p. 7 | L. A. S by L. A. S.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 21, 1902

L. A. S

By L. A. S.

“Is the American workman a free man or a slave?” was the question discussed by a prominent clergyman of New York City, Rev. R. S. MacArthur, in a recent sermon on “The Ethics of the Coal Strike.” “Every man in this republic,” he said, “has the right to work; he has, too, the right to quit work whenever he pleases, providing he breaks no contract. But he has no right to say that no man shall take the place he voluntarily quits. When labor organizations do so, they become vastly more tyrannical than any capitalists I ever heard of.”

The right to work is a right that has been too little advocated and defended in the past. Much has been said about the right to rest, but the equally sacred right to work has been treated very much as a mere privilege or concession to be granted or withheld by the government or by organizations of men formed to control various branches of industry. Much of the Sunday legislation in this country is urged upon the plea that men have the right to rest on Sunday, as if that right could properly interfere with the equal right to work. Sunday-law agitators have even gone so far as to claim that the right of rest for one demanded a law of rest for all, and have sought to rob all men of the right to work in order that a few who preferred to rest might exercise their right in the matter without inconvenience. But work is a necessity to comfort, to health, and to life itself; and to interfere with the right to work is an act which is prohibited by the sacredness of life. Only he who is the Life-giver can rightfully set bounds about man’s liberty in this respect.

The interference of Sunday laws, and of labor unions, with the right to work, is tyranny. Whatever else may be said of the labor unions, it is a fact that nearly all of them do undertake to control work in the industry with which they are concerned. Repeatedly have men been discharged from a company’s employ at the dictates of the labor union, for no other reason than that they were not members of the union, the company being threatened with a strike if the union’s dictates were not complied with. In this the labor unions occupy ground that is wholly indefensible and tyrannical.

Impelled by a seeming necessity, the labor organizations have sought to oppose the dictatorship of employers by making themselves dictators. The tyranny of a manufacturers’ or producers’ trust is combated by the tyranny of a labor trust; and tyranny upon tyranny is the unfortunate and only possible result.