se nineteen languages and
dialects. The employees of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company belong to
thirty-two nationalities and speak twenty-seven languages. Such a medley
of races offers indeed a disheartening prospect to the union organizer.
And therefore when these races finally organize, the change in their
moral character must be looked upon as the most significant of the
social and industrial revolutions of our time. The United Mine Workers
of America, with 300,000 members, is very largely composed of recent
immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. So with the Longshoremen,
the United Garment Workers, and the Butcher Workmen. These are or have
been among the strongest and best disciplined of American labor-unions.
The newest races of the past twenty years have been coming long enough
to have members who speak the English language and act as interpreters
and leaders, and this is essential where the speeches at a union meeting
must be translated often into four or five languages before the subject
can be voted upon. Furthermore, the recruiting area for new races has
been nearly exhausted, and the races now coming find their
fellow-countrymen already in the unions. In the anthracite coal field I
saw a dozen Slovaks just arrived from Hungary, but persuaded by their
unionized precursors not to take the places of strikers. In New York a
shipload of Italians in time of strike has been taken directly into the
union. Such a sight would have been unlikely a dozen years ago.

The competition of races is the competition of standards of living. The
reason the Chinaman or the Italian can save three days' wages is because
wages have been previously fixed by the greater necessities of more
advanced races. But competition has no respect for superior races. The
race with lowest necessities displaces others. The cotton textile
industry of New England was originally operated by the educated sons and
daughters of American stock. The Irish displaced many of them, then the
French Canadians completed the displacement; then, when the children of
the French had begun to acquire a higher standard, contingents of
Portuguese, Greeks, Syrians, Poles, and Italians entered to prevent a
rise, and latterly the Scotch-Irish from the Appalachian Mountains came
down to the valleys of the South, and with their low wages, long hours,
and child labor, set another brake on the standard of living. Lastly,
Italians are beginning to be imported to supplem