would quickly become a calamity of vast proportions -babies would die for lack of milk and ice, the big cities would be in serious straits for food and coal, the whole activity of the country would be paralyzed. A general strike of coal miners in winter would quickly result in the stoppage of trains, and actual freezing to death in the cities. If the workers in the key industries of our country ever unite in a cause which they feel to be just, and steel themselves to suffering as ruthlessly as the fighting nations did in the Great War, the disaster to the nation might be even greater than that of war. It is no wonder that a great deal of agitation has been carried on for compulsory arbitration of labor disputes. If justice can be secured by the verdict of an impartial tribunal or court, all the suffering and bitterness and economic loss caused by strikes can be saved. Labor can be sure of getting its due even when it is not strong enough to make a successful strike. Other disputes are settled by legal means, why not these? Surely right, not might, should have the deciding voice. As a matter of fact, however, it is impracticable at present to compel arbitration in these matters. The labor-unions are almost all violently opposed to it; and even in New Zealand and Australia, where the wage-earners once welcomed it, they have lost their faith in it. It has not actually resulted in improving their status; and while once it was thought that in these lands the age of strikes was over, they have again become common. So that in 1919 the Federated Business Men's Organization of Australia declared, "It is obvious after an experience of twenty years that our industrial laws have lamentably failed to secure industrial peace." If compulsory arbitration is not successful in securing justice, it actually works out in favor of the employers. Success in a strike demands sudden action. During an enforced delay, employers can be gathering together strike-breakers and preparing to get on without their former workers. At any rate, to compel a body of wage-earners to accept arbitration by a body which they distrust is not feasible. Fines cannot be collected from thousands of poor people, men cannot be imprisoned by the thousand, nor can they be made to work, save under military rule. The attempt to force a verdict, in an important case, upon laborers who believed it to be radically unjust would be to invite revolution. The point is that the basic matters in dispute between labor and capital-the proper wages, hours, working conditions, and division of control-are nonjusticiable. There are no generally approved principles from which to decide a particular case. Labor wants not a static condition, perpetuation of the status quo, but progress toward better conditions. The so-called impartial judge, however, usually thinks in terms of the existing distribution of profits and power; his verdicts usually tend to standardize conditions at their present unsatisfactory level. Judges and arbitrators seldom have the laborer's point of view; they are apt to be thinking of business prosperity, reasonable dividends, the public convenience, rather than of the welfare of the workers. The public is instinctively inclined to resent the extra cost of commodities necessitated by, or at any rate usually resulting from, an improvement in the status of the wage-earners, and usually thinks of them as disturbers of the peace. Thus the workers feel that the scales are weighted against them, and that arbi tration, instead of getting for them their just demands, actually serves as a means of keeping them slaves in an unjust social order. Certainly peace at any price is not the ideal. The industrial pacifists must realize that a peace resting upon an unjust distribution of profits and power, of inhumane working conditions, cannot be a lasting peace. The various plans for conferences and common decisions within an industry-Shop Committees, Industrial Councils, and the like, seem promising. An opportunity to present their case to one another, to come to a mutual understanding, to participate in policies that make for the common advantage, can obviate much of the friction between employers and wage-earners. Investigation and mediation by outside tribunals may often be useful. But in the present condition of industry, obviously a transition situation, we must hesitate to take from the wageearners the one weapon that they feel they can depend upon to remedy intolerable conditions. Wretched as the strike-weapon is, we have not yet worked out an industrial order in which it is safe to make it illegal. The hope for the future lies in education-the education of the workers to understand their own needs and duties and to use the ballot as the means of remedying their wrongs; the education of the employing class, that they may understand the laborers' point of view and put into operation industrial methods that will bring about a diffused prosperity and a selfrespecting life for their employees; the education of the general public, that it may understand the rights and wrongs of the intricate industrial problem and put its weight on the side of humanity and justice. Strikes, "direct action," economic pressure-these are war-methods; they must in time give way to the methods of open discussion and decision by the majority vote. What stands in the way of this isignorance, and prejudice, the child of ignorance. A better and longer school-education, a more wideawake and socially useful Church, a non-partisan, or omni-partisan, press, these are to be the means of our salvation. In the meantime we must be content to let labor meet the power of organized business with its own organized power, and hope that through their bargaining and bickering some genuine progress may be made. It is also to be hoped that the labor-unions will more and more use their organized power not merely to wrest higher wages and humaner working conditions from their employers, but to improve the efficiency of their members and to co-operate with capital in bettering the technique of production. They are at present mainly, and necessarily, fightingorganizations. The gradual satisfaction of their aspirations for labor should transform them ultimately into constructive agencies of great value for the future of American industry. SUGGESTED READINGS J. R. Commons, Trade-Unionism and Labor Problems. John Mitchell, Organized Labor. Jane Addams, Newer Ideals of Peace, Chap. V. C. R. Henderson, The Social Spirit in America, Chap. IX. H. R. Seager, Introduction to Economics, Chap. XXI. J. G. Brooks, Labor's Challenge to the Social Order. G. G. Groat, Introduction to the Study of Organized Labor. W. H. Hamilton, Current Economic Problems, p. 577, ff. J. P. Frey, in International Journal of Ethics, vol. 28, p. 485. CHAPTER XXII MORALE DISPUTES and divergences of viewpoint there will always be in industry, as in every other field of cooperative action. But when these disputes merge into a continuous and deep-seated conflict between labor and capital, we have a state of things obviously destructive of efficiency. The maintenance of American industry and commerce upon a high level of efficiency is in no small degree dependent upon corps d'esprit, team-play, a genuine spirit of co-operation. And that is dependent upon the mental attitude of the workers-what we have in recent years learned to call morale. Many observers declare that the morale of American wage-earners has been lowered in recent years. The antagonism between their ideals and the policies of their employers has become more conscious. Workers refuse to exert themselves greatly, they repeat the phrases, "take your time," "go easy," "no hurry"; they take vacations from their jobs when they feel like it, they are less and less docile and dependable. One writer declares that "this growing reluctance of wage-earners to give more than they get is the Achilles-heel of our modern industrial system." Another writer puts the situation thus: "Let us remember that such habits of industry as we can still count on were established under an earlier order, when the relation between reward and effort appeared |