CHAPTER IV.

LABOR AND CAPITAL.

Hon. JAMES L. PUGH,

U. S. Senator.

THE words labor and capital have the most compre

hensive meaning and far-reaching application. We all understand that labor is the power to produce. In itself it is a natural, inherent, self-existing power. It produces all necessaries of life, like food, clothing, shelter, and also produces all wealth. Food, clothing and shelter are the necessaries, and wealth supplies the incidental wants, or the luxuries of life. Labor is Capital in the sense that it produces Capital. Nearly all property that constitutes wealth is the product or incident of labor. When labor and capital co-exist, as a compound power in the same ownership, there can be no antagonism, but when capital, or wealth, separates from labor and exists in independent ownership its natural tendency is to become more or less aggressive, domineering and tyrannical. Generally, and legitimately, labor and capital are mutual supports of each other, and they cannot become unfriendly without mutual injury. When they work together in harmonious co-operation, they move the industrial and productive machinery of the world. When labor and capital separate and make war on each other

all mechanism and organism become deranged and cause incalculable and irreparable mischief.

How is it that labor and capital are made unfriendly, and do so much harm to each other, and the whole country? It is impossible for this unfriendly and antagonistic relation to exist without some wrongdoing by one or the other. Whenever a dispute arises that results in strife, separation, and enmity, some wrong has been committed by somebody. It is of the last importance that working people and employers should deal justly and fairly with each other. Mutual confidence is indispensable to secure hearty co-operation. Mean selfishness and greed, or undue advantage taken of unfavorable, natural or other conditions of supply and demand, produce distrust, and ill feeling, and cause retaliation, resentment, and separation. No examination of the relations of labor and capital can be productive of more beneficial results than that which discovers the faults, the shortcomings, the failures, and the wrongs of each in its relations to the other, which furnish just cause of offence, and produce well-grounded distrust, complaint, and resentment. "Large social forces are working an alarming change in American society." While "vast natural laws are driving the world of industry and trade" we cannot surrender to these great agencies the sole power of producing results. These natural laws "take up as factors in their operation the reason, sentiment, conscience and will of man. We encumber, retard, and frequently defeat the workings of natural laws by our ignorance, anger, folly, and selfish

ness; while we can greatly promote their healthful operation by our wisdom, conscience, friendships, and wrongs and imperfections of the human beings who are the constituent elements of society and government."

First. Let us inquire into the faults of labor. "A large proportion of our wage wage workers are inefficient, require watching to prevent botching their work. Such laborers waste material, injure property, and block business." 46 'Many of Our wage workers are thriftless. Men and women neglect habits of economy, are careless in spending, and save nothing,"

The Rev. R. Heber Newton D. D., from whom I have quoted, is a minister of great ability and learning, who has devoted much time and study to the relations of labor and capital, in Europe and America, and who was examined by the Senate Committee on Education and Labor in 1883, and, among other things, testified in substance-"that the fault of thriftlessness of the average working working man runs through his life in many ways. That the old fashioned thrift by which our fathers and mothers climbed the lower rounds of the ladder, and which all experience shows to be the secret of success in the first and hardest pull of life, seems quite gone out of fashion, and how, without it, men are to honestly drive ahead in life, no one knows." The learned Divine thinks that labor, is at fault in its lack of power to combine, and its defective methods of combination.

That a mob of

men trample upon each other; and in an army they brace each other to the charge of victory. He finds a grievous fault in the abuse of our trades unions in their concentration of attention upon the organization of strikes. Strikes have had their part to play in the development of our industrial system. We note their failures and forget their successes. Their chief service has been in teaching combination and in showing labor the need of a better weapon than the strike. The cost of strikes is expressible only in the aggregate of the savings of labor consumed in idleness; the loss of the productivity of the country; the disturbance of the whole mechanism of exchange, and the injury done our delicate social organism by this unnatural strain. Labor ought to have learned that a stunning blow between the eyes is not the best method of inducing a kindly feeling and a just judgment on the part of capital. The strike is a boomerang whose hardest blows are often dealt often dealt backward on the striker. In our free contract system strikes are entirely justifiable when they are really necessary. Working-men have the right to combine in affixing the price at which they are willing to work. The supply of labor and the demand for its products, in the absence of higher considerations, will settle the question whether or not they can get the price asked.

The trying features of this method of reaching a result are necessarily incidental to our industrial system. Trades unions represent the one effective form

of combination. They were called into being to defend labor against legislation by the Republican party in the interest of capital. They have committed plenty of follies, and are still capable of stupid tyrannies that only succeed in handicapping labor, in alienating capital, and in checking productivity, thereby diminishing the sum total of divisible wealth. Such actions are inevitable in the early stages of combination by uneducated men, feeling a new sense of power, and striking blindly out in angry retaliation for real or fancied injuries. Trades unions are gradually outgrowing their crude methods. The attempts lately made by great corporations to break them up is a piece of despotism, which deserves to be rebuked by the people. Labor must combine just as capital has combined in forming powerful corporations. Labor's only means of defending its interests is is through combination. Strikes are the abuse and not the legitimate use of combination in trades unions. Trades unions should turn their attention to the modern improvements upon this bludgeon to be found in arbitration. Arbitration is a much cheaper and a more effective instrument of adjusting differences between capital and labor, and a far more likely means of securing an increase of wages. It places both sides to the controversy in an amicable mood and is an appeal to the reason and conscience, not wholly dead in the most soulless corporation. It has become a

substitute for strikes in England.