Coast, and five hundred thousand strong in Europe. We are the foundation layer of the industrial world, the shovel stiffs, the mill hands, the dock workers, the section men. How long do you think the world could go on if we stopped? It would paralyze every wheel of commerce. That is frankly what we aim to do-to refuse work till all industry is taken over by the laboring classes.

Another of the strikers said to Miss Laut:

You think we are beaten? We will go back to work and accumulate funds and strike again, and strike yet again till the public finds it cheaper for us to operate all industry than to tolerate the recurring deadlock. We are striking solely to overthrow the capital system. First, in England, it was the railways. Then it was the coal mines. Now it is the docks. . . "I Won't Works" they call us. They are right. The Industrial Workers

LIDARITY-AND-INDUSTRIAL

OF YOUR CLASS

THE UNION C

of the World are "I Won't Works" for capital. We work only for the laborer, and the laborer is worthy of his hire; and our hire is all that labor produces: not just half of it, with the other half going for profit. In overthrowing capital, we shall eliminate the profit system. No more shall be produced than can be used by the producer.

Miss Laut, who is herself a Canadian, sug'gested to one leader that she did not think that the secret propaganda of the I. W. W. would ever succeed in the factories of Eastern Canada because of the operatives being French Canadians and the Catholic Church opposing secret orders. This reply was made:

You don't, don't you? Then let me tell you there is not a railway yard nor factory from Montreal to Vancouver, from Lawrence in New England to San Diego, California, where we have not our secret agents organizing.... You put your finger on any point of the map; and I can tell

It is curious, Miss Laut remarks, how slow the public have been to realize that the I. W. W.'s are a new force in the labor world.

Arbitration, the ballot, compromise, profit sharing, contract-all are excoriated, despised, "Disrepudiated by the newest labor movement. content," "expropriation," "revolution," are the watchwords.

Mitchell and Gompers are regarded as "vultures, doing the bidding of the master class." Another manifesto says: "We do not want to build a job trust" (speaking of the old tradesunions): we aim at a big all-inclusive labor trust." Sabotage, mutiny, even treason, are advocated by the I. W. W. Says one manifesto:

Listen men, the day is once more at hand when treason is the supreme duty of every man and mutiny a soldier's highest obligation. . . . In case of dispute, remain at the post and turn out work in such shape as to be unfit for sale. The more skilled the workman is, the greater his knowledge of how to spoil work without being detected. ... The general strike of all labor is nothing less than the Social Revolution at which we aim.

Being asked by Miss Laut whether he did not fear to overthrow a civilization that it has taken the world billions of years to build up, and whether it would not be better to remove the evils instead of smashing everything over a precipice, a leader replied: "Fear? What have we to fear? It's the middle class that have everything to fear. We have nothing to lose. Let the smash come!"

Referring to the fact that one of the I. W. W. street agitators, now doing time in New Westminster prison, had advocated $4 an hour for a three-hour day, Miss Laut put to one of the leaders the following proposition:

world-to prevent a capital system ever The reply was: "For the good of the labor growing up again; and we forcibly would exile you from our new nation if you worked more than three hours a day; but you forget that in a society where there would be no rent, no interest, no dividends, no surplus products, you would have no motive to amass $64 to my $12." As Miss Laut observes, "The

tion of the joy of work for its own sake." And she concludes her article with these words of warning:

But do not mistake the force of the movement! It is not a local labor fray. It is a world war that aims to make the French Revolution look like petty politics. Ask an I. W. W. man what the continual sporadic strikes of the last year mean;

the rail, coal and dock strikes in England; the construction and dock and smelter and mill strikes in the United States, and he tells you frankly, without mincing matters, that all the little strikes are to educate the workers for the Big General Strike; and the Big General Strike is to be the Revolution, bloodless if possible, bloodless if the armies of the world can first be won over; but if not then, their manifesto says and there is a terrible menace hidden behind that one word-"forcibly."

THE

THE STEEL CORPORATION'S SELF

INVESTIGATION

The attention of Mr. Charles M. Cabot of Bos

HE United States Steel Corporation re- Copley in the American Magazine for Octocently issued to its stockholders a circu- ber, and the following summary of them will lar entitled "Action of United States Steel doubtless be of interest to the readers of the Corporation upon Recommendations Recommendations of REVIEW: Stockholders' Committee." There is nothing in this caption to attract the attention of the casual reader, and yet "thereby hangs a tale"-a tale unique in the commercial annals of this country, being no less than an account of the investigation by itself of the largest industrial corporation in the United States. The incidents which gave rise to this self-investiga

ton, a stockholder in the United States Steel Corcondition, sanitary and otherwise," of a certain poration, having been directed to "the shocking group of laborers' homes in Pittsburgh, that gentleman felt that, as a stockholder in the corporation that employed these men, he was partly responsible for the undesirable conditions existing amongst them. He, therefore, arranged with Judge Elbert

THE STEEL CORPORATION'S INVESTIGATING COMMITTEE (Left to right: Charles M. Cabot, Charles A. Painter, Stuyvesant Fish, William H. Matthews, Charles L. Taylor, C. L. Close)

that an article "setting forth conditions that meeting of the corporation and succeeded in Mr. Cabot believed should be changed and advo- putting through a resolution calling upon the cating progressive policies in general," should be prepared by Mr. John A. Fitch, a well-known in- chairman, Judge Gary, to appoint a comvestigator, and that this article should be mailed at mittee of investigation. The chairman apMr. Cabot's expense to 15,000 holders of the cor- pointed Mr. Cabot, Mr. Charles A. Painter, poration's preferred stock. The article was writ- Mr. Stuyvesant Fish, Mr. William H. Matten, and in it Mr. Fitch set forth that "the factors that entered most deeply into the lives of the steel thews, Secretary, Mr. Charles L. Taylor, and workers as he had found them were 'a daily and Mr. C. L. Close; and this committee made weekly schedule of hours, both shockingly long;asys- a tour of the mills from April 3 to April 12 tem of speeding that adds overstrain to overtime; of this year. They found the following and, crowning all, a system of repression that stifles initiative and destroys healthy citizenship."" conditions:

Before mailing the article to the stockholders, Mr. Cabot desired that the public should read it, and it was printed, under the title "Old Age at Forty," in the American Magazine for March, 1911. It did not please Judge Gary, who apparently had thought that the only questions to be raised were "the sevenday week, the twelve-hour day, and perhaps the speeding of the men," and he withdrew his promise to let Mr. Cabot have access to the stockholders' list. Mr. Cabot appealed to the courts, and they decided in his favor.

That with the exception of two or three plants, the seven-day week had been relegated to the past, and they recommended the absolute enforcement of its inhibition. From the records of 175,715 men examined, they found that 25 per cent. were working twelve hours a day, that although the hardship of the twelve-hour day had been somewhat lessened committee were of opinion that a twelve-hour day by the introduction of special machinery, still the followed continuously for any length of time means a decreasing of the efficiency and a lessening of the vigor and virility of such men. The committee favored the retention of the bonus system and the abuses therein, the committee recommended that system of payment by piece work, but, to avoid

and excessive strain.

who "in his anxiety for output becomes disregard- of the Finance Committee of the corporation, ful of possible injury to his men by overspeeding appointing a committee to "consider what, if As to the repression of the men, the committee any, arrangement with a view to reducing considered that it might be an open question as to the twelve-hour day, in so far as it now exists "what measures the officers of the corporation among the employees of the subsidiary comshould adopt for the suppression of organizations that in the past have at times proved irresponsible panies, is just and practicable." and incapable of safe control," but it believed that "the present methods are preferable to the old for all concerned" and that the corporation was justified in making "efficiency the one standard by which continuance of employment in its plants is determined."

The committee express the hope that "officials and wage-earners may be found more and more working together to bring forward the day when employer and employee shall enter into a common administration of industrial interests."

These are the findings embodied in the circular referred to at the beginning of this article; and the "action" in question is that

"HAS

The American writer quotes Judge Gary's declaration at the last annual meeting "that it needs no magazine article, nor any resolution from any stockholder, to spur us on in our endeavor to promote the welfare of the employees of the Corporation." At the same time the public interest aroused by the printing of the article exposing conditions calling for betterment cannot fail to strengthen the hands of the managers of the corporation in voluntarily hastening reforms which, with such organizations as the Industrial Workers of the World struggling to get a foothold in the steel industry, may possibly be forced upon them.

THE LITERATURE OF GREATER BRITAIN England passed her literary zenith?" On this question much might be said both for the affirmative and the negative. In the view of a writer in the London Bookman, it would not be surprising if the great creative English literature of the future came from the Colonies rather than from the mother country, which latter seems to manifest a tendency to rest, as it were, on her oars.

Our

a glorious literary heritage, with a great literature ready made for us, we have less incentive to increase it than to write about and criticize it. morning is behind us; the bloom has been rubbed from our enthusiasms-in a word, we are grown up; and I sometimes fancy that, in our literary aspect, we have arrived at that mature, uninspired, disposed to be restless and over-energetic as to mid-day stage when a man is not so naturally settle to a comfortable after-lunch nap. With the Colonies it is all otherwise. They are still at the beginning . . . with everything to do, a great literature to make, the world before them.

Many will agree with the opinion thus expressed by Mr. A. St. John Adcock in a remarkably comprehensive survey of the literature of Australasia, Canada, South Africa, and India.

Australasia

Nearly thirty years ago J. A. Froude, in his "Oceana," dismissed Australian literature with the single reference: "They have had one poet-Gordon-something too much of the Guy Livingstone type, an inferior Byron. . . . He, poor fellow, hungering after what Australia could not give him . . . had nothing to do but shoot himself, which he accordingly did." This, as Mr. Adcock points out, was to ignore Henry Kendall, Gordon's equal, and some earlier poets such as Harpur and M'Crae. It was to overlook also "one of the biggest things in Australian