As to working-men’s associations, what your
Holiness seems to contemplate is the formation and
encouragement of societies akin to the Catholic
sodalities, and to the friendly and beneficial societies,
like the Odd Fellows, which have had a large extension in
English-speaking countries. Such associations may promote
fraternity, extend social intercourse and provide
assurance in case of sickness or death, but if they go no
further they are powerless to affect wages even among
their members. As to trades-unions proper, it is hard to
define your position, which is, perhaps, best stated as
one of warm approbation provided that they do not go too
far. For while you object to strikes; while you reprehend
societies that “do their best to get into their
hands the whole field of labor and to force working-men
either to join them or to starve;” while you
discountenance the coercing of employers and seem to
think that arbitration might take the place of strikes;
yet you use expressions and assert principles that are
all that the trades-unionist would ask, not merely to
justify the strike and the boycott, but even the use of
violence where only violence would suffice. For you speak
of the insufficient wages of workmen as due to the greed
of rich employers; you assume the moral right of the
workman to obtain employment from others at wages greater
than those others are willing freely to give; and you
deny the right of any one to work for such wages as he
pleases, in such a way as to lead Mr. Stead, in so widely
read a journal as the Review of Reviews, approvingly to
declare that you regard
“blacklegging,” i.e., the
working for less than union wages, as a crime.
To men conscious of bitter injustice, to men steeped
in poverty yet mocked by flaunting wealth, such words
mean more than I can think you realize.
When fire shall be cool and ice be warm, when armies
shall throw away lead and iron, to try conclusions by the
pelting of rose-leaves, such labor associations as you
are thinking of may be possible. But not till then. For
labor associations can do nothing to raise wages but by
force. It may be force applied passively, or force
applied actively, or force held in reserve, but it must
be force. They must coerce or hold the power to coerce
employers; they must coerce those among their own members
disposed to straggle; they must do their best to get into
their hands the whole field of labor they seek to occupy
and to force other working-men either to join them or to
starve. Those who tell you of trades-unions bent on
raising wages by moral suasion alone are like those who
would tell you of tigers that live on oranges.
The condition of the masses today is that of men
pressed together in a hall where ingress is open and more
are constantly coming, but where the doors for egress are
closed. If forbidden to relieve the general pressure by
throwing open those doors, whose bars and bolts are
private property in land, they can only mitigate the
pressure on themselves by forcing back others, and the
weakest must be driven to the wall. This is the way of
labor-unions and trade-guilds. Even those amiable
societies that you recommend would in their efforts to
find employment for their own members necessarily
displace others.
For even the philanthropy which, recognizing the evil
of trying to help labor by alms, seeks to help men to
help themselves by finding them work, becomes aggressive
in the blind and bitter struggle that private property in
land entails, and in helping one set of men injures
others. Thus, to minimize the bitter complaints of taking
work from others and lessening the wages of others in
providing their own beneficiaries with work and wages,
benevolent societies are forced to devices akin to the
digging of holes and filling them up again. Our American
societies feel this difficulty, General Booth encounters
it in England, and the Catholic societies which your
Holiness recommends must find it, when they are
formed.
Your Holiness knows of, and I am sure honors, the
princely generosity of Baron Hirsch toward his suffering
coreligionists. But, as I write, the New York newspapers
contain accounts of an immense meeting held in Cooper
Union, in this city, on the evening of Friday, September
4, in which a number of Hebrew trades-unions protested in
the strongest manner against the loss of work and
reduction of wages that are being effected by Baron
Hirsch’s generosity in bringing their own
countrymen here and teaching them to work. The resolution
unanimously adopted at this great meeting thus
concludes:
We now demand of Baron Hirsch himself that he
release us from his “charity” and take back
the millions, which, instead of a blessing, have proved
a curse and a source of misery.
Nor does this show that the members of these Hebrew
labor-unions — who are themselves immigrants of the
same class as those Baron Hirsch is striving to help, for
in the next generation they lose with us their
distinctiveness — are a whit less generous than
other men.
Labor associations of the nature of trade-guilds or
unions are necessarily selfish; by the law of their being
they must fight for their own hand, regardless of who is
hurt; they ignore and must ignore the teaching of Christ
that we should do to others as we would have them do to
us, which a true political economy shows is the only way
to the full emancipation of the masses. They must
do their best to starve workmen who do not join them,
they must by all means in their power force back the
“blackleg” — as the soldier in battle
must shoot down his mother’s son if in the opposing
ranks. And who is the blackleg? A fellow-creature seeking
work — a fellow-creature in all probability more
pressed and starved than those who so bitterly denounce
him, and often with the hungry pleading faces of wife and
child behind him.
And, in so far as they succeed, what is it that
trade-guilds and unions do but to impose more
restrictions on natural rights; to create
“trusts” in labor; to add to privileged
classes other somewhat privileged classes; and to press
the weaker closer to the wall?
I speak without prejudice against trades-unions, of
which for years I was an active member. And in pointing
out to your Holiness that their principle is selfish and
incapable of large and permanent benefits, and that their
methods violate natural rights and work hardship and
injustice, I am only saying to you what, both in my books
and by word of mouth, I have said over and over again to
them. Nor is what I say capable of dispute. Intelligent
trades-unionists know it, and the less intelligent
vaguely feel it. And even those of the classes of wealth
and leisure who, as if to head off the demand for natural
rights, are preaching trades-unionism to working-men,
must needs admit it.
Your Holiness will remember the great London dock
strike of two years ago, which, with that of other
influential men, received the moral support of that
Prince of the Church whom we of the English speech hold
higher and dearer than any prelate has been held by us
since the blood of Thomas à Becket stained the
Canterbury altar.
In a volume called “The Story of the
Dockers’ Strike,” written by Messrs. H.
Llewellyn Smith and Vaughan Nash, with an introduction by
Sydney Buxton, M.P., which advocates trades-unionism as
the solution of the labor question, and of which a large
number were sent to Australia as a sort of official
recognition of the generous aid received from there by
the strikers, I find in the summing up, on pages 164-165,
the following:
If the settlement lasts, work at the docks will be
more regular, better paid, and carried on under better
conditions than ever before. All this will be an
unqualified gain to those who get the benefit from it.
But another result will undoubtedly be to contract the
field of employment and lessen the number of those for
whom work can be found. The lower-class casual will, in
the end, find his position more precarious than ever
before, in proportion to the increased regularity of
work which the “fitter” of the laborers
will secure. The effect of the organization of dock
labor, as of all classes of labor, will be to squeeze
out the residuum. The loafer, the cadger, the failure
in the industrial race — the members of
“Class B” of Mr. Charles Booth’s
hierarchy of social classes — will be no gainers
by the change, but will rather find another door closed
against them, and this in many cases the last door to
employment.
I am far from wishing that your Holiness should join
in that pharisaical denunciation of trades-unions common
among those who, while quick to point out the injustice
of trades-unions in denying to others the equal right to
work, are themselves supporters of that more primary
injustice that denies the equal right to the
standing-place and natural material necessary to work.
What I wish to point out is that trades-unionism, while
it may be a partial palliative, is not a remedy; that it
has not that moral character which could alone justify
one in the position of your Holiness in urging it as good
in itself. Yet, so long as you insist on private property
in land what better can you do? ...
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