was where it had been when Thackeray attended it. Temple Bar had been rusticated, but Mr. Bush had not yet erected his London version of an American skyscraper. There was still enough of London to make me happy there is yet, for that matter and outside London lay rural England, a symposium of everything I had read from Chaucer to Thomas Hardy. I was not confronted at every turn by the triumphant commercial supremacy of my own country. That was twenty years ago. Last summer I visited England with intent to explore its highways and byways in search of cathedrals, almshouses, inns, and cottages, but chiefly of that pastoral charm which pervades the pages of such old books as Our Village and Selborne. It was a delightful outing, for England is still England, war or no war, and in the country one is less conscious of change, the change the economist commends, in the course of which a people sloughs off the habit and habits that have no right to exist, except that they are old and picturesque and human and lovable. The hayricks still wear their hairnets. The farmsteads remind one of mezzotints after George Morland. The hedgerows are still gay with flowers, the fields spangled with poppies. The skies continue to look like backgrounds in Constable's paintings. Flocks of sheep still go to market on the hoof, |