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The associations and influences of the street are morally degrading, and in the associations of the workroom and the factory yard the whole tone of the life of individuals is frequently lowered. 56. =Child-Labor Legislation.= Friends of the children have tried to stop abuses. Trade-unions, consumers' leagues, and State bureaus have taken the initiative.
It has embarked on a course of payment of blackmail which must end either in national bankruptcy or in the social revolution which the anarchists seek. The powerful trade-unions are now plundering both the owners of their 'plant, and the general public. It is easy to show that their members already get much more than their share of the national wealth.
He had to train new workmen, he had to enlist women, he had to persuade the trade-unions to remove their restrictions, he had to prevent the sale of alcohol in munition districts, he had to tell the capitalistic makers of munitions all over the country that they were only going to be left a percentage of their profits, and that the rest was going to be taken by the Government.
The introduction of free education served more than anything, and is still serving, to create a self-conscious democracy fully alive to its great responsibilities, for knowledge means courage and strength. Changes in the industrial life of the country led to organization among the workers and the formation of trade-unions.
The time may come when the educated classes, and those who desire freedom to live as they think right, will find themselves oppressed, not only in their home-life by the tyranny of the trade-unions, but in their souls by the pulpy and mawkish emotionalism of herd-morality. Then a league for mutual protection may be formed.
Grandcourt's importance as a subject of this realm was of the grandly passive kind which consists in the inheritance of land. Political and social movements touched him only through the wire of his rental, and his most careful biographer need not have read up on Schleswig-Holstein, the policy of Bismarck, trade-unions, household suffrage, or even the last commercial panic.
A thousand difficulties rose to meet him as he built up the new organization, but he trampled them underfoot and went forward, heedless of whether he was making enemies or friends. An intermediate and important obstacle to his work was the fact that many of the trade-unions of the country had established rules which operated against an increase of production.
The legalisation of terrorism by the trade-unions was too tragic a surrender to be ludicrous, but it was even more disgraceful. None could be surprised when, during the war, the Government shrank from dealing with treasonable conspiracy in the same quarter. The Times for May 24, 1917, contained a noteworthy example of justice influenced by pressure, and therefore applied with flagrant inequality.
In a word, while the unions have been doing their effective best to keep labour, as a productive agent, stationary, or even to diminish its efficiency, the product of industry as a whole exhibits an unchecked increase. And what is the explanation of this? Little as the trade-unions realise the fact themselves, their own policy is an object-lesson which supplies us with the simple answer.
In the meanwhile the boat was drawn up and the chain locked. The girls walked on in advance; Egremont continued to speak of Mr. Dalmaine, a rising politician, whose acquaintance he had made on the voyage home from New York. 'One of the few sincere things I ever heard from his lips was a remark he made on trade-unions. "Let them combine by all means," he said; "it's a fair fight."
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