iculties._" (Italics mine.)

In the agitation that was made in behalf of a similar law in
Massachusetts, just exactly what is meant by the word "public" began to
appear. It refers not only to the consumers of the article produced by
the industry in which the strike occurs, but also to other dependent
industries, to the merchants of the locality where the workmen live, and
to the real estate interests. Here, then, are definite economic
interests which are concerned primarily in the prevention of strikes and
in the uninterrupted operation of the industry, and only in a secondary
way in rates of wages. _It is not a disinterested and non-partisan
public; it is not on the side of the employers nor on the side of the
employees, but it is opposed to the most effective weapons the working
people have yet found to advance their interests, namely, the strike and
the boycott._

It is said that if the workers lose the right to strike, the employers
lose the right to lockout. It has been customary to set the lockout over
against the strike as being of equal importance, but this is not the
truth. Employers can discharge their workingmen one at a time when they
are dissatisfied with a limited number; and they can often find a
business protest for temporarily shutting down or restricting their
output. To abolish strikes, then, is to take away the employees' chief
means of offense or defense; while to pretend to abolish strikes _and
lockouts_ is to leave in the hands of the employers the ability to
discharge or punish in other ways the men with whom they are
dissatisfied.

When it was proposed to introduce the Canadian law in Massachusetts, no
unionists of prominence indorsed it, but it was favored by a very large
number of employers, while those employers who objected did so for
widely scattered reasons. Mr. Clark is probably right in suggesting
that, while such a law will not be enacted in the United States as
things are now, it is very probable that it can be secured after some
industrial crisis--and there is little doubt that President Eliot and
perhaps also Mr. Roosevelt, for whom Mr. Clark was investigating, and
many other influential public men, are expecting this time to arrive
soon.

The attitude of a large minority of British unions and of a considerable
part of the British Socialists is similar to that of the Canadian and
Australian majority. When in 1907 the railway employees of Great Britain
were for the first time suf