THE UNION LABEL by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Apr 10, 1907

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 33, No. 15.

THE UNION LABEL.

By Editor

Not Current Everywhere.

A PAPER comes back to this office from Norwood, Mass., in a wrapper bearing this legend:

"Returned because of absence of union label. Demand this label on all your printed-matter. It represents good workmanship, good wages, and good conditions."

The little paster on the wrapper bears the union label. Now we are not going to attempt to controvert the right of the individual who returned this paper to demand the union label on all he reads. It is his right as a free American. But we feel sorry for him, because he will deprive himself of so much good reading. Not to mention a thousand other works, the "union label" is not on the Bible in any of its versions so far as we know. Then, to be consistent, our friend should demand it on the water he drank, frozen into the ice he used, on the air he breathed, on the sunshine that brings him light and life. But Heaven, which supplies these, is one country which seems not yet to have fallen under control of such unions. It is yet, praise God, an open country and keeps open shop, showering and shining its products alike on the evil and the good, on the unionist and non-unionist.

This office is a religious printing-office; it is established for that purpose, to print the everlasting Gospel; it prints only religious publications; it could not in the very nature of things turn its plant over to the control of a non-religious union. It stands for good work. It has gotten work done in union offices, but this work was almost invariably inferior to our own.

We are glad, however, that the unions number among them many, very many, fair-minded men, who are broad enough to read that which does not bear a certain brand, who recognize every man's right to think and act for himself, and who see the sweet reasonableness of some things as well as the bitter unreasonableness of others. And they know that it is good to know that no union card will be demanded at Heaven's gate. No outward label is current there. Character only counts.