ike or some similar provocation would be
considered inhuman, and popular sympathy would be wholly with the laborers
and consumers interested.

_General evils of such conflicts._--The incidental effects of such violent
opposition between profit-makers and wage-earners are certainly
detrimental to all interests. The great multitude of farmers throughout
the country depend for welfare upon the body of people using farm
products, and all the waste of power from enforced idleness of
wage-earners, managers and machinery is shared by farmers through
diminished power of the rest of the world as consumers. In only a few
instances have strikes affected agriculture directly, partly because the
relations of employer and employed are so largely personal; partly because
the supply of agricultural laborers for the season is usually large; but
chiefly because wage-earners upon farms in this country expect eventually
to become themselves proprietors, and so no separate organization is
probable. In some countries, however, where wage-earners in farming
communities are a class by themselves, a strike has been the only method
by which the barrier of custom and law, built up through many generations,
could be broken. The great agricultural strike in England will always be
remembered as having elevated the standard of labor and living in that
country. It is to the interest of all farmers to cultivate a better
understanding between employers and employed than can be maintained with
any general expectation of strikes, boycotts, lockouts or similar warlike
methods of settling fair wages.

_Trades' unions._--The organizations known as trades' unions, in which the
wage-earners in any particular kind of business unite for self-protection,
have had a gradually widening influence upon the relation of managers to
employes. Once they were characterized as "machinery by which 10 per cent
of the working classes combine to rob 90 per cent," because the advantage
secured usually comes out of the consumers of products. But today
reasonable doubts of the general advantage of a well-managed trades' union
have disappeared. If once they seemed a conspiracy against society in
general, they are now recognized as a part of the general progress in
mutual recognition of rights and privileges. It seems right to expect from
them still larger usefulness, with a clearer perception of their
importance. It is evident that they contribute somewhat to general
intelligence