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In addition, we can do something to relieve the distress and reform the vices which are born of this system. So, fifty years ago, good Christian men in the South believed that slavery was essential to the well-being of society. It could not be abolished. But slaveholders could treat their slaves with justice and kindness, harsh slave laws could be repealed, certain rights of the slaves could be protected, and gradually, with the moral elevation of the race, the divine institution of slavery could be rid of its more noxious fruits. I do not believe that either regulation or gradual moral reform or charity will set the world right. I do not believe that the evil of our present industrial system will be cured by anything less than a radical change, though it may be, and I think it will be, a gradual one. I am quite of the mind of Thomas Carlyle:

This general well and cesspool, once baled and clear, to-day will begin to fill itself anew. The universal Stygian quagmire is still there, opulent in women ready to be ruined, and in men ready. Toward the same sad cesspool will these waste currents of human sin ooze and gravitate, as heretofore. Except in draining the universal quagmire itself there is no remedy.1

More radical than mere regulation by law and amelioration by charity is the proposal for "col1 Latter-Day Pamphlets, Chapman & Hall ed., p. 24.

lective bargaining." The individual workingman has no chance in dealing with collective capital. This workingman must take the wages the railway will give to him, because his going puts the railway to no inconvenience; but his going means idleness and misery to him. This factory man must take the wages which the factory offers, if he stands alone, because his individual withdrawal produces no inconvenience to the factory; but for him his withdrawal is from something to nothing. So workingmen have organized in trade unions to protect their interests and put them on an equality with organized capital in their bargaining. They have organized in trade unions in order that labor may act as a body in its bargain with capital acting as a body in its bargaining. I think they have done well. If I were a workingman, I should desire to join the trade union of my trade, though whether I joined or not would depend somewhat, I am sure, on what kind of a union it happened to be. Trade unions have raised wages, improved conditions, shortened hours, called public attention to labor conditions that were intolerable, helped to lessen the hours of woman's labor, helped to get children out of the factory and the mine, produced a spirit of cooperation among workingmen, and promoted arbitration for the settlement of labor disputes. All

this labor unions have done. But labor unions in competitive bargaining with capitalistic unions do not constitute the consummation of industrial democracy.

The democracy of America is two democracies, one individual, one social; one inherited from France and pagan Rome, the other inherited from the Puritans and the Hebrew Commonwealth. Out of these two democracies this present American democracy of the twentieth century has grown, gradually and increasingly taking on the social aspect; so that we are no longer trying in this country to develop merely a community of individuals governing themselves, we are attempting to create a self-governing community, a community that coöperates and combines in operation for its common interest. That is not accomplished by organizing all the workingmen on the one side and all the capitalists on the other side, that they may drive their bargains with each other on something like equal terms. That is not a selfgoverning brotherhood. If A has a house to sell and B wishes to buy a house, it is well enough for A to put what price he pleases and B to offer what price he pleases, and let the negotiations go on indefinitely. But when the owners of the coal mines of Pennsylvania are on one side and the coal workers are on the other side, and one group says,

We will not work until you come to our terms, and the other says, You shall not work until you come to our terms the rest of us freeze. Or if, on the other hand, the laborer says, Raise my wages and add it to your bill, and the capitalist says, I will raise your wages and add it to my bill, we get high prices, from which the community is now suffering. Peace brings one injury, war brings the other. A bargain between two individuals concerns only the bargainers; but in a bargain between ten thousand workingmen and ten thousand shareholders in a great corporation the community is interested. And whether the bargain is not made at all, or whether it is made without regard to the interests of the general public, in either case the general public suffers. Collective bargaining furnishes some protection to the individual laborer from the injustice which inevitably follows from bargaining by an individual laborer with organized capital. But it furnishes no protection to the community. And it does not bring industrial peace or create a true industrial brotherhood.

The two other remedies proposed - Political Socialism and Industrial Democracy-I shall consider in the next two chapters.

CHAPTER VIII

POLITICAL SOCIALISM

THERE are two radical and even revolutionary changes between which Democracy has to make its choice, if the spirit of Democracy is ever to dominate American industrial institutions:- the first is Political Socialism; the second is Industrial Democracy. If any of my readers are inclined to think that Political or State Socialism, as in this chapter defined, is no longer maintained in Socialistic circles, I can only say, first, that I hope he is right, but, second, that my observation of the currents of to-day leads me to agree with Edmond Kelly, an advocate of a modified Political Socialism, in his statement, "State Socialism, therefore, is the form probably most in vogue among workingmen." And I believe the best way to meet it is to define it clearly, and to distinguish it from what may be called voluntary Socialism, but what I prefer to call "Industrial Democracy." I avoid the term State Socialism because that term is often used to designate the doctrine of Bismarck: "That the State should 1 Twentieth Century Socialism, p. 235.

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