crushing and destructive when the air is withdrawn from within or from below; just as the waves over which and through which a ship rides unharmed, when herself free to move, become crushing and destructive, let once the ship's bow be jammed between rocks or lodged in the sands. The Early English Strikes.-For myself, I entertain no doubt that the early strikes in England, which followed the repeal, in 1824, of the iniquitous Combinations Acts, were essential to the breaking up of the power of custom and fear over the minds of the working classes of the kingdom. . . . In claiming thus that strikes may, in certain states of industrial society, in their ultimate effect really aid the laboring classes in their efforts to obtain a fair share of the product of industry, although in form violating the rule of competition, let me not be misunderstood. To strikes I assign much the same function in industry which insurrections have performed in the sphere of politics. Had it not been for the constant imminence of insurrection, neither France nor England would through several centuries have made any progress towards freedom, or even have maintained their inherited liberties. . . . Strikes are the insurrections of labor. They are, of course, wholly a destructive agency. They have no creative power, no healing virtue. Yet . . . strikes may exert a most powerful and salutary influence in breaking up a crust of custom which has formed over the remuneration of a body of laborers, or in breaking through combinations of employers to withstand a legitimate advance of wages, where the isolated efforts of individuals, acting with imperfect knowledge, with scanty means, and under a dread of personal proscription, would have proved inadequate. Doubtless even more important than the specific objects realized by strikes has been the advantage resulting from the permanent impression produced by these insurrections of labor upon the minds and the temper of both employers and employed. The men have acquired confidence in themselves and trust in each other; the masters have been taught respect for their men, and a reasonable fear of them. Nothing quickens the sense of justice and equity like the consciousness that unjust and inequitable demands or acts are likely to be promptly resented and strenuously resisted. Nothing is so potent to clarify the judgment and sober the temper, in questions of right or wrong, as to know that a mistake will lead to a hard and a long fight. Nor must it be thought that because strikes often, perhaps we might say commonly, fail of their immediate object, they are, therefore, nugatory. Many an insurrection has been put down speedily, perhaps with great slaughter, which has been followed by remission of taxes, by redress of grievances, by extension of charters and franchises. . . . So even an unsuccessful strike may make employers more moderate, considerate, and conciliatory, as they recall the anxieties, the struggles, and the sacrifices of the conflict from which they emerged, in the immediate instance, victorious. Yet, as insurrections mark off the first stages of the movement towards political freedom, so strikes belong to the first stages of the elevation of masses of labor, long abused and deeply debased. Happy is that people, and proud may they rightfully be, who can enlarge their franchises and perfect their political forms without bloodshed or the threat of violence; the long debate of reason resulting in the glad consent of all. And in like manner no body of laborers can get for themselves by extreme measures so much of honor and of profit as they will when, through cultivating moderation, good temper, and the spirit of equity, they attain the capability of conducting their probably unavoidable disputes with the employing class to a successful conclusion with out recourse to the brutal and destructive agency of strikes. With political rights such as are enjoyed by all classes in the United States, with universal education, free land, the quick communication of ideas, the cheap transportation of persons and effects, and the abundant opportunities offered for accumulating and investing savings, it is a shame to us, as a people, that we have not yet made for ourselves a better way out of our industrial disputes. 828. EDWARD BELLAMY. Looking Backward. (1887. Ch. XXII, XXVIII, p. 319.) [Julian West, a young Bostonian, awakens in the year 2000 from a trance, and finds that all industry has been nationalized. He discusses with Dr. Leete the shortcomings of the nineteenth-century system.] . . . “I will readily admit," I said, "that our industrial system was ethically very bad, but as a mere wealth-making machine, apart from moral aspects, it seemed to us admirable." "As I said," responded the doctor, "the subject is too large to discuss at length now, but, if you are really interested to know the main criticisms which we moderns make on your industrial system as compared with our own, I can touch briefly on some of them. The wastes which resulted from leaving the conduct of industry to irresponsible individuals, wholly without mutual understanding or concert, were mainly four: first, the waste by mistaken undertakings: second, the waste from the competition and mutual hostility of those engaged in industry. .. "The next of our great wastes was that from competition. The field of industry was a battlefield as wide as the world, in which the workers wasted, in assailing one another, energies which, if expended in concerted effort, as to-day, would have enriched all. As for mercy or quarter in this warfare, there was absolutely no suggestion of it. To deliberately enter a field of business and destroy the enterprises of those who had occupied it previously, in order to plant one's own enterprise on their ruins, was an achievement which never failed to command popular admiration. Nor is there any stretch of fancy in comparing this sort of struggle with actual warfare, so far as concerns the mental agony and physical suffering which attended the struggle and the misery which overwhelmed the defeated and those dependent on them. Now nothing about your age is, at first sight, more astounding to a man of modern times than the fact that men engaged in the same industry, instead of fraternizing as comrades and co-laborers to a common end, should have regarded each other as rivals and enemies to be throttled and overthrown. This certainly seems like sheer madness, a scene from bedlam. But, more closely regarded, it is seen to be no such thing Your contemporaries, with their mutual throat-cutting, knew very well what they were at. The producers of the nineteenth century were not, like ours, working together for the maintenance of the community, but each solely for his own maintenance at the expense of the community. If, in working to this end, he at the same time increased the aggregate wealth, that was merely incidental. It was just as feasible and as common to increase one's private hoard by practices injurious to the general welfare. One's worst enemies were necessarily those of his own trade, for, under your plan of making private profit the motive of production, a scarcity of the article he produced was what each particular producer desired. It was for his interest that no more of it should be produced than he himself could produce. To secure this consummation as far as circumstances permitted, by killing off and discouraging those engaged in his line of industry, was his constant effort. When he had killed off all he could, his policy was to combine with those he could not kill, and convert their mutual warfare into a warfare upon the public at large by cornering the market (as I believe you used to call it), and putting up prices to the highest point people would stand before going without the goods. The day dream of the nineteenth-century producer was to gain absolute control of the supply of some necessity of life, so that he might keep the public at the verge of starvation, and always command famine prices for what he supplied. This, Mr. West, is what was called in the nineteenth century a system of production. I will leave it to you if it does not seem, in some of its aspects, a great deal more like a system for preventing production. . . . I assure you that the wonder with us is not that the world did not get rich under such a system, but that it did not perish outright from want." [Then Julian West has a dream, in which he fancies himself to have dreamed all this, and to be once more back in Boston amidst the industrial system of the nineteenth century.] "It was indeed the nineteenth century to which I had awaked. . . . With a profound sigh and a sense of irreparable loss, not the less poignant that it was a loss of what had never really been, I roused at last from my revery, and soon after left the house. A dozen times between my. door and Washington Street I had to stop and pull myself together. . . . Another feature of the real Boston which assumed the extraordinary effect of strangeness that marks familiar things seen in a new light was the prevalence of advertising. There had been no personal advertising in the Boston of the twentieth century, because there was no need of any, but here the walls of the buildings, the windows, the broadsides of the newspapers in every hand, the very pavements, everything in fact in sight, save the sky, were covered with the appeals of individuals who sought, under innumerable pretexts, to attract the contributions of others to their support. However the wording might vary, the tenor of all these appeals was the same: 'Help John Jones. Never mind the rest. They are frauds. I, John Jones, am the right one. me. Employ me. Visit me. Hear me, John Jones. mistake, John Jones is the man and nobody else. God's sake remember John Jones!' Whether the pathos or the moral repulsiveness of the spectacle most impressed me, so suddenly become a stranger in my own city, I know not. Wretched men, I was moved to cry, who, because they will not learn to be helpers of one another, are doomed to be beggars of one another, from the least to the greatest! This horrible babel of shameless self-assertion and mutual depreciation, this stunning clamor of conflicting boasts, appeals, and adjurations, this stupendous system of brazen beggary, what was it all but the necessity of a society in which the opportunity to serve the world according to his gifts, instead of being secured to every man as the first object of social organization, had to be fought for! Buy of Look at me. Make no Let the rest starve, but for "I reached Washington Street at the busiest point, and there I stood and laughed aloud, to the scandal of the passers-by.... All these ten thousand plants must be paid for, their rent, their staffs of superintendence, their platoons of salesmen, their ten thousand sets of accountants, jobbers, and business dependents, with all they spent in advertising themselves and fighting one another, and the consumers must do the paying. What a famous process for beggaring a nation! . . . Nor were these storekeepers and clerks a whit worse men than any others in Boston. They must earn a living and support their families; and how were they to find a trade to do it by which did not necessitate ... placing their individual interests before those of others and that of all? They could not be asked to starve while they waited for an order of things such as I had seen in my dream, in which the interest of each and that of all were identical. . . . Some time after this it was that I drifted over into South Boston and found myself among the manufacturing establishments. . . . If Washington Street had been like a lane in Bedlam, this was a spectacle as much more melancholy as production is a more vital function than distribution. For not only were these four thousand establishments not working in concert, and for that reason alone operating at prodigious disadvantage, but, as if this did not involve a sufficiently disastrous loss of power, they were using their utmost skill to frustrate one another's efforts, praying by night and working by day for the destruction of one another's enterprises. The roar and rattle of wheels and hammers resounding from every side was not the hum of a peaceful industry, but the clangor of swords wielded by foemen. These mills and shops were so many forts, each under its own flag, its guns trained on the mills and shops about it, and its sappers busy below, undermining them." . . . [Finally, Julian West reawakens to find himself, after all, really alive in the Utopia of the year 2000.] "As with an escaped convict who dreams that he has been recaptured and brought back to his dark and reeking dungeon, and opens his eyes to see the heaven's vault spread above him, so it was with me, as I realized that my return to the nineteenth century had been the dream, and my presence in the twentieth was the reality." 829. HENRY SIDGWICK. The Elements of Politics. (1891. pp. 53, 551.).. To sum up, I conclude that I am in harmony with common sense in taking, as the fundamental basis of individualistic legislation, not the proposition that freedom is to be sought as an ultimate end, but what may more appropriately be called the principle of mutual non-interference, understood in a utilitarian sense. . . . Let us now proceed to consider more fully the application of the individualistic principle. . . The general problem, presented to an individualistic legislator in different forms under these different heads, is that of adequately protecting A from loss, pain, or alarm, caused by the action of B, without unduly annoying or hampering B. In many cases, experience alone can enable us to determine the best middle course to take between opposite dangers; but we may note some of the general considerations by which this course will be determined. . . . How far is A to be legally restrained from causing loss or annoyance to B by interfering with his relations with other persons? Here, however, we must first notice another distinction of fundamental importance: the interferer (1) may either induce other persons, in domestic or social relations with B, to violate actual obligations, or (2) he may merely induce them to abstain from making agreements with B or rendering him services not legally due. (1) The general expediency of prohibiting the former kind of interference is obvious: a man who commands or requests another to commit a wrong should be regarded as himself a wrong-doer. A partial exception, however, seems to be needed in the case of breaches of contract; since, in some cases, the performance of promises to render personal services would be inexpedient, as being much more injurious to the promiser than beneficial to the promisee; so that the law ought not to enforce specific performance of such promises, but only adequate pecuniary compensation for non-performance. It would therefore not be right in such cases to inflict any penalty on one who had advised a breach of contract, unless he had also advised non-payment of reasonable compensation or unless his advice had been given with a demonstrable intent to injure or coerce the promisee. But in the case of contracts where specific performance should be legally compulsory-such as contracts to pay money or transfer other wealth-I conceive that the offering of inducements to break the contract should be regarded as a wrong. (2) There is more difficulty where the acts to which the interferer offers inducements are acts in themselves lawful, though seriously damaging or annoying to B; since acts of this kind are inevitable incidents of industrial competition. That competition may go on, A must be allowed to persuade B's customers to desert him en masse, and transfer their custom to A, even though the result may be industrial ruin to B. Here it seems right to have regard partly to the ulterior intention; if the interference damaging to B is designed to promote A's business interests, in the ordinary course of the competition for industrial prosperity, it must be treated as legitimate-if otherwise lawful-in a society individualistically organized; but, if its aim is demonstrably to injure B, it must be regarded as falling within the class of interference which-if the mischief they cause be considerable-may be proper subjects for legal repression. . . . To a great extent, however, this kind of mischief, so far as it is caused by individuals acting independently, must be left to be repressed by public opinion; partly on account of the general difficulty of proving an act to be criminal, when the criminality lies solely in the coercive design with which effects, in themselves legitimate, are produced. But where this kind of coercion is threatened and carried out by an association, it becomes generally easier to prove the coercive intention from the mutual discussion and arrangement which such combined action necessarily involves; while at the same time the increase of power, which association tends to give, increases the danger of oppression and the need of Governmental interference to protect the freedom of the persons threatened. Attention has been recently called to this point by the appearance in Ireland, and subsequently in the United States, of "boycotting," or concerted refusal to have commercial dealings with certain individuals, whom the boycotters wish to coerce into some action which the persons coerced regard as contrary to their interests. A comparison of this practice with the ordinary operation of trades-unions in England, for the purpose of raising or maintaining wages, will illustrate the different degrees in which coercive intention may enter into concerted action for the promotion of the interests of the persons who act in concert. When a trade-union of laborers fixes the terms on which the labor of its members is to be purchased, and threatens to stop work unless its terms are accepted, it may be said—and in a certain sense truly-that it is trying to coerce the employers of labor into action contrary to their interests; but here the coercion is no more than what is inevitably involved in any sale in which the seller enjoys a partial monopoly and is determined to avail himself of the advantage that this gives him. The aim of the trade-union is merely what individualism assumes to be the aim of every exchanger of commodities,-to sell in the dearest market; and the method adopted for realizing the aim has no other element of intimidation than necessarily follows from fixing a price and sticking to it: it is, at any rate, only incidentally coercive. But if the combination is extended to include another set of laborers, who pledge themselves not to purchase the products sold by the employers of the first set, or not to work for any employers |