Carl Schurz

“ They not only feel that the talk of governing working-men upon army principles has a very strange and irritating sound in this country, but they are beginning to perceive that the expectation of preventing the recurrence of strikes by merely resisting them at any sacrifice, and the hope of destroying the power of the trade-unions or brotherhoods by stubbornly refusing to recognize them in their representative character, springs from a lamentable misapprehension of facts. ”

“ The first thing the demagogues aim at always is to alienate the working-people as much as possible from the other classes of society, and thus to shut out what influence the latter might exercise upon them. Nothing could be better calculated to play into the hands of the demagogues in this respect than an impression created among the working-people that the capitalists are determined to treat all matters of difference between employers and wage-workers as a mere question of power. ”

“ Some people stand more in dread of an argument than of a fight. But whether that effect be to any large extent produced or not, the determination of a conflict by authoritative decision would at least not be preceded by a suspension of work, causing a loss of profits to one party, a loss of wages to the other, and, as in the case of railroad or telegraph strikes, much larger damage to the general public. It is not asserted that many of the great corporations will favor the establishment of such tribunals. ”

“ It is evident, therefore, that the relations between the railroad and telegraph corporations and their employés, so far as the working of the agencies of rapid transportation and transmission of intelligence depends upon them, are not only a matter of concern to the corporations and employés themselves, but a matter of the greatest possible concern to the whole community. They are not a mere private but a public interest. ”

“ Last summer, in July, there was an extensive strike of the employés of the Western Union Telegraph Company. The strikers generally conducted themselves as law-abiding citizens should, and no disturbance of the peace took place. But, as the Western Union Company had been doing by far the larger part of the telegraphing in the country, an interruption of its service to a great extent deprived the business community and the people generally of the means of that rapid exchange of intelligence which, in many important respects, has become one of the necessities of modern life. ”

“ While the great majority of the working people are not only honest but well-meaning and sensible, there are unquestionably among them a good many dreamers who cherish, with profound faith in their practicability, certain fanciful schemes for the sudden and radical reformation of all human things by revolutionary action; and there are also not a few self-seeking and artful demagogues who try to acquire leadership by playing upon the passions of the excitable and the credulity of the ignorant. ”

“ It cannot allow strikes of employés in these great public services any more than it can allow the corporations themselves to refuse to carry on their business as a means of extracting what they think fair rates of transportation. No legislature would permit this, and one or two more experiences like the railroad strike (of 1877) will cause every legislature to take measures against the other.” — “Telegraphers, railroad men, post-office clerks, and policemen fill places in modern society very like that of soldiers. In fact, they together do for society what soldiers used to do. ”

“ Whenever, for the determination of a conflict of interests, peaceable conference and debate are substituted in the place of a contest of brute forces, mankind has reason to congratulate itself upon an advance in true civilization. ”

“ The way in which they “govern” their employés will, therefore, be determined not merely or mainly by the public interest, but by what they understand to be their private interest. They are not unlikely to consider it their private interest to make those profits as large as possible, and to that end to keep down the wages of their employés at as low a figure as possible. This has not infrequently happened and it is likely to happen again. In some cases, corporations may do this undisturbed by any effective competition in the labor market. ”

“ If it is urged that the corporations are organized, not for philanthropic purposes but for the purpose of making profits, so it must be considered that the employés work, not for philanthropic purposes but for the purpose of making a living; and the laboring men, almost all of whom are poor, should certainly not be asked to be more philanthropic than the corporations, most of whose members are rich. The laboring man with his wages should surely not be held to more onerous duties to the public than the corporation with its profits ”

“ The modern methods of production, and the consequent large aggregations of wage-workers under great industrial organizations, have fostered a tendency among the working-people to think of themselves as an entirely separate and distinct social order, having separate and distinct interests of their own in contradistinction, if not absolute antagonism, to those of all other classes, and being obliged to cultivate a distinct and peculiar set of economic and political doctrines. ”

“ The ten thousand to forty thousand men which some of our modern corporations now employ in telegraphic or railroad service are an army, and have to be governed on the same principles as an army, and the fundamental principles of army management are that there can be no division of authority, and that nothing, however reasonable, can be yielded to dictation. ”

“ No company can be threatened into a change in its arrangements by its subordinates, or admit outsiders into a share in the control of them, without seeing its service eventually go to pieces. Doubtless this often works injustice and hardship, but it is essential to the government of large bodies of men, and this government of large bodies of men in industrial organizations is a recent phenomenon to which it is absurd to apply rules derived from the petty disputes of factories or workshops employing a few dozen or a few hundred hands. ”

“ Methods more civilized, less costly, and better calculated to bring forth just results, will inevitably be found and adopted, as the nature of the trouble, the insufficiency of the remedies so far tried, the correspondence of rights and duties on one side and the other, and the direct interest of society at large in the relations between employer and laborer, as in the case of railroads and telegraphs, are more clearly understood and appreciated. ”

“ Those of them which virtually enjoy or hope to enjoy a monopoly in their lines of business, enabling them to fix the rates of wages, will probably not approve of it. But the great mass of business men and employers of labor are neither so situated nor so minded. Indeed they have in many instances voluntarily resorted to the expedient of arbitration for the prevention of strikes, and frequently, if not usually, with excellent effect. ”

“ The immense advantage the capitalist has in point of endurance over the working-man is no mystery to the latter. It has practically demonstrated itself by too many triumphs over well-organized and very determined strikes, not to be recognized. And yet, in spite of all these disastrous experiences, strikes are again and again resorted to, and the unions and brotherhoods which organize and lead them are constantly growing in membership and influence. Every new defeat seems, in fact, to have not a discouraging but a stimulating effect. ”

“ They enable every man to come and go freely on his lawful occasions and transact his lawful business without let or hinderance.” — “The present strike (of the telegraph operators) will do much good, if it calls the attention of the public to the fact that the enormous number of persons employed by modern corporations and the relations of some of them to the public put strikes out of the question as a mode of adjusting their differences with their servants. Whether such strikes are prohibited by law or not makes no difference. No great corporation can allow them to succeed on pain of ruin. ”

“ The great mass of working-men will not easily be seduced into violent and wasteful proceedings when they see a fair and trustworthy method offered to them through which they may expect to obtain justice peaceably and at little, if any, cost. In one word, the relations of the different classes of society will be the less subject to disturbance the more extended the middle ground is upon which they can meet for the discussion and adjustment of clashing interests. By the establishment of tribunals of arbitration, that middle ground would be materially enlarged. ”

“ In one word, the soldier is in all respects under the government and protection of the same power to which he owes his duties and to which he renders his service, and his pay and treatment are regulated according to the requirements and interests of that service. ”

“ The rapid transportation of persons and goods and the rapid transmission of intelligence, it is hardly necessary to say, have become functions of so essential a nature in our social organism, that their interruption, only for a few days, cannot fail to bring upon a multitude of people great losses and very serious inconvenience, and their suspension for a long period would result in incalculable confusion and disaster affecting the whole community. ”

“ Every unsuccessful strike impresses the working-man more and more with the superior strength of the power he has to contend with. At the same time he knows, under present circumstances, of no other means than the strike to enforce his demands when petition and entreaty have failed. ”

“ There being a duty to the public on the one hand, there must be a duty incumbent upon the public on the other to see as far as possible justice done between the corporations referred to and their employés, so that the public interest may be enforced without wronging either of them. ”

“ It is characteristic of that early period in the struggle with new social problems, when current notions as to the nature of those problems, as to the ends to be reached and the means to be employed, are still in a crude state, and when the impulse to master existing difficulties by mere assertions of power most readily possesses men's minds in default of anything better. ”

“ In this circumstance they would find a very strong inducement to look at the two sides of a question before pressing it, to keep the actual condition of things and its possibilities carefully before their minds, and to thus appreciate the world they live in. It would not bring about the discontinuance of the labor-unions — nor is it desirable that they should be dissolved, for there are many good objects which they are capable of serving — but it would be very apt greatly to diminish the ability of unscrupulous leaders to make a mischievous use of those organizations. ”

“ Nothing would indeed seem better calculated to discourage strikes for all future time than the history of strikes in times past. The number of successful ones has been so small, in proportion to the quantity of wealth wasted and the amount of wages lost to the working-people themselves by temporary cessation of work, not to speak of the demoralization and consequent misery caused by periods of idleness, that laboring men might well shrink from another attempt. ”

“ But the more generally the practice of arbitration is introduced, the more likely its effect will be to reach beyond the mere adjustment of occasional controversies about wages. We have seen only the beginning of the complications which accompany the industrial developments of our times. The difficulty of dealing with them will, as is usually the case, greatly depend upon the spirit in which they are approached, and in which the parties immediately concerned endeavor to understand each other. ”

“ Ample opportunity and inducement for such discussion are especially necessary, when different social classes, upon whose harmonious coöperation their own prosperity and to a great extent the well-being of the whole community depend, are by the nature of their relative situations liable to become distrustful of each other's motives and aims, and thus apt to drift into unwholesome irritations and dangerous conflicts. ”