privileges a far greater number of work ers. As civilization progresses the number of men who work for a per diem wage constantly decreases. When a man is hired by the month, or the year, there is always a tacit, and generally an expressed, contract that a certain amount of duty shall be done, without regard to the hours it may occupy. As a rule the learned professions give most hours to labor. For the clergyman, the lawyer, the physician, the round of duty begins with the waking hour, and closes, with brief intermissions, when the tired spirit seeks repose. The soldier paces his weary round by night or day, or marches without reference to the toil of the previous day. The sailor pleads no limit when the call comes of "All hands on deck." Merchants, book-keepers, editors, railway employés, expressmen, hotel waiters, newsmen, car-drivers and conductors, and all farm-laborers and houseservants work without regard to hours. The farm-laborer who, having toiled twelve hours in the harvest, would desert his wheat in the probability of a storm, would find his mission ended. This is simply a necessity of civilization. Under no other rule can capital afford to invest in enterprise.

We find, then, that an Eight-Hour law can only apply to a few of the trades. To how many of them? To none which work by the job or piece. Printers set so many thousand ems per diem, their wages depending altogether upon dexterity and industry. So with tailors, shoemakers, hatters, jewelers (manufacturing), and many other forms of trade. The Eight-Hour law, then, is just what we have called it-class legislation, made in the interest of a few of the lower forms of mechanical art, where brawn, and not brain, is the essential. It is noteworthy that art, in its true sense, and high mechanical skill, want no Eight-Hour laws. They are a folly which will cure itself.

As to Trades Unions. A little personal experience is worth a deal of theory in such a study. A close personal knowledge of, and constant association

with, mechanics has stripped us of many notions which we had derived from studies of political economy as we read it in books. Let us, then, explain and define our position at the outset, in the proposition that, in the present relations of labor and capital, Trades Unions are a necessity. Of course we assume that they must be wisely conducted. Of what we consider wisdom we shall speak hereafter. Of the unwisdom of the present organizations we shall also have a mention.

We have just thoughtfully read the constitution and by-laws of a prominent, powerful, and, let us in justice say, an honorably conducted Trade Union. Let us give an instance of their management. Recently the men in a certain large concern decided that they must have higher wages. Their action took this shape: There should be no compulsion, no strike; but they addressed a letter to the proprietor, saying that other employés in neighboring cities were receiving higher wages; that, although their treatment was kind and their pay prompt, they could not remain when they could do better elsewhere; that each individual would drop out, one by one, as opportunity offered; and that, logically, the best hands would be those who would first leave. The proprietor saw the force of the argument, and the wages were raised. The result was that the best hands in the vicinity sought an establishment where the pay was full and prompt.

Mixed up, as we were, in this not unpleasant adjustment of differences, we sought out an intelligent Union man, and asked for information. It was given clearly, dispassionately, and in terse phrase. The sum of his statement was this: "The Union is a necessity, and an evil. It is hard," he said, "for a mechanic like myself, who know my trade, to submit to a dead level of wages, and settle down to a life in which there is no hope of promotion. Look at it! There is a blacksmith, twenty years at his trade; a patient, sober, skilful workman. He is the only man in the shop who can be trusted with his peculiar work.

At the

next anvil is a lubberly boy, just out of his apprenticeship, hardly fit to forge a share to a plough. Both get the same wages, because both must have the Union price. There is nothing for the old man to look forward to. He wins a fair living, but the Union robs him of the chance to rise; to become a partner, by turning his skill into capital. It is, after all, a miserable concession that capital is the almost absolute master; and that the mechanic-a slave with two owners must make the best terms he can."

These words, full of pith, are not our own. They came from a man who prefers to lead in the Union rather than be led by it. His statement expresses a serious evil; one tending to immeasurably degrade the dignity of labor. Fortunately there are many avocations to which it cannot be applied. For instance, in the working jewelry business, of which we have some incidental knowledge, a rolled plate of gold is given to a workman, and charged up against him. He is to make a ring, a bracelet, a breast-pin, or some other ornament. His wages depend entirely upon what he returns. They may be twenty, and they may be fifty dollars a week. If he can only copy models, weld, file, and polish, he gets the lesser sum. If he is an artist, and returns his gold in novel and artistic form, charming to the eye, his wages become a sale of his talent, his genius, and not of his mere manual labor; just as a fine poem of four stanzas will bring more money than a closely written page upon a ledg

er.

And this, again, suggests that the higher the form of labor, the more independent it is of the restrictions of Trades Unions. Fancy Church or Bierstadt going into combination with daubsters, to paint pictures by the hour, or by the square foot! House-painters can have, nay, imperatively need, Trades Unions. Genius cannot afford them. It must claim all the rights of competition; must work under the high stimulus of hope and ambition.

But this one evil of the degradation of the excellent to the level of the many, is merely a part of the problem which, per

haps, can have only a millennial solution, when the lion of capital shall lay down by the lamb of labor. There are several incidents in the organizations of labor which are erroneous. First of these is the idea of an irrepressible conflict between man and master; of a tyranny on the part of the one only to be met by the tyranny of the other. But that is only a result of conditions precedent. It is an outgrowth of antecedent blunders; and may some day cure itself. Perhaps the Unions may cure it. The power they assert to do infinite damage to their natural enemy has been so often proved that it begets, in return, a feeling of respect. The grand evil is the terrible tyranny of the Union within the Union; the stern repression of personal ambition which it exerts, lest all should not be equal. The Union demands of its members a fearful sacrifice, and we can honor the courage, if not the unwisdom, with which it is so cheerfully made.

Now there never was in the United States any further necessity for a Trades Union than the natural and honorable feeling of social intercourse among brother-craftsmen; and the prime requirement that a "strike" shall include men enough to be effective. Unions, as now conducted, are not American. They are a foreign importation, brought to us by men who, God help them, have lived starved and unhappy lives in countries where labor is cheap and money is king. We justify strikes. There is no unfairness in them when honestly conducted; nothing unreasonable in a man's refusing to work for unsatisfactory wages; and nothing wrong in his combining with his fellows to coerce just and remunerative pay. We honor the pluck with which some of these battles are fought; we honor still more the generosity with which one Union, at work, supports another which is on strike.

But here we reach the limit. The Union tries to accomplish too much; and some of that too much is very wrong. Let us look at the apprenticeship system. Under the old laws, and when manufactories were smaller, a man's shop was a part of

his household. The laws of some of the States, now obsolete, require that the apprentice shall be a member of his family, shall have proper schooling, and shall sit even at the same table with himself. The effect of such a system is obvious. It is true there were brutal masters and worthless apprentices; but as a rule the latter learned his trade well enough to become himself a master in his turn. There is no character in the world more full of worth, enterprise, thought, and mechanical skill, than has been developed under the old American apprenticeship system. But here the Union comes in to break or control this almost parental relation. It' says to the manufacturer that, having so many journeymen, he is entitled to only so many apprentices. It even dictates whom he shall select, in some instances as to nationality, often as to color. The family element in the contract is erased. The employer has no interest in his apprentice, forms no attachments, and looks upon him as a part of his machinery for making money. He gives him no instruction, but allows him to blunder along at the mercy of the foreman, or his shopmates. If a boy is bright, he cannot fail to learn something in this shabby school. If not, a good cow-herd has been perverted into a bad mechanic.

But this is not the worst of it. A year ago, wishing to train a young relation to a profession, to which we deemed a certain mechanical education necessary, we sought a place for him. It was to be had, as an apprentice was nearly out of his time, and there was a vacancy in the shop, under the rules of the Union. Passing, for the moment, the hardship and wrong involved in the fact that, except for the accidental expiration of another's term, we could not buy or beg for the boy the education which his future business success required; that we could not purchase his schooling in a trade, as we could in any of the learned and so-called exclusive professions; we were met with a miserable question of detail, "What branch do you want him to learn?" "The trade-all branches !" was our anThe reply was that he could learn

swer.

this or that department of several involved in the business; but only one of them! He must stick to his place in the subdivision of labor. We could not educate him beyond a certain level. It was as if a school should teach a child to cypher, and refuse to teach him to read. Sick with this injustice we abandoned the plan. The boy is left to a life he does not relish, and is stuffing himself with Latin, Greek, and French, that he may become a dull preacher, an indifferent doctor, or a slow lawyer.

The theory of the Union in this affair in which we were assuredly wronged -was this:-"An over-supply of labor will depreciate its rewards. The cheap labor of the apprentice comes in competition with that of the journeyman. Therefore, keep the trade as small as possible; hold out no inducements to young men whose friends can support them, maintain a stringent labor market, and then we shall have-what? Why a monopoly; the very thing we are organized to resist; which in all our constitutions, bylaws, speeches, and resolutions we denounce as intolerable." Thus our friends of the trades have fallen into the same error which they combined to overcome.

We have said that we justify the combination of workmen for what we call "straight strikes for higher wages." Like all broad assertions this will bear modification. Labor, as well as capital, can be tyrannical. It can also be cheated by corrupt agencies. Last spring, or in the early summer, there occurred a great strike in the anthracite coal regions of Pennsylvania. We cannot pretend to an exact knowledge of its causes; but there are some surface indications. There was an overstocked coal market. A mild winter had shortened the demand; and the summer came on with a slack business among the manufacturing consumers. It was not in the interest of the mineowners to go farther in that direction. It was better for them to cease operations for a time, and get rid of the stock on hand at paying prices. Then came the strike. It was sudden as a thunderbolt. The miners had been working con

tentedly. No fault had been found, no discussions even had been held in their Unions. But an order came from the "Central Committee," and they left their work; in some mines being driven away by compulsion. Some of them were in debt; many were unable to see their way to find food for a month. How shall we account for this? It was in the interest of the owners to stop work; in that of the miners to keep on. Yet the men stop in implicit obedience to their "Central Committee," a small junta of their own leaders, who are heads of the county Unions. The owners immediately increased the price of coal; the strike being their apparently valid excuse. That is all we know; but who believes, in view of these probabilities, that the "Central Committee" are not in the clover-field of financial prosperity, dividing their blissful state with the mine-owners?

Political rings are not alone in their great outrages upon public justice. Money is the objective; and in the fierce, ravenous competition very mean things are done by Aldermen and "Central Committees." In this case, if our unpleasant, but too probable, theory is correct, the actual wrong committed was far greater than that of a New York tax-levy. In every household fuel became more costly. How costly, what pinching want a rise in coal may involve, let us illustrate. A kindly gray-haired gentleman met a sturdy boy, with a basket of coal upon his arm, and cheerily said "Got some coal, sonny?" The reply came back as cheerily "Yes, sir, and my father is going to buy a quarter of a ton next week!" What a wealth of poverty there was in that answer! And how hardly practical is the fact that the father must pay next week as much cartage on that quarter ton as if it were a full load! But outside of the household, in every shop the expenses of the owner were increased, and his ability to pay his men full wages was lessened. It was a calamity costing many millions; yet it looks as if it were brought about by the expenditure of a few thousands. Strikes, to be properly conducted, should grow out of

some real hardship and general discontent. They should be ordered by the popular vote of dissatisfied men, and not left to the mandate of a central junta, human, and therefore corruptible. It is some satisfaction, even at our own cost, to know that in the final adjustment the men compelled the owners to make termis far more liberal than they wished, but to which the consequences of their own greed compelled them. The working miner, in many cases, is now an actual partner in the profits, and not in the losses, of the mine.

But the great, glaring wrong in these minor rules of the Unions is done to the workman himself. He puts his life, his success, his hopes of promotion, all in the hands of other men. The boy is as good as the man; the tyro crawls to the same dead level with the skilled workman. There are employers who secretly pay, and workmen who surreptitiously receive, more than the regulated wages, But this working under a cloud can never take the place of entire frankness and honesty of dealing. What we need is a reformation within the Unions; the concession to the employer of the right to take apprentices as he needs them, and of the right of the lad to seek the form of education he requires; and the further concession of the right to pay the man what he is worth; to stimulate, forward and promote him. It can easily be agreed between the two parties that a day's wage for common hands shall be so much a thousand ems for setting type, so much a day for moulders, finishers, packers, etc. But an excellent hand should have excelling pay. He should not be dragged down, as we know that good men are, by the incapacity of others. He should have his chance to rise in this world's fortunes. All recognize this principle in the fees of lawyers and physicians, and in the salary of clergymen. Years ago there was an attempt to establish a horizontal tariff of salaries in one of our ecclesiastical denominations; but it has long since been abandoned for the better plan, which by worldly rewards provokes to higher preparation