With a population of a hundred millions under its flag, and a total area almost equaling that of Europe, the United States contains large districts, together with considerable strata of society in every district, in which non-unionism is the normal and natural condition of the family bread-winners. In our agricultural States and in the dependencies, wherever, in fact the land owners and the tillers of the soil are one, or even where the qualified tenant farmer is yet so rare as to be in demand, the principle of trade unionism invariably makes slow headway. Also among many professional and commercial men who, though offering their labor for a hire and finding it difficult to establish a common scale-the expectations of each being to find himself some day in one of the highly prized places of his calling-the prevailing spirit is decidedly that of competition as against one another, though it may be that of combination against individuals not yet admitted to their ranks. Even members of the typical professional society or league who do not term their remuneration wages, but fees or salaries, are often unaware of having taken up with trade union principles by organizing and have no sympathy with wage strikes.

In the earlier days of our republic, when agriculture was the pursuit of three-fourths of the population, individual initiative knowledge of one's calling and the virtues of personal thrift were usually sufficient to bring at least a modicum of success. At a time when developing trade unionism was absorbing much public attention in Great Britain, and being hailed by the working people there as an institution promising more for their material welfare than any other, Americans in general were as yet bestowing

upon the organization of labor scarcely a passing thought. Remedies for low wages or non-employment for our wage workers of that period were to go west, or to move from place to place or to change from one occupation to another-in any event to "hustle," "reach out," with faith in the abounding opportunities then existing in the new and rich land. The social spirit encouraged each man to launch out and do for himself. "I paddle my own canoe," was a popular boast. The individual proved his manhood by getting ahead-which almost invariably meant shrewdness in amassing wealth, no matter by whom produced. The oldest of the trade unionists of this country can remember when the maxims which guided men to prosperity in business, or in election to office, were those which imposed injunctions upon each person to work for himself exclusively and avoid entangling alliances with others, especially with any of his weaker brethren. The youngest of our trade unionists may every day hear the people who believe that these maxims still hold good.

Trade unionism in this country has had to make its way against what was undoubtedly the original American spirit-in business. All citizens, including the farmers, were assumed to be in business producing and selling for themselves. If a man was not in business, he was, if made of good stuff, expected to be on the way, through working, skimping and saving, of going into business, whether in agriculture, trade, manufacturing, or a profession. To a self-made man who ardently held to this conception of society, which involves the principle that to be successful one must "arise," must be an employer, must show his superiority in acquisitiveness over his fellows, the proposition

that there should be a wage workers' combination, possibly to be operative against himself, seemed almost blasphemous breaking away from the moorings of accepted morality. Such a union was, to his mind, contemptible, composed of an aggregation of failures, a startling evidence of social degeneracy. Many men, self-made or made big through heredity, their dependents and those attached to them by social ties, therefore felt it a bounden duty to stamp out trade unionism, to continue to uphold the ancient precepts that led to the success they had worshiped, to proclaim that the possession of property was evidence that the possessor was a mental giant, to hold that an employer's business entitled him to manage it-and the employes-as he willed.

The opportunities existing in a rich, sparsely settled country, the emulation afforded in every community through the example of its self-made men, the social atmosphere in which adulation of the strong and independent was accepted as a phase of truth itself-these were factors giving nourishment to the spirit of non-unionism. Another, and a most notable factor, arose with the appearance of labor organizations. It was made possible through the crudities in the form and operation of the first organizations and the natural blunders of their representatives, blunders which persist, on occasions, to the present time, when the organized are under an improved discipline.

In the Old World the uprising of labor in any form through political parties or through trade organizations, could not be met by the arguments, springing from equality in voting or in material opportunity, which in this country once had in them some show of reason. In the thickly-settled countries of Europe the masses have had few opportunities even in education; there has been no semblance of equality among the citizens, except as the poor were equally and miserably poor; the economists and other teachers of the

public of Europe have, therefore, favored rather than discouraged, labor organizations. Non-unionism, with its wage workers, was never a normal or natural situation. Unionism, as soon as serfdom was actually put aside, was a logical outcome of working-class liberty. In America, on the other hand, the white masses of wage workers have passed from the stage of comparative economic freedom of forty years ago to a social stage approximately that of the industrial countries of Europe. Consequently, the area, social and geographical, for the American non-unionist, has been contemporaneously narrowing. The premises for his reasoning, in self-defense, or apology, have been gradually disappearing. left-over maxims, fitting to a period of crude and mistaken individualism, are no longer appropriate to the times. The lot of one man, year in and year out, in any of our great industries, is the lot of the mass-in nine cases in ten; in nineteen in twenty; or in ninety-nine in one hundred.

His

With few exceptions, the day for the industrial wage worker to study purely personal advantage, the overreaching of his fellows, or promotion and finally partnership through racehorse strain and effort, has gone by. The mass of the workers have covered the whole game of climbing up, on the shoulders of others, as taught in the circles which profit by it, with a full set of queries. A few of these are: What proportion of us can possibly win the few glittering prizes ever dangled before the eyes of us all? Of what profit is it to the rest when one of us, or a score in a thousand, is set up above the others? Why should we not study, for the common betterment, the methods which will surely yield equal benefits to the entire brotherhood?

While the hardships of daily experience have been divesting the wage earner himself of the superstition that the conditions of half a century ago still survive as guides and bases for his hopes, his plans, his activi

ties in getting along in the world, converting him from non-unionist to unionist, the theoretical territory of non-unionism—that is, individualism -still has strongholds in our courts and colleges. The lawyer, dealing in precedents, and the professor, looking to history, are apt to see what was instead of what is. The wage worker, on the contrary, knows by contact with his tasks of job-hunting and job-holding what actual conditions are. Hence, while the college president-emeritus has praise for the non-unionists, the union worker regards him as usually unfaithful to his class, though granting that occasionally he may yet be a product of the conditions surviving in the side currents of agricultural or industrial life where the general social situation of times gone by has been still, to some extent, perpetuated.

In this survey of the origin and progress of the two sentiments-nonunion and union, individual and cooperative which in this country bear upon the organization of labor, we arrive at an understanding of the possibilities of honesty and principles animating men on either side. The judge on the bench may be acting in accordance with his lights, which are legal tomes, in rendering judgments that are absurd when viewed from the standpoint of the spirit and social needs today. The old-time college professor, a closet man, may be loyal to ideals of citizenship which were possible when his favorite authorities in sociology gave the world their heavy volumes. The college student, fresh from the farm or from the home of a professional or business man, may lightly play strike breaker as a lark, or for the extra cash needed to pay his way to a diploma, not realizing his social crime, as seen by the organized workers. The journeyman worker coming from a country town may be but following the only custom of which he has had practical knowledge when he takes a job left vacant by strikers, although this is nowadays a rare thing. The usual founts of knowledge and influence

from which the plain people in small communities absorb their views of life and its obligations-as represented by the school teacher, the village newspaper, the "influential business men," or the speech maker on patriotic occasions-are rarely engaged in the active propaganda of trade unionism.

When, however, we mingle among the wage earners of the industrial centres of the railroad world, the mines and the undertakings in general requiring workers in large numbers, we speedily find ourselves in a society by itself. It is living in close contact with the harsh facts of today; it is educating in branches of economics not usually emphasized in the college curriculum; it is fighting the battle of the worker pushed hard by conditions of the live labor market; it is animated by a moral code which is the outcome of the necessity of its defense warfare; it is busied in divers ways with advancing the warfare of not only the organized workers, but of all-men, women and childrenin the wage-working ranks.

One is enabled to affirm, in sober earnest, that the sentiment of this wage workers' society in the United States today is almost wholly union. The statistics of the present paid-up membership of the American Federation of Labor, the railroad brotherhoods, and the as yet unfederated unions show more than 3,000,000 members. But this number does not express the sum total of unionism as it exists in fact. Unionism, in its ebb and flow, is made the more possible to a larger and larger number through union sentiment continually preceding organization itself. Beyond the forces organized and paying dues to the unions are the masses that long to be with their comrades who are bearing the burdens of labor's uplift through union methods. A large proportion but await the opportune time to fall into line. In the progress of organization errors have been made, which for a time have caused serious losses to the unions; there have been on occasion poor