LABOR'S WAR UPON LABOR

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 21, 1903

LABOR'S WAR UPON LABOR.

ONE of the most striking portrayals of the signs of our time is contained in a recent discourse of Rev. Newell Dwight Hillis, pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N. Y. He takes the ground that the “two giants,” organized capital and organized labor, have no need of sympathy, and makes a plea for non-union labor.

The capitalist is all but omnipotent, having money for comforts, conveniences, travel, equipage. Organized labor, also, is a trust almost as influential. Indeed, organized labor is for the time being more powerful than organized capital. Corporate capital to-day owns its ship or engine or factory, less the right to control and administer them. Organized labor owns itself, plus the right to administer the mine and locomotive of the capitalist.

But organized labor’s power over the property of the capitalist is the heart of its power. The unions control the politicians of the country. In Albany their lobby has passed thirty laws giving union men special privileges over non-union men, and one of these laws has been, and the rest probably will be, declared unconstitutional, yet the politicians had to pass them. The labor unions own the wage. In the anthracite coal country the school-teachers, aggregating over two thousand, in four counties, receive $1.20 a day for only 200 days’ work, a wage less than the miner’s helper and less than one-half what the miner himself receives, while the priests and the Protestant pastors average two-thirds the miner’s wage. At present this country is producing something more than a thousand dollars annually per citizen. Of this the farmer receives less than $500, the average teacher, physician, and lawyer less than $800, the trades-union men—the carpenters—work at the rate of $4.50 a day, while the capitalist often has an enormous excess. But owning the wage, the union also can control the hours.

A Plea for Non-Union Labor.

But the non-union men, who represent eighty per cent of the trades, whose sons are forbidden the right to become apprentices and whose wrongs are above all other wrongs whatsoever, justify a plea. Organized capital has deserted non-union men. Organized labor maltreats them. And, just as one hundred soldiers, organized and with a leader, can scatter a crowd of ten thousand, so the twenty men out of a hundred, representing organized labor, terrorize and browbeat the eighty non-union men, who are being driven lower, made more and more ignorant, more poverty-stricken, until at last, in their despair, they are ready to turn against the capitalists who will not defend them and the union men who maltreat them, and hate the country, the protection of whose laws is refused them. Having made many addresses in the interest of the colored people in the South and the red people and yellow in the West, and having made more than one score of addresses for union labor, I am going to make a plea for the non-union man’s right to be a non-union man, since he has fully decided that that is the best way for him to make the most possible of himself.

The union man has a right to decide how many hours he will work and at what wage he will work. The non-union man has a right to deliberately consider the reasons for the union and also to refuse to join it in his own happiness and welfare. No union man has received any charter from God or the Constitution to kill a non-union man or to send around these printed notices saying the following factory and the following store and the following shop are declared “unfair,” and you are directed to boycott any merchant who handles their goods—orders that have bankrupted scores of little shops and factories and stores, notices that have broken the hearts and ruined the lives of innumerable poor men. These men may have been mistaken in not joining the union, but they have the same God-given right to do foolish things that you and I have, without being starved to death by being posted as unfair, or pounded to death. For every twenty union men and their families there are eighty non-union men with their families.

These laboring men may hate capitalists, but labor’s hatred for labor burns like a flame, eats like nitric acid, is malignant beyond all description. But the other day a woman, representing a certain union, visited many of the families in Plymouth Church, asking them to boycott a certain institution and saying, “If you will boycott these non-union goods in this line we will boycott all non-union goods in your line.” It never seemed to occur to this woman that she was pulling down other poor women’s houses and lives and climbing up upon their bodies. At first I was so innocent as to suppose that this woman had come to tell how labor loved labor, how a union woman loved non-union women.

She was pitilessly, relentlessly, and tirelessly pursuing the non-union women and men to destroy the market for their goods, to ruin their factory and to starve them out; and that woman named The Vengeance, in the French Revolution, was not a better hater. Thank God, only a little section of the labor unions feel in this way; the great majority disclaim violence, but just here we remember that Guizot tells us that only one or two per cent of the people of France believed in violence; the ninety-eight per cent were disclaiming violence; they allowed the two per cent to fill the streets of Paris with festering corpses, to clog the Seine with dead bodies, to shut up every factory in Paris until the laboring classes starved by scores of thousands. And the one per cent element in the labor union that hates non-union men, that sends out letters declaring non-union factories unfair, the element that makes the union effective by the boycott, are now daily using the United States mails to boycott little shops and factories all over the country, and if permitted they will get this country into immeasurable ruin.

An Appeal to Patriotism.

The time has fully come for every patriot to put himself on record against labor’s hatred of labor and the union man’s boycott of the products of non-union men that is destroying our little shops and factories all over the country, ruining the lives and breaking the hearts of innumerable poor people who have no voice, no newspaper organ, no friend to lift a shield above them, no defender. The man who keeps silent must some day meet that Judge who said: Inasmuch as ye have not done it unto one of the least of these, My little ones, ye have not done it unto Me. Let the honest merchant, whose business is a philanthropy, and who administers his wealth as a trust, say to selfish capitalists, Luxury is not the throne on which you stand, but the chains which you wear, and the grave that will finally bury you. Let good union men say to bad union men, The cause of labor is too noble to have political confidence men for its leaders; and on labor’s banner let us inscribe, not the word “boycott” or the motto, “go and buy a gun”—advice that a labor leader has made historic—but on labor’s banner let there be written these words: Opportunity, Equality, Justice, Goodwill, Fair Play. The union should precipitate its hatred as water precipitates the mud.

The entire discourse in pamphlet form can be had of the Christian Work and Evangelist, New York; or of the Fleming H. Revell Co., New York or Chicago. Price, $1.00 per 100. We have given but a few specimen paragraphs; the whole discourse should have a wide circulation.