may probably act in office in accordance with your wishes. If you can in the meantime join in one of the new movements to direct candidates how they must act and vote on legislation, so much the better. But while the long drawn-out political battle is raging, you may profitably preserve your equilibrium, prevent yourself from wasting valuable time, and save yourself disappointment by observing a few "dont's" that are the fruit of experience. Don't, first of all, lose sight of the fact that the well-being of the wageworkers in this country has been promoted more by union activity than by any legislation thus far accomplished.

Don't overlook the fact that, no matter which side wins, labor will get only what it demands loudly, repeatedly, and emphatically, with the backing of trade union power.

Don't fall into the delusion that the appointment of a labor politician to an executive office or a fat job bears heavily on the solution of the labor question.

Don't take it for granted that the issues pushed to the front by the political managers are the issues most important to the wage-earners.

Don't imagine that the various millennial platforms of self-styled radical parties are any more probable of realization than so many dreams, or have more value than vents for discontent, while in some cases they are mere misleading high road fingerboards erected by old party leaders to take away from their opponents the voters who may be thereby misguided. Don't let interest in politics diminish your interest in your union. Don't take too much stock in the seriousness of campaign slanders, roorbachs, personal denunciations, or in stump speech oratory or lurid "literature," or in the stupid prejudices and hatreds of blustering partisans.

Don't let yourself believe you will help to serve the country by going into hysterics over partisan politics and overlooking the all-the-year-round labor movement.

Don't spend too much time in reading the clap-trap and drivel of political party arguments. There's little education in it all. Standard reference works are in the libraries relating to all the general subjects debated and your trade union publications will tell you what are the immediate demands of organized labor.

Don't go into party politics any further than to give your influence in favor of measures which may clearly result in making politics a clean game, in giving the wage-earners their due force in law-making, in remedying the evils of privilege, and to the extent possible in paving the way to a better condition of society.

Don't allow yourself to be persuaded that in national labor or other issues "labor leaders" have a selfish interest. If the American Federation of Labor asks your support for certain conditions, it will be, not for the personal advancement of those candidates, but because they are pledged to a specific work for the wage-workers, to secure for them equality before the law with all other citizens for the protection of the rights and interests of the masses of our people.

Don't lose sight of the fact that the Atlanta Convention considered the

situation in which the wage workers of the country are placed, by reason of the interpretation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Law and of the abuse of the writ of injunction as issued by the courts against the workers and which are issued against no other citizens of all our country, and the convention adopted, without a dissenting voice or vote, the following declaration and instruction:

The Executive Council is hereby further authorized and directed to take such further action as its judgment may warrant to secure the enactment of such legislation at the forthcoming session of Congress as shall secure the legal status of the organized movement of the wageworkers for freedom from unjust discrimination in the exercise of their natural, normal, and constitutional rights, through their voluntary associations.

And the Executive Council is further authorized and directed that in the event of a failure on the part of Congress to enact the legislation which we herein seek at the hands of the Congress and the President, to take such action as in its judgment the situation may warrant in the presidential and congressional election of 1912.

Labor's watchword must be "Clear Results, Now!"

Louis D. Brandeis is one of the prominent men of the country who ten

THE NEW SLAVERY

IN THE UNITED STATES.

years ago saw in the trusts a promise of increased national efficiency and in the character of the men at the head of at least some of the leading trusts some guaranty of an enlightened management and a consequent diffusion of trust profits to small business and the laboring classes. Mr. Brandeis, in the light of the developments in the trusts since that time, has entirely changed his views. He is today telling the country what those develop

He has closely watched them continually. He has the statistics regarding them, the laws bearing on them, the policies the trusts have followed, and their Wall street history, all at his command in detail. He has recently, on a number of occasions, appeared before the public and stated the case of the people against the trusts. His chief illustration is the steel trust.

What is most interesting to our readers in Mr. Brandeis' statements is the fact that he independently has ascertained that the charges of the trade unions against the steel trust in regard to its labor policy are true. His findings in other respects also are important to union men, for these are American citizens, active in preserving American institutions. The United States Steel Corporation has reaped in ten years $650,000,000 beyond "a very generous return on its actual capital." In its formation, among its other enormous expenditures to obtain a mastery of the industry, it paid Andrew Carnegie, for property representing $80,000,000 of true value, somewhat more than $400,000,000-four-fifths water.

In a crowded meeting in the large hall of the Ethical Culture Society

February 3, Mr. Brandeis, when he came, in his address to the labor situation in the Steel Corporation, said, as reported in one of the daily newspapers:

"The report of the United States Commissioner of Labor, just issued, shows that fully one-fourth of the employes in the steel industry work seven days in the week and twelve hours a day; another fourth twelve hours a day for six days a week. Twenty years ago the workers in the steel industry might have enjoyed high wages, but today the number of skilled workmen has been reduced and the wages of skilled workmen likewise. Two-thirds of the steel workers are unskilled.

"The Associated Charities of Pittsburgh," he went on, "recently determined by actual investigation what it costs for a family consisting of husband, wife, and three children not to live, but barely to subsist. If the common laborers in the steel industry were to work twelve hours a day for 365 days a year, they would be unable to earn even that minimum amount; they would fall just $1.50 short of that bare subsistence wage. Of course, it is physically impossible for any man to work twelve hours a day for 365 days. Moreover, there are only two holidays in the steel industry-Christmas and the Fourth of July and in the shriveling heat of blast furnaces even those holidays are denied. Think of that situation side by side with the enormous profits taken from the American people to be distributed among stockholders of the Steel Trust.

"It is a life so inhuman as to make our former negro slavery infinitely preferable, for the master owned the slave, and tried to keep his property in working order for his own interest. The Steel Trust, on the other hand, looks on its slaves as something to be worked out and thrown aside. The result is physical and moral degeneracy-work, work, work, without recreation or any possibility of relief save that which dissipation brings. The men coming out of these steel mills move on payday straight to the barroom. Think what such men transmit as a physical and moral heritage to their children, and think of our American citizenship for men who live under such conditions.

"There is only one explanation. This great corporation, which exemplifies the power of combination, and in connection with which combination has been justified, has made it its first business to prevent combination among its employes when they sought to procure decent working conditions and living conditions. It stamped out, through its immense powers of endurance, one strike after another. It developed a secret service, a system of espionage among its workmen, singling out individuals who favor unionism and any one 'fomenting dissatisfaction with existing conditions', as it was called, was quietly discharged. The trust is buttressed on one hand by the powers of the railroads and on the other by the great financial interests; against it stands the poor miserable individual workingman.

"It has instanced as one of its benefits to its employes its pension system, but this is only another system by which it deprives the worker of his just due. Nothing is so everpresent in the worker's mind as the fear of old age and his elimination from business thereby. Under the pension system every one who remains with the corporation may look forward to getting a pension, but he has no right to it. It is absolutely in the discretion of the directors whether or not he shall get it or if it shall be withdrawn even after it has been granted. Anything that may in their opinion indicate that the worker is not 'loyal' or working for the interests of the corporation, as they interpret hem, will result in loss of pension.

"Here you have a corporation that has made it its cardinal principle of action that its employes must be absolutely subject to its will. It is treason for an employe to participate with other employes for combination. In this corporation, and in other corporations, there is growing up under the guise of welfare work and efforts for more humane conditions for labor a system which robs the laborer of that little liberty he should have. It is a condition which explains with peculiar force the term ironmaster.

"The profit-sharing system, too, Mr. Brandeis said, in that it is extended only to the Superintendents and Assistant Superintendents, but not to the workmen, is simply a goad to drive the Superintendents to speed up the already overworked laborers. Equally

hollow, he said, is the benefit alleged to lie in the trust's policy of allowing its employes to subscribe for shares of stock and get $25 on each share, provided they have remained in the corporation's employ five years, and been found loyal and deserving; under that system, they also receive their pro rata of the shares of stock which other employes subscribed for, but on which they could not keep up payments. In 1903, he said, 26,000 employes so subscribed for stock; but in 1908 only a few more than 5,000 were left-all the rest had been obliged to let their subscriptions lapse, the survivors thus reaping the shares of their fallen brothers.

"Mr. Brandeis declared that while the Steel Trust was the most conspicuous, the same despotic policy is common to other great corporations.

"Must not this mean that the American who is brought up with the idea of political liberty must surrender what every citizen deems far more important, his industrial liberty? Can this contradiction-our grand political liberty and this industrial slavery— long co-exist? Either political liberty will be extinguished or industrial liberty must be restored.

"The real cause that is disturbing business today is not the uncertainty as to the interpretation of 'reasonable' or 'unreasonable' restraint of trade; it is this social unrest of our people in this struggle with which none in our history save the Revolution and the Civil war can be compared."

After Mr. Brandeis' address before the Ethical Society, written questions were sent up to him from his hearers, in replying to which he occupied a full hour. One of them was: "Have you any data for forming a judgment as to what might happen to you were you, as John Smith, organizer of the American Federation of Labor, to deliver this address at McKee's Rocks, Pa.?" The question brought out an appreciative laugh.

The effect of the studies of the numbers of men and women—the social workers, trade unionists, Government bureau agents, and independent investigators like Mr. Brandeis-who are making clear to the country the social situation resulting from the Steel Trust, is but just beginning to be feit.

Only so recently as three years ago, when the American Federation of Labor supported the trade unions represented in the steel industry in protesting against the trust's processes of eliminating the unions and enslaving its employes, the conservative press professed to see in the movement nothing more than the agitation of irresponsible disturbers of the peace. The country will tolerate no such pooh-poohing of the matter now. A question than which few could be more serious confronts our people as they see the truth in the alarm sounded by the union workers long before the general public was awakened to the menace of the Steel Trust's methods. The trade unionists were right in all their charges against the trust. It is a tyranny, to be struggled against at once and abolished as soon as possible. Let all men of courage and American principle join in the fight.

Grit your teeth and organize.

The Atlanta Convention of the American Federation of Labor adopted a resolution recommending to all the workers of America the more general observance of Labor's Memorial Day. The date upon which Labor's Memorial Day is hereafter to be observed was changed to the fourth Sunday of May of each year. This year it is to be observed Sunday, May 26. Organized Labor, take notice.

Hiram W. Johnson, Governor of California, writing in the California Outlook, when he penned this paragraph fearlessly uttered a truth that must have its due

"THE POISON PRESS."

consideration:

"Apparently, today there is a directing and controlling force in the poison press of the State-a single power that gives publicity in this portion of the press to every invention and every scrap that may be gathered, calculated to injure the progessive movement. Sometimes the same article will be published in exactly the same form on the same day in several of the reactionary newspapers; and again, if one member of this poison squad produces something particularly atrocious and mendacious, which it is thought will injure the movement that is striving with singleness of purpose for the good of the State, every other newspaper that responds to the interests and prays for the return of the old system, copies the atrocity."

The poison press is by no means confined to the limits of California. Every union man, every "progressive," every radical of any school whatsoever, is ready to take his poison in doses as a matter of course whenever he reads newspaper, magazine, or book that is printed on behalf of the truly good who favor unions but "not as they are now managed," who advocate reform but not such as would injure privilege, or who look for a better future for society but frown upon the "agitators" who want betterment to begin today.

A newspaper's poison squad is usually inside the newspaper office. Reporter or correspondent may record faithfully an event of the hour, but the drop of acid that gives the report its color and taste is injected in it by the news-chemist at an editorial desk who works according to the secret formulas given him by the big medicine men who set the policy of the paper. And, as Governor Johnson notes, the news poisoners understand not only manufacture but imitation and rapid distribution of one another's concoctions. In their fabrications they practice both free trade and reciprocity. However, the biggest fact in the use of drugged printed matter is that readers sooner or later become immune to its effects. They detect its looks and smell, prevent its touching a sensitive spot in their mental or moral constitution, and as long as they are in contact with the package containing the stuff keep on their guard. Like people who live in a malarious country, they sedulously practice prevention and take antidotes.

Here is an example of newspaper poison. When James T. Harahan, of the Illinois Central Railroad, was killed in the collision near Chicago in January, this paragraph promptly found its way into a certain class of the daily newspapers:

"With the bodies of the dead railroad men lying in a Chicago morgue tonight the city is filled with rumors that the accident was not only avoidable, but that it was directly attributable to the labor troubles in which the Illinois Central and the Harriman systems have been involved for several months."

This unfounded insinuation was quickly silenced by the facts developed in the official investigation. It was shown that the company management had for the sake of "economy" discharged a number of its station telegraphers and imposed tasks upon the few remaining telegraphers, who were not up to the highest standard of competency and safety, and that due to