Note and Comment by L. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Oct 29, 1903

Note and Comment

By L. A. S.

THE Illinois State Federation of Labor, in session at Chicago, passed by an overwhelming majority a resolution indorsing the policy of closed shops in all industries with which the federation is concerned; in other words, a resolution declaring that in such industries only the union members shall be permitted the right to work.

A RECENT newspaper report states that the general staff of the United States army are convinced that a war for the maintenance of the Monroe doctrine is not far off, and that Germany is the nation which is most likely to attempt to set that doctrine aside. It is expected that the conflict, should it come, will be fought out in some country of South America, and topographical notes of those countries, especially of Venezuela, are being collected by army officers.

ON September 5, the “Eldorado,” a steamship of 850 tons’ burden, carrying an exploration and trading expedition, struck an unchartered rock at the entrance of Hudson Bay, near Fort George, and sank. Every member of the crew, numbering forty-eight, succeeded in getting ashore, but nothing was saved from the wreck, and the men began their long march southward, lacking almost everything needful to sustain life. They trudged through the wilderness for forty-two days, covering nearly 600 miles. Their suffering was intense, but not a single man succumbed.

A SENSATION was created at the meeting of the Christian Women’s Board of Missions in Detroit, October 17, by the following statements concerning the lives led by society women of the present day, made by Mrs. Jessie Brown Pounds, of Ohio. Her audience of two thousand women applauded her utterances:—

Modern life is getting to be more and more a vulgar display. The expenses are so rapidly exceeding incomes that there is no longer any home life. All the adults of families are forced to go out and work to meet the heavy expenses that modern conditions impose. We would much better keep our daughters at home, and let them make a home, than to send them out to work in order to increase the family income. Let us lead simpler lives, and develop more homemakers. The women of the middle classes in this country are dying at present from too much housekeeping, and the women of the upper classes are dying, too, but from a different cause. Too many courses at dinners and too much bric-a-brac to worry over are killing them. American parents are proud if their daughters marry European noblemen, but heartbroken if one marries a missionary.

IN support of what this paper has said of late regarding the attitude of the labor unions toward the “open shop” as constituting the chief issue in national affairs at this time, we quote the following from the Chicago Chronicle of October 14. Speaking of the coming session of the National Civic Federation in that city, under the heading “The Real Question,” the Chronicle says:—

Every spokesman for organized labor who will appear at these debates, will say, if closely pressed for a specific declaration, that Americans not as yet received into the charmed circle of trades unionism are without rights either as working men or as citizens. The highest officials and the wisest leaders of organized labor are on record in this respect. For themselves and their followers they demand privileges, which neither law nor custom justifies, and for the Americans who exercise their undoubted right to remain outside of the unions they advocate a denial of employment, a withdrawal of the protection of the law, and a social and industrial ostracism, which, once recognized, would make this land, where labor once was free, the most odious tyranny on the face of the earth.

Even if there were disputes as to hours and wages, this issue, involving as it does personal liberty and the administration of justice, would be of so much more importance that it would not be worth while to waste time on wage scales and conditions of labor when the very rudiments of industrial freedom are so sharply assailed.

Without being able to guarantee employment to any man, the labor trust assumes the right to forbid employment to whomsoever it pleases, and in many places controls the situation absolutely in this respect. A trades union member can not be sure of retaining his job, but he can be surely shut out of employment by the labor union’s opposition. The question of the survival of the honest, independent working man between the upper and the nether millstones of the money trusts and the labor trust, is indeed “the real question” of the hour.

L. A. S.