If there were no wrongs to right, if selfishness did not exist, if there were a real belief in the brotherhood of man, and life were in accordance with that belief, such organizations might not be necessary, or if they existed have other aims; but until all men have an equal chance for self-development, and a chance for something more than a mere existence, labor unions or something to take their place must exist.
And so we stand to-day with labor unions and the labor problem, so called, with us. The laboring class is discontented. Men claim as rights what their fathers would have been glad to get as favors. There are violence and bad blood and waste, and so there have been from the beginning. But there have been also injustice and oppression and greed from the beginning. While we may condemn strongly much of the violence and wrongdoing of labor organizations, we can find many extenuating circumstances. The same spirit of independence, the same desire for equal justice which animated the old guilds of England, and which have made the Englishman and those who have sprung from him the freest as well as most law-abiding people on the earth, are found within the organizations of labor. We in this country hardly can find only danger in the spirit which impels the workingman to resist every encroachment upon his rights, to strive for that better future to which he believes he is entitled. There were many things done in the youth of our history which in our manhood we regret, and I hardly think, as a nation, our own robe is so unspotted that we must draw it round us lest it be soiled by the violence of a perhaps uneducated and inadvisable but still earnest effort after higher and better conditions of life. Let us read and ponder over our histories anew, and with humble hearts try to find a better way both for the laborer and ourselves.
I have said that it was through his organization that the laborer has made the industrial and social advance he certainly has made in the last century. The trades unions, like the guilds before them, had to struggle for a legal existence, and their early days were full of violence. Dr. Brentano, in his work on Trades Unions, says: "They have fought contests quite as fierce as those of the old craftsmen against the patricians, if not fiercer. The history of their sufferings since the end of the eighteenth century, and of the privations endured for their independence, is a real record of heroism." May not we hope with him that now they may cease using the arms of violence which belong to former times and use the legal means which belong to our days?