SPICE OR BRINE?

Oliver Wendell Holme's once said, "Because I like a pinch of salt in my soup is no reason I wish to be immersed in brine", he might well have been speaking of the modern labor union. There have been workingmen's associations in America since the beginning of the industrial era long before the Civil War. That they have earned an important place in our social organization is unquestioned; the abolition of chattel slavery in the South found its parallel in the relief of wage slavery in the North. But their quest for wholesome working conditions and a living wage has led the unions to extremes. There have been occasions, as Elbert Hubbard remarked, when the workman was forced either to "carry a union card to take out an accident policy." Modern methods are perhaps less atrocious, but none the less stringent.

Organized labor has made itself particularly obnoxious in recent years by its wholesale interference with education, politics, and public utilities. It has attempted to evade responsibility for damage to which it is liable under the law of injunction. It now undertakes through a coalition of international unions to make individual agreements--the "yellow-dog contracts", so-called--illegal. In their pursuit of freedom and democracy, the exponents of the closed shop seek by a sort of commercial excommunication to hound the independent worker into submission.

The happy solution of the labor problem depends upon the free play of the law of supply and demand. Manufacturers will always charge for their product as much as the public need will stand; laborers will likewise strive to exact from their employers the maximum compensation for their services. Ultimately it is the consumer who pays. If we would preserve American prosperity, we must maintain the only satisfactory compromise between wage slavery and the autocracy of labor,--the open shop. The suppression of individual bargaining would be of inestimable value to the unions; armed with a monopoly of production they would be in a better position to pry further into our national life. But the people at large have had their pinch of salt; they will not tolerate the brine.