tion, in reference to either of which power to interrupt the service should never be permitted to rest with a single mind or group of organized minds, however much it or they might be devoted to any given cause. The arbitrary power to stop the supply of this utility, so essential in our public and private life, does not exist; it has not been placed in the hands of any public authority, municipal, state, or national, and surely it is not possessed by the Directors or even to the very stockholders of the Company. Were the Company to assent to the formal organization of its operating forces through which they might become subject to an outside element of control, it would by that very fact confer such a power on an individual or group of individuals, possibly not even residents of this city, who, for any cause, real or fancied, might direct and succeed in establishing an interruption in this essential public service. The result of such an interruption, were it to continue for more than the briefest moment, would be of a most serious nature, both to life and to property and to the industrial and commercial interests of the city, to say nothing of our theatres and other places of entertainment, or of our very extensive homelife which today so largely depends upon electric service, not only for illumination, but for cooking, and in the larger buildings for the supply of water and the operation of elevators. In the event of fire, an interruption in the Company's service would deprive large areas of the city of highpressure water supply, the pumping plants for which depend upon the service of this Company, for which there is to-day no possible substitute. Could there be any greater danger to property and to life than a fire in this city without water for the Fire Department?

"But it is not only from the standpoint of the city's security in these various phases that the matter has received the consideration of the representatives of organized labor and of the Company. This Company is enjoying what is admittedly one of the most important franchises existing anywhere in the world. The rights it enjoys, conferred under this franchise, belong to every citizen, man and woman, of this city. This is true, regardless of race, creed, color or any other relation or affiliation. Were the Company to enter into an agreement to limit employment in its operating or other activities to any given organization, it would, by that act, deprive all other owners of their interest

in this great property right—which, in the judgment of the Company, could have no moral or other justification. This is but another of the considerations which have led the Company to consider that in all operating matters under its franchise it should possess inherently and at all times a choice of method and personnel determined only by questions of economy, efficiency, and service, impartially and universally rendered to all alike. Most happily for all concerned, it would seem, the representatives of Number Three upon reflection have accepted this point of view with practically little exception throughout a period of many years, thus in company with ourselves bringing about a trade or industrial condition or relationship of very great mutual advantage-to the electrical industry as a whole and (of even greater importance) to the great public we are jointly serving.

"On the other hand, getting away from the principles underlying, and involved in, our franchise obligations, where the activities of the Company fall outside those relating purely to its operations for the public service, it has been agreed that the Company would be justified in conforming with the established practices of the industrial life of the city and that were it to take another view it might fail to meet full public approval. The line, therefore, has been drawn between the essential service we render the public under our franchise, which demands a continuous supply of electrical energy to meet the established purposes for which it is being utilized throughout the city on a constantly increasing scale for public and private purposes; and that work in which this element of continuity and franchise relationship is not an essential part and which can be performed by others as well as by ourselves.

"Having these considerations before it, the Company is prepared to enter upon an informal understanding that all of its construction work not directly related to the equipment used exclusively in its operations for the public service shall be done, directly or indirectly, by the representatives of Electrical Workers Number Three."

The letter then enumerates the character of the work over which the union shall have jurisdiction. This includes outside and commercial work, installations and connection services within buildings, installation of equipment, construction, et cetera.

"For liberalism emphasizes the necessity of giving free play, so far as is possible, to the spontaneous inventiveness of individuals and social groups, since only from individual initiative, only from the free play of individual faculties, can there be any mental, moral, or economic progress, any trustworthy prospecting of the paths our future history is to traverse." So writes the Italian philosopher, Benedetto Croce, in The New Republic, a magazine which many people regard as radical. Such also is the claim for liberalism advanced by the New York World in its recent advocacy of John W. Davis for the presidency. Mr. Gompers and the American Federation of Labor was in accord with this thought except where the activities of coercive unionism were at stake. Arthur Twining Hadley, formerly president of Yale University sustains the same platform:

"When we speak of a free country we mean a country whose laws and customs encourage individual citizens to use their own judgment in matters which do not directly menace public safety or public decency."

The League for Industrial Rights has advocated the same idea for two decades. Its recent History begins as follows: "Individual character, initiative, and responsibility are still believed to be the cornerstones of our social structure." Its pamphlet, "The Open Shop and Industrial Liberty," again declares for individual character, initiative, and service, and adds: "So far as collectivism permits the development of individuals it is good, but so far as it obstructs such development, it is bad."

In these days of flux and change, attempts on the part of government or powerful groups to narrow the field of spontaneous experimentation and to hinder human resourcefulness by dictating fixed and rigid schemes are not beneficial. As Croce points out, they discourage social "prospecting" and "spontaneous inventiveness of individuals and social groups." From this viewpoint, the recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States

"The Greatest Source

"Perhaps the greatest source of industrial strife is the refusal of employers to permit their employes to exercise the right to join labor unions."

So said William Green, a speaker at the luncheon of the National Civic Federation on April 11th on the subject of Waste in Industry.

The President of the American Federation of Labor thus says that the demand for unionization is of greater importance in motivating most of the industrial strife than are wages, hours, or working conditions. This statement

reaffirming its condemnation of compulsory arbitration in private industry, as exemplified by the Kansas Court of Industrial Relations, should receive a hearty welcome from liberals. Coercive shortcuts, whether at the hands of government, or at the hands of powerful organizations, which, sometimes exercise a power equal to soverign power, if they had been given free sway, would not have permitted some of the most successful social pioneering in the field of industrial relations which the world has ever known. Coercive shortcuts never find a path to peaceful cooperation and human happiness, for this can only be attained through education within the limits of the natural capacity of man himself and through the creativeness of those directly interested.

The decisions of the United States Supreme Court during the last two decades protecting the liberty of individual men against the assaults of private power and against encroachments at the hands of governmental authority, as in the Kansas Court case, reconsecrate this country to the political concepts upon which it was formed. By protecting liberty, they increase the obligation and opportunity for social service and permit the development, through painful experience, of new devices to carry out social ideals upon which there can be no disagreement.

This theory of individual rights and the decisions of the Supreme Court, supporting them, do not militate against the right of the public to protect itself in emergencies or to regulate railroads and public utilities in the public interest. The decision of the Supreme Court, in sustaining the Adamson Act and compulsory arbitration on railroads still stands, as does also the Kansas Industrial Court in respect to public utilities. Society, as a neutral party, has a right to protect itself from great social privations, but the rights of individuals to conduct their own affairs without encroachment from governmental or private sources is also secured.

of Industrial Strife"

is one of the most significant that has ever eminated from such a source. It needs no comment.

This statement implies, however, that all wage earners demand trade union organization. Is this implication justified? If all employes were free to join labor unions or not to join them would they in fact join?

Why was it that in the Danbury Hatters case the Hatters' Union spent thousands of dollars in a nation-wide boycott to unionize the Loewe shop? Because Loewe's employes of their free will would not join the union. Why

did the Machinists' Union undertake a nation wide boycott of Duplex printing presses? Because when they called a strike of its 200 employes only 11 men quit work. In both these cases, which are familiar examples, the unions could not persuade the workers to participate in their program for the coercion of employers, so they sought to compel the employers, by interference with their trade, to coerce the workers.

Why have the West Virginia coal fields remained unorganized, in spite of the millions of dollars spent by the most powerful single union in the world in a campaign of over twenty-five years? Mountaineers are proverbially independent. If the mountaineer coal miners desired to unionize is it possible to believe that in a period of twenty-five years they could not do so with the aid of the United Mine Workers? We are advised that there are thousands of miners in West Virginia who hate the

union.

Why are there hundreds of thousands of employes who have never participated even in a demand for unionization?

Why in spite of unlimited advertising of its virtues Goes trade unionism embrace today only about one-fifth f the industrial workers? Is it honestly possible to elieve that if the twenty-five million wage-earners in this Duntry desired to join trade unions that their effort to Lo so could be resisted?

The fact is that American wage earners do not want to join trade unions. No matter who or of what kind the employer to be dealt with may be, union organization has never taken place on a wide scale or maintained steady progress without strikes, agitation, and the use of coercive tactics. And this is true in spite of the fact that Americans are naturally good organizers, and the individual American is the most constant joiner in the human species. Freemasonry and every variety of fraternal and beneficial society thrives.

With what we know about the habits of the average American workman, who is certainly the most independent and self-reliant wage earner in the world, there may be a wide spread demand for organization, but the evidence points unmistakably to the fact that there is no general demand for trade union organization under the prevailing conceptions of a trade union as it reveals itself in practice.

Mr. Green speaks of industrial strife and industrial waste flowing from resistance to unionization. He fails, however, to discuss the motives for this opposition. He fails to discuss the uneconomic practices and industrial waste of unionism which are the primary causes of antiunionism. A plea for the elimination of strife must meet the issue of its provocation. The waste and inefficiency

of unionism is piled high athwart the road to industrial peace.

In the coal mining industry, in spite of all advances in the art of mining, union wage rates, enforced not by mutual understanding, but by nation wide strikes, coupled with the limitations of production, have forced the price of coal today above war prices and production at such prices cannot command a market large enough to give steady employment to the coal miners. The consumer loses in extortionate prices which curtail his use of coal, the employer loses in the overhead charge on idle equipment and the miners lose by reason of persistent unemployment.

In the building industries millions of dollars of work are annually tied up by jurisdictional disputes. Extortions levied by labor leaders as insurance against strikes have added hundreds of thousands of dollars to the rent bills of the public and restrictions upon employment of workers and of their output are notorious. The Lockwood Committee uncovered the fact that in New York City 3,800 unionized electricians are exacting a tribute of $2.50 a week from each of 8,000 non-union electricians for a "permit to work." The limitations upon work and output revealed by Judge Landis in the award in the building trades in Chicago in 1921 so shocked public opinion in Chicago that the unions refusing to accept the award, although it would have eliminated only the more vicious of these limitations, brought upon themselves the most vigorous open shop movement that had yet occurred. The open shop movement in San Francisco revealed that in that city no plumber, whatever the emergency, was permitted to work on non-union material or to work over time on Saturday without permission of his union and plumbers were fined for setting more than a stipulated number of fixtures per day. The limitation of the width of brushes by the painters' union is notorious. The list of such restrictions in the building trades is almost unlimited. The Open Shop News Letter, No. 10, of the National Association of Manufacturers after setting forth a table of costs per cubic feet on the erection of school buildings in thirty-five open shop communities and in twenty-seven closed shop communities, states that it costs 38 per cent more to erect public schools in closed shop than in open shop communities.

Outside of mining and the building trades possibly the strongest union is that of the typographers. In unionized newspaper composing rooms the union demands that all local advertising be set up in type by each newspaper although the advertisement was actually run from mats, prepared and sent to the paper by the advertiser. So each advertisement is set up in type and then knocked down, sometimes days and weeks after the advertisement has appeared. This is sheer waste which adds from