regular dues were paid solely to assist unknown and far-off strikers of whose case they knew nothing except through reporters whose interest it was to see that dues were collected. Rumors followed that many of these strikes were from inner jurisdictional feuds or from local rivalries between envious leaders. Was hard-earned money to be paid by labor in Cincinnati to doubtful quarrels in some New England "local"? Hundreds of unions fell away, one after another, because the resonant phrases about "labor's united interests" came to be questioned and then defied. When errors of judgment are made or violent passions lead, it is a wild folly to insist that "labor's cause is always sacred against the employer." The sole measure of labor's common interest is the soundness and justice of its cause. There are no "common interests of labor, right or wrong," any more than there is a decent patriotism, "right or wrong."
In the height of the Knights of Labor ascendency, I stopped off the train in a New England textile town to inquire about a strike then raging. It was on the slippery edges of defeat. It was from a trade unionist that I heard at once, "We have put our foot in it. We thought the employers were making a thirty per cent profit and we acted on that, and now we have got perfectly good evidence that they are not making seven per cent, and we've got to get out of the scrape as best we can." There have been quite uncounted thousands of such strikes. A few years later, conflicts in the K. of L. became so frequent that unions by scores dropped from their allegiance and the first intimations of a new order, The American Federation
