What constitutes a state? Not high-raised battlement or labored mound, Not cities proud with spires and turrets crowned; Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride; Where low-born baseness wafts perfume to pride; Men who their duties know, But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain. The Drift in Industry By JOSEPH E. COHEN Compositor, Weber Printing Co., Philadelphia, Pa. THE aims of the plant can be summed up in a single compre hensive sentence: To serve as an integral part of modern industry. Such a mandate implies relationships of three kinds, namely, toward other employers, toward employes and toward society as a whole. What can the relationship toward other employers be today? Dealing with American industry as it is commonly conceived to be, what possible relationship of anything like mutuality can be effected among employers? It would seem, none. For industry in this country is taken to be an organization of unrestricted competition. It is spun into our organic concepts of political principles and woven across our industrial fabric. We are wont to glory in what is nothing less than studied individualism, in a land of supposedly boundless opportunities, wherein he who asks for a handicap of assistance or he who cannot survive the flood, is regarded as the necessary victim in the process of weeding out the unfit. With such possibilities assured, as are thought to obtain here, no one in the struggle for industrial life is expected to ask for quarter or to give it. There still ring in our ears the campaign cries of a few short years ago: Bust the trusts. We may even recall what a feeling of satisfaction settled down upon the exponents of the Manchester school among us when the Sherman Anti-Trust Law was passed. We have rather taken it for granted that competition would always be with us. Competition was accepted as the life of trade, until trade became the death of competition. But how reluctantly, even at this late hour, do we acknowledge the fact? In spite of the absolute trustification of all important industries, we imagine that the Sherman law still operates, through the interpretation read into it by the Supreme Court, when it differentiates between "reasonable" and "unreasonable" monopolies in restraint of trade. And imagining that copy book maxims receive a hearing in the mad chase after dollars, we console our selves with the suggestion that there are "good" trusts and "bad" trusts. By a peculiar twist made in our thinking process, we reconcile the laying of tariffs, granting of subsidies and passage of protective legislation, as in some mysterious way compatible with our theory of competition. They are not reconcilable. Industrial evolution is scrapping the laissez faire platitudes. If we were constituted to welcome a revolutionizing of our theories, when it answers the test of wholesomeness, then there should have been such a revolutionizing as a result of the experience of our country in the war. For over the head, and thrusting aside the whole spirit of the Sherman law, comes the proposal to permit and underwrite combinations of American capitalists to handle export trade. Only a confirmed hairsplitter would insist that the door of combination be kept closed for domestic trade, while opened wide for foreign business. Moreover, when the war came to America our government found it necessary, first having obtained the authority to do so from Congress, to substitute an administration of industry for our political management of men. The running of industries essential to the conduct of the war was practically taken over by various bureaus at Washington; also the control of prices, raw material and finished product. For the first time it was assumed that industry as a national enterprise could not be conducted planfully and scientifically, unless there were a mind at the head of it, an intelligence of centralized effort such as would operate our whole industrial process as a unified whole, having regard for nothing so much as the ordering of our economic life and the security of our national being. Production was carried on for the direct purpose of supplying the market whose dimensions were measured and proved. There was the fear of neither underproduction nor glut in any branch; we were not to have the spectacle, so common in the past, of being offered too many shoes when we needed wheat. But when the war ended, the industrial mechanism built at Washington, which was functioning so well, folded its tent and silently stole away. We were expected to go on as though, like the Bourbons, we learnt nothing and forgot nothing. The ghastly trail of the calamity which befell the world was to yield us no lesson that would lift our industrial cart out of the individualistic rut it had been accustomed to follow. We were to be as we were before. But all a war, or for that matter a revolution, does is to bring to a head tendencies which have been already gathering. In the sudden upheaval, in the unexpected flash of light, we are apt to assume that entirely unwarranted phenomena are taking place. This is not always true. Possibly we shall even come to see, when we can take a historical perspective of what we have gone through, gained and lost in the last four years, that the world would have undergone in about the same time equally fundamental changes, industrially and socially, had we missed the war. And we may have had our evolution in a finer way. That is to say, we had long since been steering into trustification and monopolization. However much we might blink the fact, when the first employers' association was formed there could be no outcome but "gentlemen's agreements" to distribute raw material, place the output, fix wages and prices, eliminate duplication, dispense with unnecessary advertising, wipe out other waste, and secure friendly as well as prevent hostile legislation. Then, too, as business flourished, as the profits kept rolling in always in bigger heaps, as they begged and pleaded to be disposed of in enlarging the business or sugaring allied enterprises, it was inevitable that a single corporation, or a small group of corporations, would hold in their grasp the larger share of an industry's activity, and that such power would be bound, under our understanding of business ethics, to be used with scant consideration . for the welfare of employes or the general public. Our reckless individualism was changed into rampant, large scale industrial cannibalism. All the king's horses and all the king's men cannot restore competition. It is dead. Employers' organizations are here to stay. Permeating the upper class is a consciousness of kind that must now be accepted as a basic fact in our social life. Our industrial plant, if it is in step with the marching battalions, will find its work as a necessary part in the whole industrial process of the country, coming more and more clearly to be recognized as one process. And beyond this is international organization of the markets of the whole world, put through by the representative men of modern industry in the better developed countries. So much then by way of fixing the status of employers toward each other. What now of the relation of the employers toward their hired men and women? The idea which customarily obtains among employers or, let us say, but recently obtained, is that labor, like other commodities, should be bought in the cheapest market and should be expected to render the utmost service for whatever wage is paid. Labor power was considered as more or less of an inanimate thing, entirely divorced from the person of the possessor, with no more sentimental attachment than exists, say, between a fisherman and the day's catch he is trying to dispose of. The individual workingman was supposed to offer his power to create wealth entirely apart from his procedure as a human being and entirely without regard to what any other workingman might do. The whole arrangement was to be a barter of equal values between the single employer and the single worker. That explains why collective bargaining and recognition of the trades union were fought so bitterly. And it explains, by the same token, why the worker holds to these principles so tenaciously, until now they are coming to be generally accepted. He has learnt by uniform experience, that standing alone he is helpless. His thin reserve of savings, if he have any, is pitted against the employer's fortune and banker's aid and the employers' association. It is an altogether unequal struggle. The worker almost invariably loses. The employer likewise paid for his obstinacy. He had to contend with constant derangements, the uncertainty of the plant running at all through the succession of strikes and lockouts, breaking out here and there, in the most unexpected directions. He faced continual disruption. The workers not only had no interest in the plant; they regarded the employer as a hard taskmaster, their sworn enemy, who swung the whip of hunger and against whom any retaliation was fair. Only slowly did collective bargaining meet with favor as a possible stabilizing factor in industry. For industry itself is not stable; it is in motion all the time. The organization of large bodies of men into unions means the lessening of petty strikes. Mutual agreements become easier to make when each side knows the strength of the other. Labor leaders feel the responsibility |