The English workers found that organization into aggressive, virile trade unions was necessary to free the workers from the fetters that legislation had fastened upon them, and to enable the workers to secure for themselves better conditions of work, higher wages, and a shorter workday. The lessons of English history as well as the recent happenings in American states raise fears as to the future of those workers who put their trust in laws to secure for workers higher wages, a shorter workday and better conditions of work. The trade union movement of America has just finished one great stage in the effort to free the workers of America from legislation that hindered their efforts and activities to protect and advance their own interests and to work out their own welfare. The labor sections of the Clayton Act secure to the workers industrial freedom and give them the legal right to collective economic activity. Is it wise then for the workers to jeopardize that industrial freedom by seeking to secure legislation establishing hours of work or minimum standards of pay? Administration of law is entrusted to political agents. There is no guarantee that standards or administrative acts determined by political agents will always be for the best interests of the workers. On the other hand, there is reason to fear that they will jeopardize the best interests of Labor. Free, enlightened men and women can not submit tamely to that which they know will injure them and those who shall come after them. Does it take any great imagination to foresee that machinery for coercion will follow upon the footsteps of legislative or administrative determinations of the conditions of work and relations between employes and employers? May not combinations to secure changes in minimum standards be judicially declared "conspiracies" just as were combinations against maximum standards? Is there any guarantee that reactionary lawmakers or lawmakers subservient to the interests will not endanger the welfare of the workers by vicious legislation of that nature? Let the workers keep in their own hands and under their immediate control regulation of matters that vitally affect industrial welfare. Organizations of workers aware of their own interests and alert to further that which promotes their own welfare are more capable of steadily securing wider opportunities and better things than any outside agents to whom this responsibility can be delegated. The way to industrial betterment and progress and freedom lies in our well-tried policy, Educate! Agitate! Organize! Truly it was a kindly courtesy in the United States Congress to coin and that does not detract from the horrors of the disease. The defects characteristic of the disease are clearly exhibited in the cognitive processes of those suffering from the disease. Some of these processes of psychopathic minds observed are crudely and imperfectly performed and others are abnormally conspicuous. Perception of each individual sufferer is of course limited by his experience, but in all victims imagination is found to be out of all proportion to other activities; memory is very faulty; consciousness of meaning, judgment and reasoning are usually defective because of arrested development. For years it has been our public duty to warn the confiding and the ingenuous against certain self-established prophets and teachers of men. Again and again we have disclosed the sophistry and the vain hopes of those faddists who proclaim partisan political action as the unfailing panacea. Whether the end desired is a communal utopia or merely the regulation of community toothpicks, these zealots eagerly advance the superior advantages of organizing a political party as the only means of securing the end. The psychopathic condition of their neural processes is due to the domination of the hallucination that they must organize a political party before any undertaking of any nature can be accomplished. Occasionally we have allowed ourselves to hope that these victims of this hallucination perchance might not be suffering from constitutional psychopathic inferiority but from a curable ailment. But alas! there comes new evidence that the mental processes of these sufferers are hopelessly abnormal. No other conclusion is possible in regard to those who always ignore facts and everlastingly misrepresent movements. The New York Call, the best known organ of these psychopathic unfortunates, published an article in its editorial columns under the somewhat indefinite title, "As Mad as a Danbury Hatter." The somewhat discon nected matter in that article of editorial form ventures to suggest the edi. torial policy of the AMERICAN FEDERATIONIST and even to give advice upon the specific points to be included. Then the New York Call, out of the kindness of its limited comprehension, offers its usual remedy-the only way by which the Hatters can secure relief is to organize a "labor party and secure legislation." Socialism, though economically unsound, socially wrong and industrially impossible, is held up as the only refuge of the workers. Poor deluded New York Call! So often have we pointed out the faulty reactions of your psychophysical organism, but you were deaf and blind. For eleven years the Danbury Hatters' case has been pending in the courts, and you, supposedly an interpreter and reporter of public happenings and tendencies, have not known of the political campaign which organized labor inaugurated for the enactment of legislation securing to workers their fundamental rights, and carried to a successful culmination in the labor sections of the Clayton Antitrust Act. Because we foresaw that the courts would interpret the Sherman antitrust law just as they have in the Hatters' case, Labor had written into law the declaration that Labor is greater than its products and that Labor has a right to activities necessary to promote its own welfare. But because of psychopathic inferiority the New York Call is unable to comprehend that the labor sections of the Clayton Act have been enacted even though they could not be made retroactive to apply to the Hatters' case. Because its mental processes have become abnormal by constant buzzing round the concept that a law can not be enacted unless a political party has been organized, the New York Call has failed to see or to understand recent legislative enactments by Congress. Verily not all political wisdom is monopolized by political parties and the enactment of laws can be secured without the organization of a political party. What Socialists have declared would be an impossibility has become a reality. Can you get that fact into your noddle? At least try. Read Sections 6 and 20 of the Clayton Act. Power is necessary to influence. Power depends upon resources. OF HIGH DUES This is true of the trade union as well as of every other organization. THE ADVANTAGES The labor organizations that have the greatest power to protect their members and the greatest influence in furthering the needs and the demands of their members are the labor organizations provided with ample, substantial financial resources. There is only one way to accumulate organization funds-payment of adequate union dues. Organizations have found it a wise policy to increase low dues as rapidly as possible because increased financial resources at their command give them increased prestige, increased ability to secure better wages and working conditions and increased ability to provide against threatened dangers. There is no investment a wage-earner can make that will bring him greater returns than his union dues. If dues to the union are increased proportionally as the union increases wages, the power of the union to promote and safeguard the interests of its members becomes increasingly effective. the price in dues, managesound financial organization does not always have to be The financial organization of a trade union must be based on sound business principles. Wildcat finances in trade unions will be no more reliable than wildcat banking investments. Money will not get into the union treasury by miracle or by the wishing process. The protection of a well-filled treasury is possible only for those who are willing to r ment and foresight. The very existence c' constitutes a defense of its members. Pow aggressively used in order to be effective-reserve power is often the most potent. Consciousness that they possess power puts moral courage and confidence into the workers, and it puts fear into the hearts of those who would wrong them. When power exists there is hesitancy to deny the possessors their rights or fair demands. The existence of the power of self-defense prevents many industrial struggles while the weak and the helpless are wronged with impunity. As union dues are increased it is possible to extend the system of union benefits. These benefits supplement the wages earned and enable unionists to live better and more comfortably. The views which we advance here have been repeatedly proved correct by the experiences of the different trade organizations. An article by John F. Tobin, President of the Boot and Shoe Workers' Union, published elsewhere in this issue, tells how the boot and shoe workers learned that they could not afford to remain a low-dues-paying organization, and of the cumulative effect of establishing a better financial system. Labor organizations are constantly preaching the gospel of higher wages. What wages are to the individual, dues are to the organization. The ideal of the American Federation of Labor is to have each organization strong, competent to manage its affairs and to solve its own difficulties. While there is whole-souled sympathy and willingness to help fellow workers in their time of need, yet the best results for all workers can be obtained when each organization is free to protect and promote the rights and interests of its own members and to organize the yet unorganized. But high dues should not be accompanied by high initiation fee. Indeed the initiation fee should be small, thereby inviting and making it possible for the yet unorganized to join the union and to make common cause with their fellow workers to secure the common welfare of all. High dues regularly paid. will inevitably lead to greater self-reliance, mutual interdependence, unity, solidarity, fraternity and federation. Whither are we drifting? SELF-HELP IS There is a strange spirit abroad in these times. The whole people is hugging the delusion that law is a panacea. Whatever the ill or the wrong or the ideal, immediately follows the suggestion-enact a law. If there is no market for cotton, those interested demand a law. If there is a financial crisis, a law is demanded to protect special interests. If the desire for physical strength and beauty is aroused, laws for eugenic marriages are demanded. If men and women speak ill-considered or unwise words, laws that forbid their speaking in that mann are proposed. 750 If morals are bad, a law demanded. 19" If wages are low, a law or a commission is the remedy proposed. Whether as a result of laziness or incompetency there is a steadily growing disposition to shift responsibility for personal progress and welfare to outside agencies. What can be the result of this tendency but the softening of the moral fibre of the people? When there is unwillingness to accept responsibility for one's life and for making the most of it there is a loss of strong, red-blooded, rugged independence and will power to grapple with the wrong of the world and to establish justice through the volition of those concerned. Many of the things for which many are now deludedly demanding legislative regulation should and must be worked out by those concerned. Initiative, aggressive conviction, enlightened self-interest, are the characteristics that must be dominant among the people if the nation is to make substantial progress toward better living and higher ideals. Legislation can not secure these characteristics but it can facilitate or impede them. Laws can not create and superimpose the ideals sought, they can only free people from the shackles and give them a chance to work out their own salvation. Many conscientious and zealous persons think that every evil, every mistake, every unwise practice, can be straightway corrected by law. There is among some critics of prevailing conditions a belief that legislation is a short-cut to securing any desired reform-merely enact a law and the thing is done. Now enacting a law and securing the realization of the purpose the law is aimed to secure are two vastly different matters. Of the making of many laws there is apparently no end, for legislative and congressional mills yearly grind out thousands. But for the enforcement of these laws there is little effort unless enforcement is demanded by public opinion or by interested groups of citizens. As a rule the laws affect conditions and people little, and society is glad to escape with so little damage. A law that really is a law, is a result of public thought and conviction and not a power to create thought or conviction. The enforcement of the law follows naturally because the people will it. To enact a law with the hope and for the purpose of educating the people is to proceed by indirection and to waste energy. It is better to begin work for securing ideals by directing activity first for fundamentals. Frequently, when the people concerned become mindful and eager for what will promote their own welfare, they find that they are much more able to secure what will benefit and adapt their methods to changing circumstances than is any law or the administration of that law. The virile spirit that has given our young nation a foremost place among the nations of the world is the spirit of aggressive initiative and independence. the ability of our people to grapple with hard problems and to solve them for their own benefit and for the benefit of the nation. We must not as a nation allow ourselves to drift upon a policy of excessive regulation by legislation-a policy that eats at and will surely undermine the very foundations of personal freedom. These principles and facts apply to the working people, the organized wage earners, as fully and completely as to any other group or to the people as a whole. Labor seeks legislation from the hands of government for such purposes only as the individuals or groups of workers can not do for themselves, and for the freedom and the right to exercise their normal activities in the industrial and social struggle for the protection and promotion of their rights and interests and for the accomplishment of their highest and best ideals. Thus Labor asks legislation providing for the abolition of child labor; security and safety in life and work; sanitation in factory, shop, mill and home; workmen's compensation in preference to employers' liability; the regulation of convict labor and the like; the enactment of laws such as the proposed seamen's bill and the labor provisions of the Clayton law already enacted; the regulation of the issuance of injunctions and the trials of contempt cases; these latter work for freedom, for right, for justice. These reforms the workers and groups can not secure without law, because they are governmental functions and can not be accomplished by private agencies. In a word, the labor movement undertakes to secure from government both |