There are 1,402 causes for strikes listed in the twenty years prior to 1900. Perhaps one of the least of these was a strike because a foreman swore at a workman; another because a man who had been discharged for drunkenness would not be reinstated by the manager of the establishment. But among the chief causes for these disturbances, that of the simple salary or wage question is first, while it is also mixed up with a number of other qualified demands.

A tabulation of the causes for strikes in the order of their number is:

From these carefully prepared figures of the country the individual union man may draw some conclusions of his own. As a twenty year record of strike and lockout measures they are full of possibilities.

STRIKES AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE

STRIKERS.

BY FRANK K. FOSTER.

[Frank Keyes Foster, editor; born Palmer, Mass., December 19, 1854; received an academic education; is a well known writer on labor topics, and has been trustee of the Franklin fund and a member of the investigating committee of the Boston public library. Author: Evolution of a Trade Unionist, and many articles in maga zines and periodicals.] Copyright 1901 by Frederick A. Richardson

A notable phase of the industrial history of the United States during the past decade is the number of strikes occurring in this period. Not alone have these conflicts between employers and employees increased in frequency, but they have also grown in scope and intensity. The sympathetic strike, where men belonging to crafts not directly affected by the original cause of disagreement have left their work for the purpose of assisting those first involved in the difficulty, is almost entirely a modern development, and suggests a future contingency in industrial warfare whose possible gravity it is hard to estimate with any degree of accuracy.

Both the pessimist and the optimist have had their deliverances as to the significance of the strike phenomena. The former apprehends in them a grievous menace to industry, the expression of a spirit hostile to American institutions and of vital danger to the public welfare. The incidents of disorder which occasionally accompany strikes are held to be the logical outcome of the purposes of the strikers, and to be of such a nature as to warrant the exercise of repressive agencies against the labor organizations themselves.

The optimist, on the other hand, while he may take issue with some of the methods used by strikers, and even hold that the strike itself is a costly and clumsy way of attempting to bring an industrial dispute to a conclusion, is, nevertheless, sensible that it is a most fortunate thing for wage earners that they have the legal right, and possess the power, to refuse, individually and collectively, to sell their labor under what they, at least, esteem to be unfair conditions. In a broader sense,

moreover, he recognizes that this power of resistance possessed by the wage earner in an era of gigantic combinations of capitalists assists in maintaining that equilibrium between contending interests whose destruction would be the severest of blows against industrial freedom. "So long," wrote Herbert Spencer, "as men are constituted to act on one another, either by physical force or force of character, the struggle for supremacy must finally be decided in favor of some one; and the difference once commenced must become ever more marked. It must be evident, therefore, that believers in democracy who are of cheerful vision must find cause for felicitation that the industrial masses possess the capacity to enter into this struggle for supremacy."

But, to begin at the beginning, what is the economic object of the strike?

Labor is reckoned by the economists as a commodity to be bought and sold in the market as other commodities are bought and sold, and with its price regulated by the law of supply and demand. A surplus of a commodity, under the natural operation of this law, creates a tendency toward a falling market; a scarcity of a commodity creates a tendency toward a rising market.

Even under the orthodox definition of labor, it becomes apparent that within certain limits, there are two classes of interests in the industrial world; the interest of the labor buyer to purchase the commodity at a low price and the interest of the labor seller to dispose of the commodity at a high price.

The lines marking this limit are roughly determined by the margin of profit in production. It is evident that if the margin of profit becomes absorbed by the abnormal forcing up of the wage rate, the labor seller destroys the market for his commodity. Conversely, if the wage rate be depressed below the living wage, the labor buyer not only decreases the value of the commodity he buys, but cripples the market for the joint product of labor and capital, which is dependent in no small degree upon the purchasing power of the wage earner.

It is useless to assert that, within these limits, the interests of the labor seller and the labor buyer are identical. In the apt phrase of Col. Carroll D. Wright, chief of the national

bureau of labor statistics, they may be, and often are, reciprocal, but they are never identical.

But in the economic philosophy of the wage earner there is taken into account an element which the orthodox economist too often entirely ignores. The wage earner grants that labor is a commodity but a commodity plus the laborer. Labor thus differs from an inanimate commodity by all that marks the distinction between a man and a bale of cotton. The latter commodity has no volition as to the conditions under which it is disposed of. The cotton seller has to deal with merely the commercial element in the transaction of sale. He may ship his commodity to the other side of the world, receive therefor his bill of exchange, and the business is completed. There is a certain visible supply of cotton in the market, and excepting for the influence of tariffs and trusts and their like, the law of supply and demand works inexorably and decisively.

are one.

But the laborer and the commodity he has to dispose of In selling his labor, the labor seller must to that degree, sell himself. He must go into the market where his labor goes; he must endure the conditions under which it is disposed of. But-mark the point-by virtue of his volition he may increase or diminish the amount of his commodity on the market. He may, individually or collectively, modify the normal operation of the law of supply and demand by willing to withhold his labor from an unfavorable market. It is as though a million cases of shoes should refuse to be sold, except under conditions approved of by them.

It is in this differentiation between the commodity of labor and inanimate commodities that the impossibility inheres of instituting a fixed science of political economy. A science demands absolute quantities. The laborer is not an absolute quantity, but is subject to continual change through the agencies of environment, education, and aspiration. The serf of to-day becomes the sovereign citizen of to-morrow. The Hungarian miner, content with a crust of black bread for food, wooden shoes, and the coarsest of fabrics for clothing, a miserable shanty for a dwelling, evolves into a member of the Miners' National Union of America,

whose stimulated intelligence and awakened wants lead him to demand wages which will procure for him a far larger share of the comforts of life than he formerly required.

The modern trade union is as distinctively the product of an advancing civilization as is the town meeting, the daily newspaper, the university, or any other agency which has developed the faculties of men and led them towards higher levels of thought and action. The trade union is the historic and agreed upon agency selected by the judgment of the labor sellers to protect and advance their interests as such. It has evolved from the experience of centuries of back bending toil and travail as the most available means of securing an equality of bargaining power for the labor seller in his relations with the labor buyer. Its potential possibilities are limited by naught save the capacity of cohesion and wise action among the workers of the civilized world.

The trade union recognizes the strike as a legitimate weapon of offence and defence. It is grossly unfair to style the trade union, as some ungracious critics are in the habit of doing, a striking machine. It has countless other functions besides that of precipitating industrial war. In fact, the strike plays but a subordinate part in the history of the great craft organizations of America, and represents but a small part of their expenditure of funds and energy. But the power to strike is of great importance in the consideration of the status of these organizations, upon the same principle that the fighting power of a people, even though it is rarely resorted to, is largely instrumental in determining its status in the family of nations.

"Thank God we have a system of labor where there can be a strike," said Abraham Lincoln in a speech delivered in 1860. Whatever the pressure, there is a point where the workingman may stop.

But as the purpose of this article is to examine more particularly into the nature and causes of strikes, the benevolent, educational, and fraternal aspects of the trade union movement may not properly be entered into in detail. It may be said, however, that a form of organization which