actively engaged in regulating the working hours of women and children by legislative enactments; associations for labor legislation are helping to secure compensation for injured workmen and state regulation of dangerous trades; safety committees have forced the enactment of fire protection laws. The churches, social settlements, Christian and Hebrew associations, clubs for working women, and clubs for working men offer nation-wide opportunities to men and women of leisure, of professional and technical training, of wealth, of social position, and political influence to share some of their good fortune and to help in the general effort to better the lives of the men, women, and children who are without the assets of an enriched existence.

Social service has become a profession. Experts in service are developed through schools of philanthropy and special university courses. The movement has passed, indeed, through stages of organized giving of the rich to the poor to extensive surveys and investigations into the condition of the poor for the enlightenment of those who help in the administration of their lives and conditions of work. We seem to be on the eve of witnessing the inauguration and administration of such service by capital and by the

state.

The whole movement received an epoch-making impulse in 1912 and became a national issue in politics. Theodore Roosevelt, twice President of the

United States and candidate for a third term at a convention of a new party of his making, received from Jane Addams, the most eminent prophet of the new social spirit, the armor of its aspirations. His cry at the convention, "We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord," was a promise to thousands of hard working reformers that their dreary years of effort were to be crowned with victory.

Theories underlying the movements for labor reform were well developed before they became a national political issue. For many, the movements were the expression of pure benevolence. Others discounted the philanthropic impulse or spirit as a basis for extensive reform and approached the problem of devastation wrought by tuberculosis, industrial fatigue, poison, accident, and death of workers less from a sense of pity than from a sense of the economic and social waste. And as social waste and bad business it has been recognized at last by the philanthropist as well as the statesman. Efforts had been made for many years to persuade capital that industrial fatigue and disease did not pay, even in terms of profit. Capital in various quarters recognized the point before industrial betterment became a political issue. Leading economists had successfully inculcated the theory among their followers that every industrial advance of labor is bound up with a continued and a progressive prosperity on the capital side. Every concession to labor involved an equivalent return to capital.

There are leaders of trade unions who seem to support this theory; but, leaving the leaders out of account for the present, the theory or the position is either instinctively or consciously opposed by the rank and file. Boldly stated, the position of the labor unionist is less work and more pay. Whether labor does or does not make an equivalent return for what capital concedes in wages; whether it pays or does not pay disastrous prices for the gains it calls its own, are questions of first importance, but they have nothing to do with the difference between the attitude of the labor unionist and the reformer. This difference in attitude is the first point of estrangement between them. The unionist knows that less work and more pay sounds like robbery to the reformer, as it does to the capitalist and the politician. The reformer's formulation of the case is more pay, more work, and better returns to capital. It may work out that way, but it does not sound straight as a union proposition. The unionist knows that he does not expect to give more or as much; that the very essence of his fight is that he gives too much. If the economist can prove to the satisfaction of every one that the capitalist will get more out of labor by giving more, well and good; but the unionist is not comfortable in alliance with those who talk

that way.

The reformer or the statesman, moreover, lays emphasis on reforms which to labor are secondary in

importance. Sanitary factories, fire-drills, safety devices, healthful processes of manufacturing, are reforms of obvious benefit to the workman; they are amendments to industrial conditions which capital, with sufficient persuasion, can be induced to make. But the dangers from bad sanitation, from fire and special diseases of occupation are, to the working man, only a few of the countless forces against which he is struggling.

In comparison with the under-feeding, insufficient clothing, and housing of his family, which are pressing and immediate necessities, the other dangers which occupy the thoughts of reformers are to the union man merely speculative. He is too absorbed in keeping up living standards at home to be seriously concerned with the reforms of the workshop. Moreover, the average workman has no very lively expectation of the benefits received through state action; they are to him in the nature of vague promises. It is his experience that the adjustment of his vital interests depends on his own efforts. The labor unionist realizes this more fully than the common run of workers. He realizes that the shorter hours and higher wages which he has enjoyed have come through the direct and collective efforts of himself and his fellow workers. labor union records show, the unions are responsible for a mass of legislation, but the hopes and the efforts of two and a half million organized workers center rather around the regulation which they are

As

able to impose on industry through their various methods of direct action.

But on other grounds the labor unionist, if he is just a union member and not a well-seasoned official, is not at home with the industrial reformer. Unionists have joined with their fellow workers to gain not only better terms of work and existence: their union is their declaration of independence. It bears the same relation to industrial life that other declarations of independence have borne to political life. Workingmen who do not join unions, consciously or tacitly, accept a position of inferiority; they virtually acknowledge their unfitness to direct or take part in matters of vital concern to them, their incapacity for judgment in what affects most directly their life of work and life of leisure. The labor unionist resents this position of fellow wage-earners. The men who join unions have a developed consciousness of their own manhood, and their membership in a union is a sign to the community at large, no less than it is to the employers, that they consider themselves capable of directing their affairs and determining their in

terests.

Moreover, when labor men join with reformers in a common effort to change this or that condition, it is their invariable experience that, even though the reformers' methods of attack do not differ from their own, the reformers dominate and the labor men are in the position, anomalous to them, of being auxiliaries