William B. Weeden

“ The fundamental truths cannot be too deeply impressed on both employers and employed. Let no employer busy himself in politics or jurisprudence, about unionist combinations or conspiracies. We have laws enough now, if we will obey and enforce them. If any striker or unionist trespasses on the rights at common law of his employer or brother laborer, punish him with humane haste and compassionate severity. One labor-leader says an employer has no more right to discharge a man than to dungeon him. ”

“ Under that modern system of organization which unites the laborers into one mass, striving to obtain the highest price for their services, and combines employers in another assembly seeking to obtain labor at the lowest price, our industrial partnerships would have been impossible. If close combinations resulting in certain antagonism, such as has prevailed in England for a generation, had existed here, then no links could have reached across from the chain of laborers on the one side to the chain of employers and capitalists on the other. ”

“ Thornton is neither a communist nor a socialist, but an acute and thoughtful Englishman, with large sympathies, who, whenever his sense of justice will allow, leans to the side of labor in its struggles with capital. He sees in labor, as capital, not theories, but immense and awful facts which must bruise and grind each other until they are worn into some finer social relations. ”

“ Trades-unionism, and all socialism, in so far as it trenches on the State, is a backward step in this American progress. They clasp rigid fetters on movements which were becoming more supple and elastic. All social organisms are finally parts of the State* that tangible divine power, the right arm of God in his relations with men. There can be no true functions of association which tend to embarrass the free development of the State—the association of associations. ”

“ Cost being made the limit of price, would give to the washer-woman a greater income than the importer of foreign goods; that this would entirely upset the present system of national trade, stop all wars arising out of the scramble for the profits of trade, and demolish all tariffs, duties, and all systems of policy that give rise to them; would abolish all distinctions of rich and poor; would enable every one to consume as much as he produced, and, consequently, prevent any one from living at the cost of another without his or her consent. ”

“ We must remember that the laborer here has social opportunities unknown in Europe. The freemasons, militia companies, Patrick's brotherhoods, and Good Templars, all found themselves on broad and benevolent ideas; higgling prices, the one effective force of a trades-union, can hardly equal these ideas in elevating the laborer. Going back to our characteristics of American citizens, it is not to be imagined that we lost all traces of old social groups because we did not represent them in our political organizations. ”

“ The price of labor is determined, not by supply and demand, which never determined the price of any thing, nor yet by competition, which generally determines the price of everything else, but by combination among the masters. Competition in a small minority of cases, combination in a great majority, have appeared to be normally the determining causes of the rate of wages or price of labor. ”

“ In our country it is practically free; the Government gives a homestead on the open prairie, or, if that be too distant and uncertain, the laborer, riding one hundred miles by rail from a crowded district in New England, can find cheap, fertile lands, with homestead buildings abandoned and decaying. It is impossible for one class to oppress another long, while these doors open freely outward to the great advantages of Nature and land. ”

“ The old groups show their traces in the American as well as in the Italian, German, and Englishman. We have not changed social laws, but given them new elasticity. Water cannot be water unless it intermingles freely with air. Society must refresh itself with new individual units, always moving, always classifying, always mingling unit and group again, like drop and stream, cloud and sea, water and air. ”

“ The associations of employers in America thus far have been loosely formed, and their action on the labor question has been indirect. The associations of laborers have been modeled after those prevailing in England, and known as trades-unions. If we would comprehend the principles of any association of laborers in America, we must first study the history of these English unions, for the results achieved by these powerful organizations govern the movements of all labor agitators, whether they are conscious of it or not. ”

“ European civilization has left but one citadel to the few, in their opposition to the many. Chieftainship, social prestige, money, all pass away from a class if its individual members are not true to its instincts. ”

“ Yet every merchant knows that competition is only one of many elements which enter into an "equation" of supply and demand. I dwell on this, not to show the differences of professional economists, but to illustrate the subtlety of these controlling influences of the market-price of labor and commodities. These influences are quite beyond the comprehension of a trades-union as such. We may say a powerful union would employ a leader of great capacity, who would construe these influences properly ”

“ If laborers choose to starve rather than work for less wages, or employers choose to rust out their mills rather than take less profits, let them. It is not the business of organized associations to interfere. Not even the State, the greatest of all associations, can control this complication. The issue lies among the great seething forces of the market indicated above; they are both economical and social, any external pressure will only aggravate the difficulty.
There can be only one legitimate power in an American labor association assuming to control the employed ”

“ Modern society has abandoned this theory; has forced employers and sellers into a larger view of their own interests through social obligation; and it will compel labor-organizations toward the same end by irresistible social laws. Mr. Thornton admits this principle in another form, for he constantly says the close organizations of laborers are now compelling absolute combinations of the employers to oppose them, and that these latter must surely prevail. ”

“ One fortress remains, where, intrenched by law, the privilege of classes can hold all assailants at bay, and can repair the unthrifty ravages of reckless individuals. Land, the final reservoir of natural advantage, the sure protector of privilege, is, in Europe, practically beyond the reach of the many. ”

“ This inheres in him, like the right of revolution in the citizen—a dangerous power, only to be evoked in dire need, it cannot be formulated socially. As political order binds the citizen, so contract, that mystic sacrament of civilization, must ever hold the laborer fast; it can only be overcome by bitter injustice. ”

“ In his view, the price of labor is regulated by a metaphysical entity, which is not the relation of the labor-supply to the general market and demand, but is a result of "the want or suffering of the community." ”

“ In the relations of capital and labor, he assumes that capitalists have the same control of the market-price of labor which he conceives sellers to have in ordinary trade; hence the necessity of trades-unionism to resist this control, which could not be governed by the economical forces of the market; and hence the above formula of supply and demand. ”

“ The fact that the buyers can afford to pay only £50 has little to do with the price paid. The cause which influences their mental action is, that they know there are plenty of other horses they can buy at £50, though there is only one at hand. Economically, the absent horses enter into the supply nearly as effectively as the one present. This supply, present and absent, affects the minds of both buyer and seller, and limits the price; the limit is not a metaphysical one, imposed by the competition of sellers alone, as Mr. Thornton would have us believe, and as he directly says elsewhere. ”

“ A general can lead an army to victory; but generals, as a class, have been poor judges of national policy, in war or peace. The union-leader may extort an advance of wages through the force of his followers. ”

“ Thornton's theory, employers do not compete for, but combine against labor, or, if they do not compete forcibly enough. Nature does now, and must for centuries to come, open her arms to the sons and daughters of toil. It must be remembered that the thrifty laborer is always a capitalist here. The struggle is not between labor and capital, want and plenty ”

“ Laborers may, by combining, acquire an influence which, if exercised with moderation and discretion, employers will in general be willing rather to propitiate than to oppose. Among the concessions which may in consequence be obtained by unionists, the most material are those which affect the remuneration of labor, and these, it is commonly supposed, cannot, when due solely to unionist action, be of permanent operation. ”

“ In treating of association we must first consider the materials which make it; the characteristics of the individuals who associate themselves together. And here we must remember that the individual is a social entity of quite recent growth. The Roman, German, Anglo-Saxon societies knew nothing of individual men and women. ”

“ The agitators felt that in some way the masses would win, the constable's club would wait on the bayonets, and the militia would sway with the voters for the poor and against the rich; therefore a striker might knock a peaceful laborer on the head with impunity. ”

“ Firm associations of employers promote the highest economical ends no better when they antagonize the market, or society economically considered. The notion long prevailed in trade and manufactures, that advantages and profits should be secured through monopolies and arbitrary control of the markets. ”

“ Our abounding life has compelled an eager competition among employers. Employers have invariably tended to overproduction, as capitalists know to their cost. Strikes have hardly ever advanced the price of labor ”

“ In England, the country of greatest abundance, capital ventures itself commercially not below five to ten per cent., while it rests content in land at two per cent. This petty profit shows contrariwise the immense power and value of land. ”

“ Such being the efficacy of unionism, there is no difficulty in accounting for its popularity without resorting, in explanation of unionist loyalty, to any of those terrorist theories, the exaggerations of which have already been exposed, and on which no additional words need here be expended. ”

“ The Roman family, gens, or house and tribe, the German benefice, commendation, and guild, the Anglo-Saxon ceorl and eorl castes, with their tithings and hundreds—all these institutions, mingling in the stream of history, made each individual into a part of something other than himself. ”

“ Thornton supports the extraordinary theory that an artificial rise of wages may be made into a permanent value by reconstructing the whole formula of supply and demand as it is enunciated by economists and men of affairs. ”

“ The idea that some wrong principles in the first constitution of the facts might be changed, and the whole result might be ameliorated, never occurs to him. The whole affair must be fought out representatively and fairly; and, when the strongest force has manifested itself, right will prevail. ”

“ I throw out of the estimate the improvident and reckless; if socialists or unionists have discovered a method which will give these classes an even chance, they have found a principle which Omnipotence itself has never ventured to put in practice. ”

“ Higgling prices through combination is not a creative force, it is a negative accessory to creative faculties. It involves tremendous waste of social and economical forces. To quote Thornton (pages 344-346) :
"A bricklayer's assistant, who by looking on has learned how to lay bricks as well as his principal, is generally doomed nevertheless to continue a laborer for life.". . . Bricks beyond Lancashire are excluded. "To enforce the exclusion, paid agents are employed ”

“ If it be true that in the armies of Napoleon every private carried a marshal's báton in his knapsack, or, as Sydney Smith puts it, if every English curate is a possible bishop, then these industrial combinations must have produced better cloth for the people and a better life in the makers of the cloth, or the laborers who were confined in the factories. ”

“ The firm owned or controlled ample capital for their enterprises, and employed the laborers. It needs no argument to show that the business was more thoroughly done because these industrial partners were taken from among the laborers ”

“ We have learned, however, in the course of the present chapter, that the fact of an increase in the rate of remuneration having been artificially caused, furnishes no reason why, in the great majority of cases, that increase should not be lasting.... ”

“ Of these eight persons, two were originally factory accountants, two were finishing overseers, and four were weaving overseers; all were men who had served long in the factories, and were outgrowths from factory-life. ”