it to assert itself, to make itself felt for its own interests and for the interests of the nation?

Organization is also a powerful educational force. Whenever a class of people organizes for a given purpose, it is bound to debate the most fundamental considerations of political and industrial life, and such discussion cannot but be educative in its results. The process is far more educative than to raise merely academic questions. Moreover, farmers, because of their isolation and individualism, particularly need the force of organization to bring them together, to get them to see their problems in a large way. They cannot possibly exert their best influence on national life unless rural public opinion can be crystallized, incarnated, put at work. Of course this will be done to some extent through the ballot box, but it is common knowledge that the ballot box does not give full expression to the social activity of our people.

The social tendency of the age is clearly toward social selfdirection. We set up goals for civilization, and we endeavor to organize public opinion in such a way that the goals may be realized. We plan for the direction in which society shall go. This process is just as important for the farming class as for any other class. It is a mark of progress when a class can organize and determine its course. The fact that other classes are organized is therefore a very good reason why the farmers should organize. They need to organize for self-protection. They need to make themselves felt on behalf of their own interests. There must necessarily be more or less friction between classes. Even a large class of people like the farmers will often have their rights invaded, unless they are in a position to protect themselves. Not only so, but no class of people can in an unorganized form assert itself as a part of the national life. In some way there must be a chance to gather up the group sentiment, the group power, the group opinion, and bring them to bear on the great issues of our common life.

At two points particularly is there great need for adequate organization of the agricultural classes. The present unsatisfactory system of distribution of farm products can never be

fully remedied until farmers combine in a systematic and comprehensive fashion for business coöperation. Buying together, selling together, coöperative activities in many minor neighborhood enterprises, are essential to permanent industrial success in agriculture.

It is also vitally necessary that farmers shall insist upon legislation favorable to their own interests. I do not mean class legislation in an individual sense, but laws that give substantial justice to the farmers as producers. Individual farmers become more and more helpless against the aggressions of capitalism. In the recent tariff discussion in Congress, for instance, there was very little said about the way in which the schedules would affect the farmers. The alleged attempt to monopolize the water power of the nation will have, if successful, a very important bearing upon agricultural welfare.

Of course there are possible disadvantages coming from farmers' organizations. They may emphasize undesirable class distinctions. They may be unwisely led. They may tend to eliminate the individual. These are small things about which we may be cautious. Fundamentally, organization is essential to rural progress and the solution of the rural problem.

Only those who have had something to do with farmers through a period of years can appreciate how difficult it is, however, to develop farmers' organizations. There are the ingrained habits of individual initiative; there is a lack of leadership; there is the fact that those composing the rural class as a whole do not always have a common interest with respect to social ideals, economic needs, or political creeds. Sometimes financial considerations stand in the way; sometimes economic or political fallacies kill off otherwise good organizations; sometimes mere suspicion prevents coöperation.

Organizations for social and educational ends are particularly needed, and have been supplied perhaps best of all by the Grange. The Grange has also done something to secure business coöperation. Probably the great development of agricultural organization in the future lies along the lines of business coöperation.

330

THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOR1

HERBERT CROLY

THE necessity for the formation of some constructive policy in respect to labor is as patent as is that for the formulation of a similar policy in respect to corporate wealth. Any progress in the solution of the problem of the better distribution of wealth will, of course, have a profound indirect effect on the amelioration of the condition of labor; but such progress will be at best extremely slow, and in the meantime the labor problem presses for some immediate and direct action. As we have seen, American labor has not been content with the traditional politicoeconomic optimism. Like all aggressive men alive to their own interest, the laborer soon decided that what he really needed was not equal rights, but special opportunities. He also soon learned that in order to get these special opportunities he which he proceeded to do must conquer them by main force with, on the whole, about as much respect for the law as was exhibited by the big capitalists. In spite of many setbacks, the unionizing of industrial labor has been attended with almost as much success as the consolidating of industrial power and wealth; and now that the labor unions have earned the allegiance of their members by certain considerable and indispensable services, they find themselves placed, in the eyes of the law, in precisely the same situation as combinations of corporate wealth. Both of these attempts at industrial organization are condemned by the Sherman Anti-Trust Law and by certain similar state legislation as conspiracies against the freedom of trade and industry.

The labor unions, consequently, like the big corporations, need legal recognition; and this legal recognition means in their case, also, substantial discrimination by the state in their favor. Of course, the unionist leaders appeal to public opinion with the usual American cant. According to their manifestoes they

1 From The Promise of American Life. The Macmillan Company, 1909. Reprinted by permission.

demand nothing but "fair play"; but the demand for fair play is as usual merely the hypocritical exterior of a demand for substantial favoritism. Just as there can be no effective competition between the huge corporation controlling machinery of production which cannot be duplicated and the small manufacturer in the same line, so there can be no effective competition between the individual laborer and the really efficient labor union. To recognize the labor union, and to incorporate it into the American legal system, is equivalent to the desertion by the state of the non-union laborer. It means that in the American political and economic system the organization of labor into unions should be preferred to its disorganized separation into competing individuals. Complete freedom of competition among laborers, which is often supposed to be for the interest of the individual laborer, can only be preserved as an effective public policy by active discrimination against the unions.

An admission that the recognition of labor unions amounts to a substantial discrimination in their favor, would do much to clear up the whole labor question. So far as we declare that the labor unions ought to be recognized, we declare that they ought to be favored; and so far as we declare that the labor union ought to be favored, we have made a great advance towards the organization of labor in the national interest. The labor unions deserve to be favored, because they are the most effective machinery which has as yet been forged for the economic and social amelioration of the laboring class. They have helped to raise the standard of living, to mitigate the rigors of competition among individual laborers, and in this way to secure for labor a larger share of the total industrial product. A democratic government has little or less reason to interfere on behalf of the non-union laborer than it has to interfere in favor of the small producer. As a type the non-union laborer is a species of industrial derelict. He is the laborer who has gone astray and who either from apathy, unintelligence, incompetence, or some immediately pressing need prefers his own individual. interest to the joint interests of himself and his fellow-laborers.

From the point of view of a constructive national policy he does not deserve any special protection. In fact, I am willing to go farther and assert that the non-union industrial laborer should, in the interest of a genuinely democratic organization of labor, be rejected; and he should be rejected as emphatically, if not as ruthlessly, as the gardener rejects the weeds in his garden for the benefit of fruit- and flower-bearing plants.

The statement just made unquestionably has the appearance of proposing a harsh and unjust policy in respect to non-union laborers; but before the policy is stigmatized as really harsh or unjust the reader should wait until he has pursued the argument to its end. Our attitude towards the non-union laborer must be determined by our opinion of the results of his economic action. In the majority of discussions of the labor question, the non-union laborer is figured as the independent working man who is asserting his right to labor when and how he prefers against the tyranny of the labor union. One of the most intelligent political and social thinkers in our country has gone so far as to describe them as industrial heroes, who are fighting the battle of individual independence against the army of class oppression. Neither is this estimate of the non-union laborer wholly without foundation. The organization and policy of the contemporary labor union being what they are, cases will occasionally and even frequently occur in which the non-union laborer will represent the protest of an individual against injurious restrictions imposed by the union upon his opportunities and his work. But such cases are rare compared to the much larger number of instances in which the non-union laborer is to be considered as essentially the individual industrial derelict. In the competition among laboring men for work there will always be a certain considerable proportion who, in order to get some kind of work for a while, will accept almost any conditions of labor or scale of reward offered to them. Men of this kind, either because of irresponsibility, unintelligence, or a total lack of social standards and training, are continually converting the competition of the labor market into a force which degrades the standard of living and prevents masses of their