THE Gospel of God is founded on a Gift, a Gift conceived in love. Therefore giving is the key-note of the Gospel. God gave Himself in giving Christ, and Christ gave Himself; and in giving Himself, He "emptied Himself" of the glory that He had with the Father—gave up the glories of heaven for the poverties and persecutions of earth—all, that He might give to His followers a share with Him in the redeemed inheritance.
Therefore it is not strange that the followers of Christ should be asked to give—asked frequently; or that plans should be laid for systematic, continuous giving. No man has ever yet purchased salvation. It can not be done, no matter if the would-be purchaser had the whole earth with which to purchase it. Salvation is free. It must be given, or it can not be conveyed at all; it must be accepted as a gift, or it can not be obtained at all. A Vanderbilt, a Morgan, or a Rockefeller, is as poor at heaven's gate as the poorest peasant or the loneliest shepherd lad.
The limit of giving is the giving of the life. Christ gave the limit. "God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son." John 3:16. "Hereby know we love, because He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren." 1 John 3:16. The first quotation tells what God did; the second what Christ did, and what is required of His followers. It is easy to remember these references, as they are the same chapter and verse in books bearing almost the same title—John and 1 John. It is well to refer to them frequently, and quote them together, thus bringing into closer contact God's doing and our duty.
In giving the limit, Christ left nothing He could give that He did not give. All things are in Him. In following the example, Christians should make all they have subject to the call of God, and that means to the needs of His work. Hoarding for gain, and grudging, or refusing to give are outside the purposes of God. He can not work through such a channel; and means so hoarded and so withheld shows a misapprehension of our stewardship. As heaven will be richer for the unlimited giving of God and Christ, so will the Christian's reward be greater for following the example of Him who has given us all.
Christendom has made this the season of gift-making. This is known as the holiday season, when the great mass of what is known as the Christian world gives gifts and expects gifts in return. While the Christian's life should be one continued gift, both of himself and his means, it is not inappropriate to make this season one of special giving and special consecration to the work of God. In fact a great good may be done by setting before the world an example in the right kind of giving in these days when such a large portion of the world is making gifts.
If Christmas were in reality what it purports to be, the anniversary of the birth of Christ, there would still be no honoring of Him in the mere giving of gifts to one another on that particular occasion; but by giving of our means to His cause at this time, we may influence others to put into that needy cause means which otherwise would go to minister to the pleasures of this life.
We have reached a time in the history of Christian work in this world when Christian men and women8—and children—must give as they have never given before. Why is that?—Because the riches of this world are being tied up as never before in the hands of the great men who are not interested in the spread of the Gospel. Their great ambition is to bring money under their control; and millions on millions are being heaped together to keep them out of the cause of God. The spirit that is working in the children of disobedience is the spirit that is inspiring this heaping, hoarding, shackling, and incarcerating of the money of the world. Look at the millions tied up in the ships of war and the armies of the nations, necessitating the heaviest possible burdens of taxation upon the people until their giving powers are shriveled almost to the point of dissolution.
The same spirit has entered the popular church, and millions are spent in maintaining "the form of godliness" where the power has long since been ebbing to extinction, and comparatively little goes into the work of promulgating the Gospel of peace. With the increase of that spirit, love has been waxing cold, spirituality has been declining, and the mass has thus lost the inclination to give for the prosecution of pioneer work. There never was a time when there was so much means in the world as now, nor ever a time when there were so many schemes on foot for tying it up and keeping it out of the Lord's work; never a time when so many men of means and powerful intellect were using every endeavor to corner the money of the world. Many who are not doing this are surfeiting, reveling, and running after the pleasures of this life.
Therefore we see the greater necessity for those who have enlisted in the service of Christ dedicating, as never before, their means and their all to the work that Christ has appointed for His followers to do. The tighter the purse-strings of the world are drawn, the more zealous liberality must the Christian exercise with the means committed to his charge. The faithful ones must shoulder the burden which the worshiper of Mammon refuses to bear. In doing this they receive the reward which such ones refuse to accept on the conditions laid down. In such work the Christian makes good his profession and silences the scoffer who would draw comparisons between Christians' professions and professed Christians' practises. "Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over." This is the liberality of God toward us. Shall we not give of ours in this time of the world's greatest need?
THE TRUST EVIL.
THE enormous greed of the capital trusts, and their tendency toward oppression of the people, are so generally recognized that the people’s representatives in Congress and in some States have enacted laws to restrain their operations. But, being a wealthy class, the trusts are able, to some extent, to withstand the execution of the law. The force to which the people look for practical restraint of these capital trusts are the independent producers. But the trusts undertake to destroy the business of these independent manufacturers by temporarily cutting prices or boycotting their customers. The independent establishments that have not the capital to withstand this opposition, must necessarily curtail expenses or fail.
Now come the labor unions with demands for higher wages, and an additional boycott on the hard-pressed establishments if they do not yield, or if they employ other laborers who are willing to work for what the independent manufacturers can afford to pay. The capital trusts that make fortunes oftentimes out of the sale of "watered stock," can afford to pay the union demands. They expect, when the independent operators are compelled to give up business or join them, that they will make up their temporary loss in a rise of prices. Thus it is that the union’s labor trust practically helps the capital trusts to crush their opposition. The trusts all logically help one another in the end.
A practical application of this principle was worked out in Chicago recently when there was an agreement between union teamsters and employers to carry out a reign of extortion on all who must needs have their services. This illustrates a fact which will become patent ere long, that no trust can be depended upon to counteract the trust principle. In the near future the labor trust will be hand-in-glove with the capital trust, and the masses of the people will be the sufferers. In the near future the people will find that, in being cajoled into boycotting non-union institutions and non-union men and women, they will have been riveting their own fetters.
Union labor is, in principle, a labor trust, and must inevitably go the way of all trusts, altho, unwittingly to most of its members, it is being gradually drawn under the control of capital, and is fast becoming a factor of capital’s oppression of labor. Instead of being the benefactor of the laboring class, as it assumes to be now, it will soon bloom out as an auxiliary of capital’s autocratic reign. It is fast becoming capital’s chief executioner in the destruction of small competitive producers, which are the real protection of the people against the extortions of capitalists greed. Let the people take note of this, and be on their guard against plausible deception.
WHAT KIND OF REVIVAL?
THE religion which Jesus Christ propagated and exemplified; the religion which He bequeathed to His apostles, and which they propagated and exemplified, was a religion which did not seek State-aid. Neither Christ nor His apostles ever sought the aid of Caesar, financially or otherwise. The principle advocated by the Lord Himself was, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” The religion of Christ made its most decisive progress during the first century, when it was not only unaided, but was bitterly opposed, by the civil government. When, in later years, the personnel of church membership had materially changed, and the predominant element believed State-aid expedient, and had sufficient influence to obtain it, the result was the Dark Ages.
Now that all the churches admit that there is crying need of spiritual revival, and are looking to all quarters for powerful men to work up a revival spirit in their ranks, it is pertinent to ask what kind of revival would be the most effectual in the salvation of souls? Would it be a revival with the Holy Spirit under it, or a revival with the State behind it? Would it be a revival of power to move legislative bodies to enact favorable legislation, or would it be a revival of power at the throne of grace to secure a greater measure of the Holy Spirit? The difference in principle between Spirit-power and State-aid is the difference between Pentecost and the Dark Ages.
THE END OF EARTHLY STRIFE.
1. To whom does the earth belong?
“The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof.” Ps. 24:1.
2. To whom do the people belong?
“The world, and they that dwell therein,” also belong unto the Lord. Same verse, last clause.
3. To whom do the creatures of the earth belong?
“Every beast of the forest is Mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the mountains; and the wild beasts of the field are Mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee; for the world is Mine, and the fulness thereof.” Ps. 50:10-12.
4. To whom do the treasures of the earth belong?
“The silver is Mine, and the gold is Mine, saith the Lord of Hosts.” Hag. 2:8.
5. How did God come to own the world and all that is in it?
“The earth hath He given to the children of men.” Ps. 115:16.
7. How came men to imbibe the idea of accumulating the land and its treasures?
When Satan overcame Adam, and usurped the dominion, his spirit of selfishness was imparted to the race. Hence all the strife for possessions; hence the inequalities and the oppressions and the conflicts. But when the Lord comes again in the glory of His power, He will overcome and forever subdue the usurper, and forever destroy all the results of his wicked rule in the hearts of men.
8. Then who will eventually possess the earth?
“Evildoers shall be cut off; but those that wait upon the Lord, they shall inherit the earth. For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be; yea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall not be. But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.” Ps. 37:9-11.
God’s eternal purpose will be fulfilled in the new earth, which He will create, “wherein dwelleth righteousness.” See 2 Peter 3:9-14.
WHAT WILL THE HARVEST BE?
THE object of the trusts is to concentrate the productive institutions and commercial enterprises and to carry all lines under as few heads as possible. A number of factories combined under one management, and under one roof, it is argued, can do the same work with a less number of hands, and therefore at less expense.
The railroads combine so as to save the employment of officers and clerks at a number of places of management.
So the argument goes all the way through. And the trades unions aim to secure for themselves the positions that are thus being minimized, and which they are constantly helping to minimize.
The harvest will be an increasing mass of unemployed men and women who have been so educated to occupy dependent positions that they are unfitted for any other means of livelihood.
The true interest of the masses of laboring men lies in an increase rather than a decrease of employing establishments. But the capitalists and the unions are laboring for their decrease. When the line is fairly drawn between capital and labor, in the current contest, the unions can not be unqualifiedly reckoned on the side of labor.
Question Corner
By Editor
1453.—Passover and Pentecost.
You will please answer the following questions on these texts of Scripture: Ex. 12:6, 18; Lev. 23:5; Deut. 16:4, 9. (1) On what day of the month did they eat the Passover? (2) Did the count of the fifty days begin from the first Sabbath after they began the harvest, or did it begin from the 15th day of the month, as some count? J. S. M.
The paschal lamb was killed between the evenings in the very closing hours of the 14th day of Nisan, the first moon, or month. The lamb was to be eaten in the following night. Ex. 12:8-10. That day, beginning with that night to its close the next evening, was the 15th day of Nisan, or the first day of unleavened bread, the feast of which continued seven days, or to the 21st of Nisan inclusive. The fifteenth day was a yearly sabbath day.
2. On the morrow after this yearly sabbath day, the 16th day of the moon, or month, Nisan, the wave sheaf was to be offered, called the day of the first fruits. Lev. 23:11, 15; Num. 28:26. From that day the fifty days of Pentecost were to be counted. Seven sabbaths, or “seven weeks, called here sabbaths, were to be complete” (Clarke), and on the morrow after the seventh complete sabbath, or week, occurred the Pentecost.
It would be evident to all that the 14th day of Nisan, regulated by the new moon would fall on different days of the week, as also would Pentecost. It will also be seen that between the killing of the paschal lamb between the evenings of the 14th of Nisan and the offering of the first fruits on the 16th there were only parts of two days, the 14th and 16th, and the whole of one, the fifteenth. So also our Lord was crucified on the sixth day of the week, and rose on the first day.
On the question whether the “Sabbath” of Lev. 23:11 refers to the weekly Sabbath, Smith’s Bible Dictionary has this note:—
It has been generally held that the “sabbath” here signifies the first day of holy convocation of the Passover, the 15th of Nisan, mentioned Lev. 23:7 (compare 24, 32, 39). Some have made the “Sabbath here signify the seventh day of the week, or the Sabbath of creation, as the Jewish writers have called it; and thus the day of Pentecost would always fall on the first day of the week. But Bahr proves from Joshua 5:11 and Lev. 23:14 that the omar was offered on the 16th of Nisan.
THE PRESIDENT ON THE LABOR PROBLEM.
By Editor
THAT the President of the United States sees the danger in the conditions now existing in the industrial world, is shown by the trend of his speech delivered at Syracuse, N. Y., on September 7, on the occasion of the opening of the State fair. It was Labor Day, "organized labor" was present in thousands, and union after union passed the reviewing stand in the great parade. The President took this occasion to lay primarily before the union element of the country and secondarily before the general public his position regarding the present antagonistic attitudes of labor and capital, and to denounce the mob spirit which has been so prevalent on the part of striking workmen. We make the following extracts from his speech on that occasion:—
There is no worse enemy of the wage-worker than the man who condones mob violence in any shape or who preaches class hatred; and surely the slightest acquaintance with our industrial history should teach even the most short-sighted that the times of most suffering for our people as a whole, the times when business is stagnant, and capital suffers from shrinkage and gets no return from its investments, are exactly the times of hardship, and want and grim disaster among the poor. If all the existing instrumentalities of wealth could be abolished, the first and severest suffering would come among those of us who are least well off at present. The wage-worker is well off only when the rest of the country is well off; and he can best contribute to this general well-being by showing sanity and a firm purpose to do justice to others.
In his turn, the capitalist, who is really a conservative, the man who has forethought as well as patriotism, should heartily welcome every effort—legislative or otherwise—which has for its object, to secure fair dealing by capital, corporate or individual, toward the public and toward the employee.
We must act upon the motto of all for each and each for all. There must be ever present in our minds the fundamental truth that in a republic such as ours the only safety is to stand neither for nor against any man because he is rich or because he is poor, because he is engaged in one occupation or another, because he works with his brains or because he works with his hands. We must treat each man on his worth and merits as a man. We must see that each is given a square deal, because he is entitled to no more and should receive no less. Finally, we must keep ever in mind that a republic such as ours can exist only in virtue of the orderly liberty which comes through the equal domination of the law over all men alike, and through its administration in such resolute and fearless fashion as shall teach all that no man is above it and no man below it.
We can keep our Government on a sane and healthy basis, we can make and keep our social system what it should be, only on condition of judging each man, not as a member of a class, but on his worth as a man. It is an infamous thing in our American life, and fundamentally treacherous to our institutions, to apply to any man any test save that of his personal worth, or to draw between two sets of men any distinction save the distinction of conduct, the distinction that marks off those who do well and wisely from those who do ill and foolishly. There are good citizens and bad citizens in every class, as in every locality, and the attitude of decent people toward great public and social questions should be determined, not by the accidental questions of employment or locality, but by those deep-set principles which represent the innermost souls of men.
The failure in public and in private life thus to treat each man on his own merits, the recognition of this Government as being either for the poor as such or for the rich as such, would prove fatal to our Republic, as such failure and such recognition have always proved fatal in the past to other republics. A healthy republican government must rest upon individuals, not upon classes or sections. As soon as it becomes government by a class or by a section it departs from the old American ideal.
In the history of mankind many republics have risen, have flourished for a less or greater time, and then have fallen because their citizens lost the power of governing themselves and thereby of governing their state; and in no way has this loss of power been so often and so clearly shown as in the tendency to turn the Government into a government primarily for the benefit of one class instead of a government for the benefit of the people as a whole.
Lessons of Other Lands.
Again and again in the republics of ancient Greece, in those of medieval Italy and medieval Flanders, this tendency was shown, and wherever the tendency became a habit it invariably and inevitably proved fatal to the State. In the final result it mattered not one whit whether the movement was in favor of one class or of another. The outcome was equally fatal, whether the country fell into the hands of a wealthy oligarchy, which exploited the poor, or whether it fell under the domination of a turbulent mob which plundered the rich. In both cases there resulted violent alternations between tyranny and disorder, and a final complete loss of liberty to all citizens—destruction in the end overtaking the class which had for the moment been victorious as well as that which had momentarily been defeated. The death-knell of the Republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others.
Liberty only Under Law.
Ours is a government of liberty, by, through, and under the law. Lawlessness and connivance at law-breaking—whether the law-breaking take the form of a crime of greed and cunning or of a crime of violence—are destructive not only of order, but of the true liberties which can only come through order. If alive to their true interests, rich and poor alike will set their faces like flint against the spirit which seeks personal advantage by overriding the laws, without regard to whether this spirit shows itself in the form of bodily violence by one set of men or in the form of vulpine cunning by another set of men.
Let the watchwords of all our people be the old familiar watchwords of honesty, decency, fair dealing and common sense. The qualities denoted by these words are essential to all of us, as we deal with the complex industrial problems of to-day, the problems affecting, not merely the accumulation but even more, the wise distribution of wealth. We ask no man's permission when we require him to obey the law; neither the permission of the poor man nor yet of the rich man. Least of all can the man of great wealth afford to break the law, even for his own financial advantage; for the law is his prop and support, and it is both foolish and profoundly unpatriotic for him to fail in giving hearty support to those who show that there is in very fact one law, and one law only, alike for the rich and the poor, for the great and the small.
Men sincerely interested in the due protection of property, and men sincerely interested in seeing that the just rights of labor are guaranteed, should alike remember not only that in the long run neither the capitalist nor the wage-worker can be helped in healthy fashion save by helping the other; but also that to require either side to obey the law, and do its full duty toward the community is emphatically to that side's real interest.
The President spoke to a purpose. Recognizing in the situation the dangerous menace to the rights of the people, he laid down the fundamental principles of justice; which, if heeded, would dissolve many of the difficulties and perplexities and dangers that now exist. The recent utterances of some of the labor agitators give little hope that organized labor will act in harmony with these principles.
CAPITALIST DESTRUCTION OF HUMANITY.
FROM an article in the Labor Leader, by Jane Adams, we take the following extracts:—
Each age has, of course, its own temptations, and, above all, its own peculiar industrial temptations. When we ask why it is that child labor has been given to us to discuss and to rectify, rather than to the people who lived before us, we need only remember that for the first time in industrial history the labor of the little child has, in many industries, become as valuable as that of a man or woman. The old-fashioned weaver was obliged to possess skill and enough strength to pull his beam back and forth. With the invention of machinery the need of skill has been eliminated from many processes, and, with the application of steam and electricity, strength has also been largely eliminated, so that a little child may mend the thread in a textile mill almost as well and, in some respects, better than a strong and clumsy adult. This is true of many other industries, until it has come about that we are tempted as never before to use the labor of little children, and that the temptation to exploit premature labor is peculiar to this industrial epoch.
. . . I have taken a Chicago street-car on a winter's night in December at 10 o'clock when dozens of little girls who have worked in the department stores all day are also boarding the cars. I know, as many others do, that these children will not get into their beds much before midnight, and that they will have to be up again early in the morning to go to their daily work.
. . . A potent cause of disease is due to the breaking down of the organs which were subjected to abnormal uses before they were ready to bear it. I recall a tailor for whom the residents of Hull House tried to get medical assistance. He died at the age of thirty-three, and his death certificate bore the record of "premature senility," due to the fact that he had run a sewing machine since he was six years old. It is no figment of the imagination to say that the human system breaks down when it is put to monotonous work before it is ready to stand up to that work, and that general debility, and many diseases, may be traced to premature labor. No horse-trainer would permit his colts to be so broken down. . . .
When children are thus broken down it means that we do not stand up to the obligations which belong to our own time, but insist upon using up the energy which belongs to the future.
MORAL FREEDOM.
By Editor
(Editorial, the "Independent," July 9, 1903.)
We ought to have in America the broadest moral freedom. Our traditions and our institutions are favorable. The colonists who laid the foundations for the republic were men who sought both religious and political liberty, and were not afraid to fight for the one or the other. The men of the Revolution and of the Constitutional Convention broke down the obstacles which centuries of class privilege had built in the way of men who would rise from humble station to position and success. The men of the Civil War destroyed the legal basis of slavery. We have become a powerful as well as an independent people, and, as a politically democratic people, it is for ourselves to say what restrictions upon individual conduct we will impose and what we will no longer tolerate. We can be, in every meaning of the word, as free as we wish to be.
Yet, are we free? The question is not idle. Every now and again it is asked with serious intent, and almost any thoughtful man must hesitate before he answers. Many circumstances have conspired to raise this question anew in recent months. . . . The developments in commerce and industry have not been cheering to those who regard individual liberty as not only a sacred right, but also an indispensable utility. And what can we say of that wholesale denial of political freedom guaranteed by the Constitution which we are now permitting throughout the southern half of our national domain?
These glaring failures to maintain the freedom which we profess to believe in are not, however, the ones to which most serious attention should be given. They are results of less obvious but far more dangerous tyrannies. Liberty in the large sense is never lost by a people until a subtler kind of freedom has disappeared. Freedom of speech, freedom within the sphere of private conduct, freedom of social intercourse,—these are the mental and moral foundations of economic and political liberty. When a people which has boasted of its liberties begins to realize that the right to work, the right to trade, and the right to vote may all be denied with impunity throughout the length and breadth of its territory, the time has come to inquire whether freedom of that more personal and subtle sort, which is the very atmosphere of personal independence, any longer exists.
Have We Freedom of Speech.
Have we, let us ask, any real freedom of speech in America? This startling question is asked by President Benjamin Ide Wheeler, in an "Atlantic Monthly" article on "A National Type of Culture." The answer which he gives is one to provoke a serious mood. The law permits freedom almost to the extent of license; but the thousands of organizations, which have sprung up to foster "causes" innumerable, have created a law outside the law, which is becoming more tyrannical than courts or Legislatures would in these days dare to be. What trade unionist dares to speak his mind about the preposterous iniquities sometimes associated with sympathetic strikes? What politician dares to say what he thinks of the machine and the boss? What teacher in the public school dares to express his opinion of the text-books in history that are forced upon him by patriotic organizations, or the text-books in physiology that are forced upon him by "temperance inebriates"? . . .
The truth, we fear, is that there has grown up in America a moral tyranny of the multitude over the individual, which is manifesting itself in many dangerous ways. The mob spirit, culminating in a lynching, is only the extreme manifestation10of mass tyranny. The mischief begins whenever an individual, whosoever he is, hesitates to express his independent judgment on any question of thought, morals, or policy, if it happens to differ from the "views" of his neighbors, or hesitates to live his own life in his own way for no better reason than that people will think him radical or queer.
Moral freedom, the spring and fountainhead of institutional liberty, has its source in moral courage; and moral courage exists only when men dare in good conscience to question the moral judgments, as well as the business or political judgments, of the majority. This is a fundamental ethical truth which "good" communities are ever in danger of forgetting. It is never in the interest of evil, but always in the interest of a "cause," that men surrender moral freedom. Men lynch to protect life and property. They hold their peace when iniquities are proposed in business or in politics, lest an industry or a party be imperiled. . . . The pity of it is that, in thus becoming insincere in a good cause, men become first cowards and then slaves, and so unable ever to strike a true and free man's blow for liberty.
ATTACKING THE PRESIDENT.
By Editor
(Editorial from San Francisco "Call," Sept. 22, 1903.)
It is evident that the American Federation of Labor is giving impulse to a campaign which is operated on several converging lines. Members of the federation in Porto Rico are spreading sedition among the very ignorant members of the labor unions in that island, and have gone so far as to denounce the flag of the United States as the emblem of rascality, and to threaten the life of Governor Hunt. On the mainland the movement is more cautious, tho in the same direction.
Here the laws of the unions and the laws of the land conflict in respect to membership in the National Guard. Federal and State laws recognize the militia organized in the National Guard as the defensive arm of the government and the training-school of the military rank and file. In times of civil disorder, when the peace officers and the courts are confronted by a physical force obstructive of their functions, the militia is the sole resource of the State for protection against that actual anarchy which exists when the civil courts can no longer enforce the law. The next resort is to Federal authority enforced by the regular army of the United States. The unions in the American Federation strike at the nearest support of law and order by striking at the militia. During the past few months National Guardsmen, and some of them officers, have been compelled by their unions to resign. They have given their reason that, if they remain in the guard, they will be expelled from the union, and then, if they attempt to work, they will be killed. It will be seen at once that this is the use of duress of the most serious kind in order to break down the first defense of the law. It is in effect threatening with assassination every man who holds the law of his country to be higher than the laws of his labor union. The extravagant assumptions with which the country has been made familiar, and at which good citizens have laughed as mere vaporizing of ignorant enthusiasts, have borne fruit. When Mr. Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, declared here, in the presence, and the approving presence, too, of the mayor of this city and the governor of this State, that his organization had "sovereign rights," law-abiding citizens believed that he was using terms in ignorance of their meaning, since here only the State has sovereignty and sovereign rights. But Mr. Gompers was not using a term in ignorance of its significance. He knew and meant exactly what he said, that his organization had taken, in the allegiance of its members, the place of the State, and they knew no other sovereignty than that represented by him. Again at New Orleans, Mr. Gompers gave evidence of his sense of the importance of his position and authority when he said, with his sovereign character in mind, "Our most dangerous competitor is the Federal Government." He undoubtedly meant that his federation of labor unions was strong enough in its sovereignty to subvert a single State, or to overcome, one by one, a group of States, inasmuch as one State can not go to the aid of another, except as it operates through Federal energy. But after that he would find the Federal Government, with the regular army, making a stand for public sovereignty, as against the claims of voluntary organizations bound by secret oaths.
It must be admitted that Mr. Gompers has inspired his confederated unions with the courage of his convictions. They are now fearlessly attacking the laws of the United States and threatening the President for enforcing them. So far, every considerable conventicle of labor unions held during the summer has declared for the sovereign right of the unions to dictate the terms of employment in the government printing office, book bindery, and bureau of engraving and printing. The terms they dictate violate the laws of the land, and as those laws conform to the Constitution, the unions are striking at the fundamental law. President Roosevelt, as his oath and duty require, has upheld and enforced the law, and for this they threaten him with vengeance. Having shown their power to disorganize the National Guard, and to leave a single State powerless to enforce the law, they now aim their vengeance at the President himself. There is no use denying the fact that this contest puts our institutions to a new test and subjects them to a new strain, in some of its aspects more serious than secession itself. The talk of the last few years, supposed to be wild and empty, has been accepted as the teaching of a principle, and has impressed the vast numbers of alien immigrants who have recruited the ranks of union labor, to the exclusion of Americans, and now the conflict rages around the Federal Government, and the President is threatened because he represents the sovereignty of the United States and the supremacy of the law.
The issue is serious; it is revolutionary; it is subversive of all law. It is to be carried, secretly or openly, into the next Presidential campaign, and may easily cause all other issues to be forgotten. If the people of this country tolerate another sovereignty than that of the State, then anarchy is here.
