at work. He finds
also that the law forbids his children to work, and compels him to send
them to school to maintain a higher standard and to support his children
he must earn more wages. This he can do in no other way than by
organizing a union. The movement is of course aided by English-speaking
outsiders or "agitators," especially by the Irish, but it finds a prompt
response in the necessities of the recruits. Labor organization is
essentially the outcome of American freedom, both as a corrective to the
evils of free competition and as an exercise of the privilege of free
association.

When once moved by the spirit of unionism, the immigrants from
low-standard countries are the most dangerous and determined of
unionists. They have no obligations, little property, and but meagre
necessities that compel them to yield. The bituminous coal miners were
on strike four months in 1897 and the anthracite mine workers five
months in 1902. Unionism comes to them as a discovery and a revelation.
Suddenly to find that men of other races whom they have hated are really
brothers, and that their enmity has been encouraged for the profit of a
common oppressor, is the most profound awakening of which they are
capable. Their resentment toward employers who have kept them apart,
their devotion to their new-found brothers, are terrible and pathetic.
With their emotional temperament, unionism becomes not merely a fight
for wages but a religious crusade. It is in the nature of retribution
that, after bringing to this country all the industrial races of Europe
and Asia in the effort to break down labor organizations, these races
should so soon have wiped out race antagonism and, joining together in
the most powerful of labor-unions, have wrenched from their employers
the greatest advances in wages.

There is but one thing that stands in the way of complete unionization
in many of the industries; namely, a flood of immigration too great
for assimilation. With nearly a million immigrants a year the pressure
upon unions seems almost resistless. A few of the unions which control
the trade, like the mine workers and longshoremen, with high initiation
fees and severe terms of admission, are able to protect themselves by
virtue of strength already gained. But in the coast states and on
miscellaneous labor this strategic advantage does not exist, and the
standards are set by the newest immigrants.

[Illustration: GOVERNOR JOHNSON OF MINNESOTA.