78 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
holes and filling them up again. Our American societies feel this difficulty, General Booth encounters it in Eng- land, and the Catholic societies which your Holiness recommends must find it, when they are formed.
Your Holiness knows of, and I am sure honors, the princely generosity of Baron Hirsch toward his suffering coreligionists. But, as I write, the New York news- papers contain accounts of an immense meeting held in Cooper Union, in this city, on the evening of Friday, September 4, in which a number of Hebrew trades-unions protested in the strongest manner against the loss of work and reduction of wages that are being effected by Baron Hirsch's generosity in bringing their own coun- trymen here and teaching them to work. The resolution unanimously adopted at this great meeting thus con- cludes :
We now demand of Baron Hirsch himself that he release ns from his "charity" and take back the millions, which, instead of a bless- ing, have proved a curse and a source of misery.
Nor does this show that the members of these Hebrew labor-unions who are themselves immigrants of the same class as those Baron Hirsch is striving to help, for in the next generation they lose with us their distinctive- ness are a whit less generous than other men.
Labor associations of the nature of trade-guilds or unions are necessarily selfish ; by the law of their being they must fight for their own hand, regardless of who is hurt ; they ignore and must ignore the teaching of Christ that we should do to others as we would have them do to us, which a true political economy shows is the only way to the full emancipation of the masses. They must do their best to starve workmen who do not join them, they must by all means in their power force back the " black- leg" as the soldier in battle must shoot down his
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