ity to pay debts ceases and capital
owners suffer. Third, insurance companies have their risks increased and
all insurers suffer. Fourth, the market for the products is demoralized
and all consumers suffer. Fifth, almost always social disorder results,
police expenses are greatly increased, and all taxpayers suffer. Sixth, in
the end the relation between employers and employed is more strained and
less free than before, so that all humanity suffers.

The chances of success, as indicated by the record of many years, are
small, and apparent successes are often temporary. And yet the world
recognizes the right of a body of laborers to strike, just as it
recognizes the right of revolution to secure the general welfare. Formerly
a combination of workmen in a strike was treated as a conspiracy and
punished as such. Now the general rule is absolute freedom of combination
with rigorous repression of fraud and violence. This enables any body of
men to make a serious test of the conditions of a labor market, at the
risk, primarily, of their own welfare, but with serious strain upon the
general good. It leaves room for the possible breaking down of old
customs, which are stronger than law, and it sometimes proves, like a war
for liberty, a means of great enlightenment to those who take part in it.
It is properly held as the last resort in the struggle for fair
recognition of the rights and necessities of wage-earners.

It is noticeable that the tendency to strikes among the more skilled
workmen is diminishing, and that the mass of communities are weighing
their own interests more carefully as they see the general destructiveness
of the method. At present strikes are expected among laborers of least
skill, where they are, from usual conditions, least effective. Strikes are
frequent among coal miners, where wages are liable to reach the lowest
possible mark because of the ease of competition from all parts of the
world, though the effect of such strikes in bettering the condition of
miners has scarcely been felt. The fact that destruction of property and
the natural waste from strikes is so widely distributed among workmen and
consumers retards popular sympathy, and the fact that strikes increase the
risk of capital employed, and actually reduce the amount of capital in
use, diminishes the chance of increasing wages or comfort in those
employments where they are likely to occur. It seems evident that some
better remedy for oppressiv