boys, and the rest of the bunch will take the tip and worry the editor. By all means, boys, hold a convention this year and send some one to it that will work for the best efforts of your organization. Lester, in 148, should be careful and not monopolize all the lassie's time unless he is serious.

Go easy, Jack, for too much of the Kokomo rag will lame any stub shover.

Hoping every lodge will appoint a correspondent and wishing every member in the B. R. C. a prosperous 1915, I remain, Yours fraternally,

"The Man from Black Bayou."

A GLIMPSE INTO THE FUTURE.
By J. F. Riley.

In imagination I sometimes peer into the future. I see conditions as they are to be the years to come. A solidily organized body of men and women filling the railroad offices. Long hours have disappeared; they have time to taste some of the joys and pleasures of life. To do more than to drag their weary bodies from their work to their homes, secure a few hours sleep and then return to their daily toil. The Sabbath day means a day of rest; and holidays are something more than mere names. Salaries are sufficient to secure all the necessities and some of the luxuries of life and to guard the horrible fear of want in old age. They are enabled to lay aside sufficient to guarantee that when their vitality yields to the imperative demands of years, they will not be forced to yield up to the last vestige of their strength in daily toil. Positions are secure-justice is guaranteed through the protection which they have through their organization-so long as they perform their duty efficiently and loyally they will have nothing to fear from the whims and caprices of officials of the companies which they

/serve.

I, too, see the efficiency of the clerk improved until it has reached the point of perfection. The railroads themselves are vastly benefited by this new order of things. The clerks are not seeking avenues of escape, but on the contrary are ever alert to perfect themselves in their duties and to improve the standard of the service-knowing that they are engaged in their life's work and that their promotion depends upon merit, ability and seniority and not upon favoritism. Harmony prevails and there is a fraternal disposition

to assist each other-thus minimizing expensive errors.

These and many other things I see as I gaze into the future, yet I cannot fail to see much of the pain and want and misery which is yet to come to the railway clerk through the intervening years until this new order of things is established.

How many of these years will there be? None can say, but it is for the railway clerk to decide. Should he determine that these new conditions shall be established before the dawn of another year, it would be done. On the contrary if he only hopes and longs for the changes and does nothing to bring them, centuries will pass away and old conditions will still prevail.

Cause and effect are inseparable. The changed conditions are effects which can only follow a cause, and that cause can be nothing but effective organization.

Thousands are now faithfully striving toward this goal, but there are many more thousands doing nothing save vainly hoping that somehow, or in some manner a change may come into their lives. It is they who are retarding the dawn of a brighter day for the railway clerks as a whole. Let them do as the thousands who are members of the Brotherhood have done -realize that individually they can do nothing to improve their condition, but that collectively they can realize their long deferred hopes. When they do this, and not until they do, will this universal change

occur.

The non-member should realize that every day he delays in rendering his share of the effort in reaching this goal-for which so many of his fellow clerks are striving -stretches out these intervening years of want and misery and of hope deferred.

UNION LABOR AND THE GOLDEN RULE.

The first labor organization that the world ever knew was a body of operative masons, gathered from the southern countries of eastern Europe and western Asia, for the purpose of building Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. They worked under the Grand Master, Hiram Abiff and King Solomon, and were organized for the purpose of securing equitable wages, reasonable hours and mutual protection. From that day to this labor has assumed its right to organize for protection.

I speak to the vanguard of the army of wage-earners. My purpose is one of peace, and not of disturbance, good-will and not hate, to diffuse more light and to dispel prejudice. No man is a friend to organized labor or a true patriot who seeks to alienate one body of our citizenship from another.

In the finality the interests of the employer and the employee are one; that which strikes a blow at the heart of capital to weaken it stabs labor also in its vital parts. I do not speak of the "conflict" between "classes," for we should have no classes in a republic where every citizen is a sovereign. Every discriminating observer of the signs of the times sees that there is a spirit of unrest, discontent and unsatis

Hercules is awakened, aroused, and is feeling his strength; he knows, like the fabled Atlas, that he carries the world on his shoulders. With increased intelligence has come increased demands. Unrest means progress. The biggest thing in this country is the average man. His rights are paramount and he will be heard and he is being heard at the ballot box, and through that, in the councils of the nation. We are proud of our fields, and factories; our money and our mines; our cities and seas; our soil and our rivers; but the grandest thing that we have is the "ordinary man," and that which presses him down toward poverty and serfdom is inimical to the interests of the country at large.

faction.

This is expressing itself in combinations of wage-earners, unions, guilds, and organizations of crafts.

They have no labor question in China; all is quiet among the laboring classes; but China is one thousand years behind the march of civilization. The revival of thought in western Europe, inspired by the invention of the printing press, gave us the glorious Elizabethan period of literature and the immortal names of Shakespeare, Milton and Bacon-this among the upper classes. The revival of thought at the beginning of the twentieth century is now applied for the first time in history to the question of the average man; not in literary, art, military, or naval adventure, but to industryto that which is nearest the life of the peo

ple. The results of this new stimulus of thought appear in labor agitation and organization.

The average man has tasted of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and has discovered his nakedness. Says one: "The workingman, this Titan, this monster of the mudsills, who in other crisis has been the bond-slave of wealth and power, this giant with the basel brain and hairy hands, this Caliban has found his Cadmus; he begins to think; he has learned how to read." He will not be satisfied and his agitation will not quiet until his wants are met with the fullness of modern civilization. Wageearners do not feel that they are sharing equitably in the general prosperity. Present labor conditions are the growing pains of prosperity. There are only two ways to stop the discontent-either to grant his just claims to an equitable share in the product of his brain and hand, or close the school room door. Universal education means universal progress. The school teacher has taken the boys and girls of the laboring man's home and led them up to the heights of the hill of knowledge and inspired them to achievement. The great daily press is the university of the common people. On the editorial page of the big daily we sometimes are treated to a severe arraignment of labor organizations and then the advertising page of the same great journal creates a want that can only be supplied by better wages and shorter hours. Advertising is the art of making people want things.

Trade union is the effort of the wageearner to apply practically and at the present time the principles of the Golden Rule; the law of harmony and justice between man and man, laid down by the Divine Carpenter of Nazareth. It is his effort to improve his condition, to increase his wages, to maintain his liberty, to keep open the door of opportunity for himself and his children; it is a refusal to be pressed down under the iron heel of monopoly to the condition of the Russian serf. Union labor says: "We do not want to put our hands into another man's pocket, but we do demand that the other man shall keep his hands out of our pockets."

This is an age of organization and centralization of power. On the one hand we see wealth and power-representing the interests of capital; on the other, numbers

and power-representing the interests of labor. Capital is of no value until it is touched by the magic wand of skilled labor, and then it is transferred into profit and commercial progress. Labor, on the other hand, recognizes that capital gives it its opportunity to apply its skill of brain and brawn, for the mutual advantage of employee and employer. The tendency of the great organizations and combinations of wealth is to press down wages, lengthen hours, and create conditions unfavorable to physical health, material prosperity and moral soundness. The management of the institutions of capital works always toward cheapening the cost of production and marketing. No individual workman can cope with this organized power. He must meet the power of wealth in organization with powers of numbers in his union, and thus be prepared to resist the encroachments of greed.

Self-protection is the first law of nature. The rights of humanity are at least paramount to those of property. "Instant dismissal" is feared by every man with home and family to sustain. The whim of a factory manager, under proper labor conditions, will not suffice to send a workman, skilled and honorable and efficient, onto the street seeking a job, or to beg for bread. Union labor seeks to attain its rights by education, persuasion, conciliation and arbitration, and, if needs be, by the harsher measures of strikes and boycott. We hear a great wail from some quarters on the subject of boycott. Labor, in its organized capacity under the extreme measure of the boycott, simply gives to the employer a dose of the medicine which labor has had to swallow for a thousand years. Lincoln, the only man who has ever been in the presidential chair whose first consideration was that of the average man, until the matchless Roosevelt came to the White House, said: "Thank God, we have a system of labor where there can be a strike. Whatever the pressure, there is a point where the workingman may stop." This is all according to the high principles of unionism to be worked out under the law and under our present institutions, using the machinery of civilization and government now at our disposal.

rule was opposed and overthrown by heroism and the purest patriotism the world has ever known; slavery-that cancer on the body of the republic which threatened to eat its life away-was opposed and overthrown by men from every section and State of the Union, whose names and deeds fill the pages of fame and glory; monopoly, organized greed, is opposed by organized labor, and this industrial revolution will save the republic from a foe worse than British rule, and from a malady more noisome than slavery. Gladstone says: "Trade unions are the bulwarks of modern democracies." This ever-increasing tendency towards the concentration of wealth and centralization of power is the great impending danger that dances like the wild terror of the storm on the horizon of our future. I come here to tell you that the American people are in open revolt; not for enmity's sake; not that they are ignorant of the value of organized capital nor that they opposed it; not that they are insensible to the immeasurable benefits of its investment for the development of the country and the advancement of civilization, but because they believe it has been converted into a huge serpent, which is tightening its coils around human rights and human happiness; because that they believe its corrupt manipulations, both in the political and business world, is threatening the destruction of the republic. Can not our industrial corporations find some safe plan of co-operation with labor?

Union labor is young in its modern, vigorous, practical form and has made some mistakes; so, also, has education and government and the holy institution of religion. Time would fail me to read you the dark pages of these great institutions for the betterment of mankind. The opposition to trade unionism has been from a controlled press, from ignorance and prejudice, all inspired by the spirit of greed. To the employer it means high-class men, contented workmen and safe investment for capital and a stronger industrial commonwealth. Potter Palmer says: "For ten years I made as desperate a fight against organized labor as was ever made by mortal man. It cost me considerably more than a million dollars to learn that there is no labor so skilled, so intelligent, so faithful as that which is governed by an organization whose officials are well-balanced, level-headed men.

* I now employ none but organized

labor, and never have the least trouble, each believing that the one has no right to oppress the other. To the wage-earner it means reduction of hours, increase of wages, the dignifying of toil and improved conditions of health and home. It has undertaken and accomplished many reforms that society at large should have undertaken. Every step of progress that labor has made has been won by the tradeunion."

Organized labor stands for a living wage, and a living wage means a comfortable home, educated children, self-respect and good citizenship.

The non-union man, who works union hours and for union wages, has ignored the demands of honor and common brotherhood. He receives the benefits for which others have sacrificed and struggled and fought to attain, and refuses to contribute the least towards that which is of equal benefit to him. He weakens the hands of his best friends by staying out of the union, and gives comfort and support to those who seek to destroy organized labor and thereby rob every laboring man of fair hours and wages. He is either grossly ignorant of his obligations as a brother man, or is a cowardly traitor to a cause whose success means only good to him.

Nobody would rob him of the "non-union man's rights," but it is not one of his rights to wrong his fellow wage-earners by refusing to co-operate with them in their effort to get a fair distribution of the pros perity, which their labor most largely produces. In refusing to affiliate with the union, the wage-earner exercises not a right, but a "wrong."

The immeasurably better conditions of the beginning of this century over those at the beginning of the last are attributable directly to the influence of labor organizations.

Someone says: "Are we not opposed to trusts, and is not labor a trust?" I answer, No. A trust is an organization seeking to exclude from its benefits everyone possible, in order that greater profits may accrue to a few. Union labor seeks to control its resources, but to include as many as possible in its benefits, and to enlarge the scope of its protection and to help to the utmost limit-the very opposite of the trust spirit. It gives every man a right to have

a voice in setting the price on his own commodity.

Time and the age and the progress of mankind fight for this worthy cause. What it has suffered it will endure no more. Its progress is permanent; its every step is forward; every throb of its great heart makes more life and blood and energy. God ward and watch union labor and keep the hearts of its mothers and daughters as pure and sweet and the arms of her sons as strong as they are today, until the hope that never falters and the faith that has never staggered is realized in the fulfillment of the Golden Rule.-By Rev. James S. Myers in The Topeka Daily Capital.

VALUABLE FEATURES OF TRADE
UNIONS.

There is no law limiting the scope of trade unions; neither is there any artificial barrier to check their usefulness, growth and development. The functions and beneficence are as broad as the universe, and as protective as human ingenuity can devise. With growing intelligence and the elimination of narrow selfishness, the trade unions can fulfill a mission, overshadowing the best and noblest traits of human endeavor and character in the world's progress.

The scope of a trade union, as constituted at present, embraces many valuable features:

It Is a Protective Organization.-It raises wages and prevents reductions; it equalizes wages for equal work performed; it endeavors to secure a living to all; it establishes a minimum wage for common work; it restricts cut-throat and unfair competition.

It Is a Fraternal Association.-It sympathizes with the sick and afflicted and the unemployed by the payment of stipulated benefits; in cases of special distress the help extended is of a substantial nature.

It is an Insurance Society.-The co-operative insurance in cases of death and total disability is superior and less costly than the rates charged by the ordinary insurance company, with a class of high-salaried officials and agents absorbing excessive premiums. It is mutual, safe and economical.

It Is a Savings Bank.-The trade union enables the worker to deposit weekly small sums of money in the shape of dues and assessments, which are returned to him when most needed; when sick, out of work,

traveling, etc. The deposits draw interest for the benefit of all members.

It Is a Legislative Body.-It plans, adopts and amends a constitution and local by-laws without any interference and advice from outside parties. Mistakes can be rectified speedily whenever necessary. There is no conflict of interests of any appreciable extent; local differences can be adjusted in the interest of the general welfare, viewed from a broad standpoint.

It Is a Direct Legislation League. The initiative and referendum, which are the cardinal features in the structure of the constitution, enable a small number of unions to propose amendments and substitutes. They are submitted to a referendum vote, with or without any discussion, as the case may be, and approved or rejected. This form of legislation is simple, direct and effective.

It Is a School on Economics.-The Manchester School of Political Economy, from Adam Smith, to the present day, has evolved a school of doctrine and critics of all shades and colors; it has evolved a system of speculative philosophy not based on concrete cases and facts. Numerous books have been written on the functions of capital, the value of labor, the rate of wages and profits, the laws of supply and demand, of exchange, finance, etc. The trade union has, in the attempt to improve the condition of the worker, exposed their economic fallacies. It is developing a new school, which is based on facts and scientific investigation.

It Is a Debating Club.-The business of the union, be it of a routine character or of a more complicated nature, involving questions of vital import, requires discussion and deliberation. Points of order are raised which require careful decision; the motions under debate are amended and substituted. Parliamentary skill is brought into play; the natural abilities of the members as debaters and parliamentarians are developed by constant practice. The progress made in this direction, in the course of years, is of vital influence in the affairs of the nation.

It Is a Trial Court.-The rules of the union require, for the management of its affairs, the enforcement of discipline and obedience to the laws enacted by the majority. Punishment as a deterrent, in the shape of fines, suspension and expulsion from membership, form a part of the laws.