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I answer that the strike is the most highly civilized method which the workers, the wealth producers, have yet devised to protest against the wrong and injustice, and to demand the enforcement of the right.
The strike compels more attention and study into economic and social wrongs than all the essays that have been written. It establishes better relations between the contending parties than have theretofore existed; reconciles laborers and capitalists more effectually, and speeds the machinery for production to a greater extent; gives an impetus to progress and increases power.
If the bitter attacks which are made upon strikes and trade unions were to be taken seriously, we would imagine ourselves in the midst of barbarism, and the United States the last in the procession of the industrial nations of the world.
There exists organization in China, bound by oath and superstition; but there is no organized labor movement there. Centuries of hunger have stultified the race, not satisfied it; curbed and compressed them; not expanded or broadened them—servility and physical cowardice are their attributes.
China is “a country without strikes;” and so long as our present industrial system shall last, a country without strikes must of necessity be like China, or tend toward that goal.
Language fails me to express how earnest are the organized workers in their desire to avoid and to reduce the number of strikes; but as one associated with the labor movement of America, and who has given more than thirty years of life to the study of economics; the history of the struggles of the workers of the world; who has participated with them in their glories as well as their defeats, I am happy in being in mental company with Abraham Lincoln when he said: “Thank God, we have a system of labor where there can be a strike. Whatever the pressure, there is a point where the workingman may stop.”
I trust that the day will never come when the workers, the wealth producers of our country and our time will surrender their right to strike. The attacks on labor organizations and strikes are repetitions of the old cry of laissez faire, “let well enough alone,” which is as old as the hills, and just as easily susceptible to an advance step or a progressive thought. The same cry went up when women in England, half-naked,
