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of legal and strictly industrial warfare. Not one school of political economy in any era of our industrial and commercial life has advanced the wage-earners one jot in their material interests. It has been the persistent plodding and sacrifices of the organized labor movement which has secured for the workers a general discussion of their rights and their wrongs, and has given the keynote and proven the open sesame to the student in all the walks of life.
In this era of industrial development and concentration, the individual worker acting for himself is accorded neither rights nor consideration. His share in the result of the product of his toil is the desideratum which depends upon the generosity of the average employer, a basis so preposterous that no reasonable, thinking man can defend it.
Some well meaning persons, and others not quite so friendly disposed, have urged upon the workers compulsory arbitration as a means to end industrial strife. The most pronounced advocate of that system in America is one who, though well-intentioned, has in turn advocated as many different remedies for our social ills as the human mind has evolved, and has written successively to the utter confusion of his previously proclaimed theories.
Another advocates compulsory arbitration for New Zealand, and while loud in its praises, hesitates in his advocacy of its acceptance in the United States; while the author of the law in New Zealand recently declared that it must be either curbed, modified or repealed.
It may not be known to the advocates of compulsory arbitration that in the fifteenth century there was a species of compulsory arbitration in vogue in Great Britain where the courts determined upon the wages and conditions of employment.
To the student of history it is an open book that the workers of Great Britain in that time were practically enslaved; that industry was hampered, and only through violent revolution was a change brought about by which the laborers were permitted to quit their employment at will, and from that period began by slow and painful processes the industrial progress of Great Britain.
Compulsory arbitration is the very antithesis of freedom and order and progress. On the one hand it means confisca-
