inconclusive to the laborer. Appropriation, gift, inheritance, saving, contract, in themselves do not produce any physical effect on the only goods which he can recognize. Therefore they cannot be used to prove property in any just or natural sense. They hold in practice simply because back of them is the physical force of the police and army established and maintained by the middle class to protect its proprietary usurpations. Thus the whole claim of the employer to the right to manage his own business to suit himself has become and is becoming in a way incomprehensible to the laborer on grounds of natural equity. At the same time, by virtue of habit and the sanction of physical force as a productive agent, he sees himself eyen more clearly the rightful proprietor of his job and of the products of it. All this is the natural and inevitable outcome of the conditions under which he lives and toils.

Undoubtedly the picture drawn here is too definite in its outlines. The laborer of today is not so completely under the domination of the machine and the machine process as I have assumed him to be. What I have assumed to be actualities exist perhaps only as more or less manifest tendencies.

2. The unionist laborer does not recognize the sacredness of contract. This is, if anything, a more serious charge than the preceding one. Is it possible that a man who deliberately and without any personal grievance stands ready to repudiate his contract obligations can be acquitted of moral or intellectual inferiority? Is it possible that he can be called reasonable, and that he deserves to be dealt with in any other way than by denunciation or legal and physical obstruction? Is it possible that these are not proper and effective weapons with which to recall him from his seeming perversity?

The employer returns to these questions, unhesitatingly, a decided negative. In so doing he meets with the approval of men generally who are well to do and educated. To the employer contract is the obviously necessary basis for any successful industrial activity. Violation of contract is therefore to him, and to those socially allied to him, the unpardonable economic sin. Without doubt it is rightly so. The essential business operations involve time and the division of labor. The benefits of capitalistic production, therefore without which most of us would be reduced to primitive penury-require that men trust their means in the hands of others, and that many men be depended upon to perform certain economic tasks and obligations in certain definite ways and at certain

times. Indeed, so delicate has become the adjustment of the modern productive enterprise, and so intimately are apparently independent enterprises related, that the failure of a single individual to perform his contract obligation may possibly involve hundreds of others in financial ruin and the members of a whole commonwealth in temporary economic distress. This, of course, is in itself altogether commonplace. It is stated here merely because it shows why contract is and must be considered by the business class as the most sacred of all economic obligations. The business man's attitude toward contract is the inevitable outcome of his activity and environment. It is not so much a personal virtue with him as an evolutional necessity. He cannot see things otherwise. He is made so by the conditions of his life.

As a matter of fact, the laborer is so circumstanced that obligation to contract with the employer must appear secondary in importance to his obligations to fellow-workers. This is not difficult to show. Ever since the establishment of the money wage system, the everyday experience of the laborer has been teaching him the supreme importance of mutuality in his relations with his immediate fellow-workers. The money payment, related, not to the physical result of his efforts, but to its economic importance, has been blotting out for him any direct connection between effort and reward. Experience has taught him to look upon his labor as one thing in its effects and another thing in its reward. As a thing to be rewarded he has learned to consider it a commodity in the market. As such he knows that it is paid for at competitive rates, and he sees that the sharper the competition between himself and his fellows, the lower the rates are likely to be.

The essential point is that, as a result of the circumstances under which he works, the laborer actually does see the best hope for his betterment in ruling out competition between himself and his immediate trade associates. He does believe that individual under bidding, if habitually practiced, must cause the conditions of employment to deteriorate and reduce the wage to the starvation limit. From his viewpoint underbidding therefore is far more destructive of wellbeing than is breach of contract with the employer. Thus scabbing becomes his unpardonable sin. Beside his moral duty to stand by his fellow-worker against the scab, standing by contract with his employer becomes relatively unimportant. To him it seems a case of selfpreservation on the one hand, against comparatively slight interference

with well-being on the other. Proneness to breach of contract, therefore, is seen to be a natural and inevitable outcome of his life and working conditions. It is a thing to be remedied, if at all, only by changing conditions, and it is a thing upon which, if we take all circumstances into consideration, it is difficult to found a charge of moral depravity.

The fact that the laborer is apt to accompany his contract-breaking with acts of brutality does not invalidate our explanation, and need not alter the conclusions which we have reached. The laborer cannot, of course, put himself in the employer's place. Therefore the hiring of scabs is, from his viewpoint, just as indicative of immorality as from the viewpoint of the employer is breach of contract by him. 3. The third charge against the unionist which we have undertaken to examine states that while he is struggling for increase of wages he is at the same time attempting to reduce the efficiency of labor and the amount of the output. In other words, while he is calling upon the employer for more of the means of life, he is doing much to block the efforts of the employer to increase those

means.

There is no doubt that this charge is to a great extent true. Unions constantly are demanding higher wages and better conditions of employment, coincident with shorter hours, limitation of the numbers of workers, handicapping of machine introduction, and more or less direct restrictions on individual output. To the employer, "sanding the bearings" constitutes one of the most aggravating features of unionism. It is from his standpoint a perfectly clear case against the intelligence and right-mindedness of the unionist laborers. He reasons thus: The industrial product is the industrial dividend. This dividend is shared among the productive factors according to certain definite laws. Whatever, therefore, hampers efficiency, and thus limits or decreases the product, must correspondingly limit or diminish the shares. He honestly believes that in matters of output the interests of himself and of his laborers are identical. Both gain by increased efficiency, however attained; both lose by decrease of effort and output. He therefore constantly invites the co-operation of his workers in efforts to speed up the process and to increase the productive power of his establishment. Their refusal to co-operate with him in this simply astounds him. He cannot understand it on economic grounds. He feels that he has no choice but to look upon it as the result of stupidity or perversity.

To this mode of reasoning, and to the conclusions reached through it, the unionist takes very decided exceptions. To the statement that labor as a whole stands to gain through any increase in the social dividend he returns the obvious answer that labor as a whole is a mere academic conception; that labor as a whole may gain while the individual laborer starves. His concern is with his own wage-rate and that of his immediate fellow-workers. He has learned the lesson of co-operation within his trade, but he is not yet class-conscious. In answer to the argument based on the individual competitive establishment he asserts that the conditions which determine the income of the establishment are not the same as those which govern the wage-rate. Consequently, increase in the income of the establishment is no guaranty of increase of the wage-rate of the worker in it. Conversely, increase in the wage-rate may occur without increase in the income of the establishment. Indeed in consequence of this non-identity of the conditions governing establishment income and wage-rate, increase in the gross income of the establishment is often accompanied by decrease in the wage-rate, and the wage-rate is often increased by means which positively decrease the gross increase of the establishment.

The laborer's statements in this instance are without doubt well founded. The clue to the whole situation is, of course, found in the fact that the wage-rate of any class of laborers is not determined by the conditions which exist in the particular establishment in which they work, but by the conditions which prevail in their trade or "noncompeting group." The employers of the group bid for the labor of the group under competitive conditions, and thus determine the wage-rate in all the establishments of the group. It is the group income, then, increase or decrease of which raises or lowers the wagerate in any and all establishments; it is not the income in any particular establishment, or in industrial society as a whole, that is the determining factor. With this commonplace economic argument in mind, the reasonableness of the unionist's opposition to speeding up, and of his persistent efforts to hamper production, at once appears.

See also 243. The Trade Union Program,

CHAPTER X

CONCENTRATION

I. CONCENTRATION OF PRODUCTION

II. CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH AND INCOME
III. CONCENTRATION OF PRIVATE CONTROL OF
INDUSTRIAL ACTIVITIES

Our study of modern industrialism has shown us an individualexchange-co-operative-pecuniary-specialized-interdependenttechnological-speculative society. It has doubtless been evident. from the discussion that these adjectives do not so much refer to separate and distinct features of our industrial society as they do to different points of view which may be taken in studying that society. One can almost say that each of these adjectives, taken in its broadest sense, includes all the others.

From another point of view, an outstanding feature of our industrial society is concentration. The operations of modern industrialism and the control of those operations are of magnitudes unknown to earlier societies. The term "concentration" has been adopted as a convenient way of expressing this fact. At its best, the term is a vague one. It can be made to include at least five separable, if not separate, ideas: (1) concentration of production, generally called large-scale production, which means large production by a given business unit; (2) concentration of population, particularly in cities and other industrial districts; (3) concentration of the ownership of wealth and income; (4) concentration of private control of industrial activities; (5) concentration of social control of industrial activities. For purposes of convenience in discussion, concentration of population is treated as a phase of concentration of production. This is, after all, not far removed from the actual situation. Concentration of social control of industrial activities is not taken up for separate discussion. Its essential features are discussed, by implication at least, in chapter xv, on "Social Control."