unused to self-control. But it is hardly
possible that this should be a great evil. The body of workmen will,
eventually, if not now, refuse to sanction and defend their members in
any thing which their innate sense of justice must teach them is wrong.
Few workingmen will causelessly ask their brotherhood to undertake the
hardships and loss of prestige which accompany a strike. And even when
insolence is shown toward employers or overseers, they have at least
equal power to resent it, and are not, as was the laborer of a
half-century ago, forced to submit to insults with outward humility.

We have already noticed the condition of the laws in reference to the
laborer in former times: but the repeal of the laws oppressing the
workman, and making him a servant to a master instead of a workman for
an employer, has been largely due to the organized efforts of the trade
unions. To them, also, we owe the passage of many acts like those for
the guarding of machinery in factories, the restrictions upon the
employment of child labor, and the proper care for the health, comfort,
and convenience of employes in general. It cannot be said that the
labor interests have always shown great wisdom in all their advocacy of
new legislation, and too many acts, like those in reference to the
employment of convict labor, show a lamentable retrogression. On the
whole, however, there is every reason to believe that the general course
of justice has been aided by the influence of the trade
unions--something which can be said of very few special interests for
whose benefit our legislatures have enacted laws.

All the above facts we must admit in defence of the organizations which
have, to a large degree, killed competition in the labor market. But in
defence of the especial action of the labor monopolists in forcing wages
up to a point above that which competition alone would determine, there
is also much to be said. Those who are unwilling to concede that there
is any justice in the claim of the wage-workers that full justice is not
yet awarded them, are accustomed to expand on the theme of the improved
condition of the laborer over that in which he was a century ago. How
this can be taken for argument is a mystery. No one thinks of disputing
or diminifying the well-known fact that many workmen of to-day have more
comforts than the princes of the Middle Ages. The single point in
dispute is this: Of the total wealth which is being produced in th