ments, yet the associates will be certain to go to it for their supplies, without invitation through newspapers or posters.

Third: a great reduction in the expenses of handling and dealing out goods. Being sure of their custom, they can control it, and concentrate it into a few hours of the day, or perhaps of the evening wholly.

Fourth: a saving of vast moment, in the abolition of the credit system; involving as that does the keeping of books, the rendering of accounts, and much solicitation of payment, and, secondly, a very considerable percentage of loss by bad debts.

Fifth: security, so far as possible with human agencies, against the frauds in weight and measure and in the adulteration of goods, which are perpetrated extensively under the system of retail trade, the poorest customers being generally those who suffer most.

The difficulties of consumptive are fewer and less severe than those of productive co-operation. To handle and sell goods is a much less serious business than to produce them. When once marketed, the contingencies of production are past, the quality of the goods is already determined, and in the great majority of cases only moderate care is required to prevent deterioration. Then again, the profits of retail trade are relatively higher, for the capital and skill required, than the profits of manufacture. Finally and chiefly, the destination of goods is already practically provided for; the members are certain to take off what is bought, if only ordinary discretion is used; waste and loss are therefore reduced to the minimum.

242. DEMOCRACY IN INDUSTRY

[It should be noted that this passage is not a statement of the author's "remedy" for labor troubles. It is merely a statement of a conceivable experiment in an imaginary situation set forth in full in the book from which the selection is taken.—ED.]

So far as I can sense the meaning of the tide of democracy behind this strike, it is a passionate feeling, reaching deep below the mental level where it is a reasoned theory, that our social agreements have right soon got to make a place for three things; and you needn't look far to find the pressure for each of these three things behind every move the strike has made.

First-and at this transition point out of the capitalistic aberration into sanity practically most important is that the theories and

Taken by permission from A. W. Small, Between Eras from Capitalism to Democracy, pp. 379-84. (Inter-Collegiate Press, 1913.)

policies of business shall frankly recognize the literal fact of the operative partnership of workers, and shall honestly accept the moral consequence of corresponding right to partnership in control. This reality of partnership is filling the minds of workers, and it will not rest till it refashions their democracy. The fact that every business is an organization of men who are necessary to one another on the operative side, foreordains sooner or later a régime of partnership in information, partnership in influence, partnership in deciding policies, partnership in adjusting principles of distribution; an active partnership of every worker in giving spiritual meaning to the work; not merely dumb and menial partnership in physical operation.

The second thing grades up in importance with the first, because it is the most necessary means to that end. Because partnership is co-operation in getting a common result; because the working partners in business are not cogs but men; the man-to-man relations in the economic process imply community of knowledge among the partners about the purposes of the process, the policies pursued in promoting the purposes, and all the reasons why these policies, and not others, are the best. There is no democracy where some of the partners deny to other partners information which affects the interests of all.

The third thing is merely the last and largest look we can get at present at the meaning of democracy. What are we driving at? What is our standard of value? What is the last test we can apply to human programmes, to decide whether they are wise and just or foolish and selfish?

The democratic faith is substantially a belief in men as a standard of value. It doesn't quarrel with anyone who thinks he can see beyond human values, provided that his assumption of larger vision does not in practice depress these nearer values. The most worthful things we know are the qualities of men, and their reciprocities with one another on the basis of a rational scale of valuation of the qualities. The goal of democracy is not a point where the human process may be supposed to end. It is an illimitable development through conditions progressively favorable to the production of the highest types and most harmonious assortment of human values.

Some of these principles are embodied in the following [hypothetical] memorandum of a basis of agreement between a company and its striking employees:

1. The Company acknowledges the principle that work in its employ creates an equity in the business.

2. Since no more exact way to calculate this equity has been discovered than the adjustment secured by established business practices, the Company holds that the only practical method of giving effect to Clause 1 is cooperation between the Company and its employees in discovering how the operations of the Company may more closely apply the aforesaid principle.

3. To that end the Company agrees to designate a standing committee of conference, to act with a similar committee of the employees, in taking into consideration all the affairs of the Company, particularly everything affecting the interests of the employees, and from time to time to propose modifications of the general policies of the Company, whenever the conferees are able to unite on recommendations which in their judgment would tend better to protect all the interests concerned.

4. The Company agrees to accept any method, satisfactory to the employees, of constituting the membership of the employees' committee; provided only that all such members shall be on the pay roll of the Company.

5. The Company agrees to instruct its committee to co-operate with the employees' committee in working out specifications of the kinds of information about the affairs of the Company which shall be put at the disposal of the committee, together with the rules which shall govern access of the committee to this information, and its transmission to the body of employees.

6. The Company agrees in good faith to co-operate with the employees in carrying out the spirit of this agreement, by adoption of details which experience may from time to time show to be necessary in order to give it full effect.

243. THE TRADE-UNION PROGRAM

A1

The principal expressions of class-consciousness in the handworking classes in our day are labor unions and that wider, vaguer, more philosophical or religious movement too various for definition, which is known as socialism.

Labor unions are the simpler matter. They have risen out of the urgent need of self-defense, not so much against deliberate aggression as against brutal confusion and neglect. The industrial population has been tossed about on the swirl of economic change like so

1 Adapted by permission from C. H. Cooley, Social Organization, pp. 285-89. (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912.)

much sawdust on a river, sometimes prosperous, sometimes miserable, never secure, and living largely under degrading, inhuman conditions. Against this state of things the higher class of artisans—as measured by skill, wages, and general intelligence-have made a partly successful struggle through co-operation in associations which, however, include much less than half of those who might be expected to take advantage of them. That they are an effective means of class selfassertion is evident from the antagonism they have aroused.

Besides their primary function of group-bargaining, which has come to be generally recognized as essential, unions are performing a variety of services hardly less important to their members, and serviceable to society at large. In the way of influencing legislation they have probably done more than all other agencies together to combat child labor, excessive hours, and other inhuman and degrading kinds of work; also to provide for safeguards against accident, for proper sanitation of factories, and the like. In this field their work is as much defensive as aggressive, since employing interests, on the other side, are constantly influencing legislation and administration to their own advantage.

Their function as spheres of fellowship and self-development is equally vital and less understood. To have a we-feeling, to live shoulder to shoulder with one's fellows, is the only human life; we all need it to keep us from selfishness, sensuality, and despair, and the hand-worker needs it even more than the rest of us. He gets from it that thrill of broader sentiment, the same in kind that men get in fighting for their country; his self is enlarged and enriched and his imagination fed with objects comparatively "immense and eternal."

Moreover, the life of labor unions and other class associations, through the training which it gives in democratic organization and discipline, is perhaps the chief guaranty of the healthy political development of the hand-working class-especially those imported from non-democratic civilizations and the surest barrier against recklessness and disorder. That their members get this training will be evident to anyone who studies their working, and it is not apparent that they would get it in any other way. Men learn most in acting. for purposes which they understand and are interested in, and this is more certain to be the case with economic aims than with any other.

The danger of these associations is that which besets human nature everywhere-the selfish use of power. It is feared with reason that if they have too much their own way they will monopolize

opportunity by restricting apprenticeship and limiting the number of their members; that they will seek their ends through intimidation and violence; that they will be made the instruments of corrupt leaders. These and similar wrongs have from time to time been brought home to them, and, unless their members are superior to the common run of men, they are such as must be expected. But it would be a mistake to regard these or any other kinds of injustice as a part of the essential policy of unions. They are feeling their way in a human, fallible manner, and their eventual policy will be determined by what, in the way of class advancement, they find by experience to be practicable. In so far as they attempt things that are unjust we may expect them, in the long run, to fail, through the resistance of others and through the awakening of their own consciences. It is the part of other people to check their excesses and cherish their benefits.

BI

Trade Unionism, to put it briefly, remedies the defects of a merely instinctive Standard of Life. By interpreting the standard into precise and uniform conditions of employment it gives every member of the combination a definite and identical minimum to stand out for and an exact measure by which to test any new proposition of the employer. The reader of our descriptions of the elaborate standard rates and piece-work lists, the scales fixing working hours and limiting overtime, and the special rules for sanitation and safety, which together make up the body of Trade Union Regulations, will appreciate with what fervor and persistency the Trade Unions have pursued this object of giving the indispensable definiteness to the Standard of Life of each section of wage-earners. And when we pass from the regulations of Trade Unionism to its characteristic Methods, we may now see how exactly these are calculated to remedy the other shortcomings of the wage-earners' instinctive defence. By the Method of Mutual Insurance, the most necessitous workman, who would otherwise be the weakest part of the position, is freed from the pressure of his special necessities, and placed in as good a position as his fellows to resist the employer's encroachments. The provision of a common fund enables, in fact, all the members alike to get what the economists have called a "reserve price" on their labor. Thus, the

Taken by permission from Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Industrial Democracy, pp. 700-702. (Longmans, Green & Co., 1902.)