The Outlook said last week, the conditions of war which exist in Colorado to-day in the conflict between labor and capital, if spread throughout every State in the Union, would make this country not only intolerable but unsafe to live in. There may be set down in considering this subject three generic positions which are assumed towards tradesunions:

First, that the trades-union is an unmixed blessing to the human race. This is the position of the enthusiastic workingman or sympathizer with the laboring classes, who thinks he sees in the tradesunion the only means of saving the people of the United States from the despotic control of what he calls the plutocracy.

Second, that the trades-union is an unmixed evil and menace. This is the position of the employer or propertyholder who honestly feels that tradesunions, if carried to their ultimate and logical goal, mean anarchy and the destruction of all private property and private rights.

Third, that the principle of tradesunionism is a sound one in economics and a useful one in civilization; that its evils and dangers are those springing from mismanagement and the control of misguided or dangerous officials; that society cannot destroy the unions; that they have come to stay in our industrial system, and that the power of society and the State must be directed, not to uprooting the union, but to weeding out the errors and blemishes which have sprung up within the union itself. The last is the position of The Outlook.

Mr. William English Walling contributes to the May number of "The World's Work" a paper entitled "Can Labor Unions be Destroyed?" The text of his paper is the following statement made by a business man of prominence and influence in Chicago: "Some day the unions and the business community will have to fight it out to see who owns Chicago." Mr. Walling, in a compact form, gives the very interesting history of the genesis and rapid growth in this country of the associations of employers which have been organized and are now being federated to "fight" the

labor unions. These associations bear such names as The Manufacturers' Association, The Anti-Boycott Association, The Citizens' Industrial Association of America, The National Founders' and Metal Trades' Association, The National Stove Founders' Association, and numerous other similar bodies. Some of these associations have offices and bureaus in widely separated cities throughout the country. As a result of his study of this concerted effort on the part of employers who organize themselves into effective opposition against the labor unions, Mr. Walling draws the conclu....... sion that "a year or two will show whether employers can conquer the unions alone, or whether to achieve that end they must seek the assistance of the Government and the great middle class." Mr. Walling has given, it seems to us, a fair although brief presentation of the case of those who hold the view that labor unions are an unmixed evil and

menace.

In the May number of "McClure's Magazine" Mr. Ray Stannard Baker presents a stirring and dramatic account of the labor war in Colorado. The reader of that article gets a vivid impression of the attitude of the extreme and uncompromising unionist. Such a unionist honestly and passionately believes that the "capitalistic and employing class," to use his own phraseology, is, by nature, instinct, breeding, and education, despotic and selfish; that vested rights are really vested wrongs; and that the accumulations in this country of private property are due to an industrial system which is in effect legalized robbery. A workingman holding these views logically believes that the union is an unmixed blessing, and that, when necessary, he must be loyal to it at the cost of wages, of his home, and of the suffering of his wife and children. He feels toward his union as the Northern soldiers of '61 felt toward theirs. No danger of material suffering or of physical wounds is too great to deter him from ranging himself with his fellows on the fighting line. Such a tradesunionist does not find any extravagance or false sentiment in the words which Mr. Baker quotes from a speech made

It is both a relief and an encouragement to turn from these two equally extreme and, we think, equally false views of our industrial system to a sane, intelligent, and broad-minded speech which was made on trades-unions to workingmen by a prominent and influential representative of capital, at Hartford, Connecticut, last week. The speaker was Mr. Charles S. Mellen, President of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad. His audience was the West Side Workingmen's Club of Hartford. We have not recently seen a better statement from an active man of affairs of what The Outlook believes to be the right attitude of both workingmen and employers towards the trades-union. Mr. Mellen began his business career forty years ago as a wage-worker on a New England railroad. "I am," he said, "naturally more or less of a workingman myself. of parents who had to work for a living, I have personal knowledge of the trials and privations of living on a small income, and from childhood have remembrances of the denials and economies necessary in a New England family to preserve existence and to give one's children that opportunity in life always desired but often denied to one's self. The hope and future of this country lie in the common people, in the working

men.

Born

This is the age of the workingman. Let him, with moderation, with conservatism, show his ability to assume responsibilities, and there is no bound set to his attainments." Mr. Mellen frankly asserts that unions have accomplished much good, but they are, nevertheless, not an unmixed blessing to the laboring man. They tend to the "discouragement of individual effort and reduce men to a part of a machine." But Mr. Mellen believes that the union has come to stay. The serious defect

thinks, in its solidarity, but in its intolerance. The bitter attitude of the union man towards the non-union man is a revival of the spirit that "prevailed ages ago in religion and in race prejudice. The cry of the union or the hospital’ has its counterpart in that of the older one of the Church or the stake.' It is through the elimination of the feeling that physical force is necessary to the accomplishment of results that real progress is made. . . . My advice to you who have families, who have a stake in the world, is to join your unions and make yourselves felt in them. Be always a force for conservatism. It seems to me as much in your interest to do this as that you shall attend the caucus and nominate good men for office and vote for them at the polls. Your apathy is the opportunity of the demagogue, the anarchist, the floater, who has nothing to lose."

This seems to The Outlook to be sound advice. The principle of unionism is a universal and permanent one. The Chamber of Commerce is a tradesunion of merchants; the Bar Association, of lawyers; the County Medical Society, of doctors; the Joint Traffic Association, of railway managers. No one denies that these bodies perform necessary and useful functions not only in behalf of their members, but for the benefit of the community at large. But if the Chamber of Commerce abuses and browbeats competing merchants, if the County Medical Society seeks for legislation to admit drunken and ignorant physicians to practice, if the Bar Association screens and defends swindling and pettifogging lawyers, if the Joint Traffic Association attempts to raise freight rates and passenger tariffs extravagantly, they become a menace to society.

The worst enemies of the tradesunions to-day are those passionate, illbalanced, unjust, and unscrupulous "leaders" who would make the unions not sodalities conducted for the benefit of the community as well as for the members, but despotisms which insist, like the ancient ecclesiastical hierarchies, in compelling their members and all

of this impression is evident the moment a man comes into wide relation with the world and discovers that every advance in civilization in any community means greater attention to the externalities of life, not as a matter of show, but as a matter of expression of the higher ideals and a means of guarding them. And then there is the universal haste. Haste and fine manners are incompatible. The rushing and pushing in our public conveyances would seem to the Japanese indecent. In Japan it indicates great lack of respect if one person touches another. In Japanese crowds, however excited, there is always a little space around each person. In America the man or woman in a street-car who can breathe comfortably is fortunate, and every one who uses these conveyances, in almost every city, is subjected to personal indignities which are not the less indignities because they are unintentional, or, for that matter, necessitated by conditions.

If we are to have any fine civilization in this country, good manners must be drilled into the school-children; and The Outlook proposes to the teachers of the country that they shall organize everywhere in the schools leagues for courtesy, voluntary associations of boys and girls for the purpose of advancing the standards of manners and of developing those instincts of courtesy, kindness, and helpfulness which are characteristic of the American in all parts of the country. The American ought to be the most courteous and the best-mannered person in the world, for his natural kindness, his desire to be helpful and to make himself agreeable, are recognized everywhere. He fails, whenever he does fail, not because of bad intentions, but because of lack of training or because of haste. As the use of English is supervised in every recitation in every good school, so the manners of every boy and girl ought to be supervised and corrected in every school relation.

The best way of bringing about a revival of good manners in this country would be to induce boys and girls to take the matter into their own hands by organizing societies which should have for their end keener self-respect ex

pressed in finer attitude toward one another. Every American boy ought to be taught that his function in life is to protect and bear the burdens of those who are weaker, and on all occasions to treat women as if they were specially committed to his care. The American boy responds quickly to the appeals which are made to his sense of honor and to his instinct as a man, and the stronger he is the more ready is his response. The test of the quality of a society everywhere is the respect paid to

women.

Boys ought to be taught that reverence for women which not only shows itself in their bearing, but which makes them, if necessary in later life, protectors of women against themselves. And girls ought to be taught that their influence depends entirely on the respect which they exact. The American girl in her instincts and education is probably the purest girl in the world. She does not suffer from the grosser temptations; but the freedom of manners of a great many of our communities, the absence of conventionalities, place girls in so free a relation to boys that the barriers are often broken down, and there is a familiarity which cheapens if it does not defile. No sensible American would introduce the conventionality of older countries into this country, but the reaction from these conventionalities has gone too far; it has gone so far that in many sections it has cheapened girls. Every girl should be taught to express her respect for herself by exacting a certain degree of respect from every boy of her acquaintance. That respect boys are quite willing to concede, but many of them will not do it voluntarily. Reports often appear in the newspapers of incidents which show a lack of the sense of restraint and of delicacy on the part of well-meaning boys and girls who do not know the significance of what they are doing. These incidents, which astonish and bewilder Europeans, involve nothing worse than a "free and easy" disregard of the conventions of older societies; but conventions, it must be remembered, are not arbitrary socia! requirements; they are almost always based on sound principles, and their function is to protect women, to preserve

privacy, and to put a high valuation on personality. There are social conventions which we do not want and will not adopt, but there are others which ought to be more widely observed in this country. Independence which is gained by cheapening men and women is not worth having. To defy conventions is, in many cases, not so much an assertion of individual freedom as a

gross disregard of the comfort and pleasure of others. Familiarity breeds contempt nowhere more rapidly than where it is introduced in the relations

of young men and women. College "rushes " in which girls take part are demoralizing to the last degree; the custom of allowing girls to accompany athletic teams on long journeys without proper chaperonage-journeys which often involve night travel-is pernicious and vulgarizing. These "free and easy" relations do not involve the slightest moral irregularity (there are no cleaner communities anywhere than those which exist in American schools and colleges where both sexes are taught), but they inevitably cheapen women and lower the tone of civilization. We cannot be too careful of our standards in a country in which standards are fixed, not by the practice of the few, but by the practice of the many. The schools have a great work to do in instilling respect for women and protecting and expressing that respect by insistence on courtesy and delicacy in all relations between boys and girls. If the American boy has a chance, he becomes a gentleman by instinct; the schools ought to make that chance for him.

time as pastor of the church must say and do things which contradict what have come to be profound convictions.

The questions that trouble me are such as these: Which is the largest service to the world in the long run, to stand by conviction spite of everything, or to make concessions for immediate practical gains? Did Christ ever compromise? Was he not crucified because he would not compromise? By what principle can one be guided in the everrecurring dilemma of truth on the one hand, and, on the other, practical expediency in an imperfect, slow-moving world, whose greatest need is truth?

The question which you ask is a difficult one. No general principle can be laid down which can be applied easily to all the varying circumstances under which the problem practically presents itself for decision. There are, however, a few general principles which are almost self-evident. The difficulty lies in the application of those principles to varying conditions.

(1) Generally, the aim or object to be accomplished is not a matter for compromise; the method by which it is to be accomplished is a matter for compromise. If a hundred men in a village desire to promote the life of temperance in that village, they cannot compromise. with another hundred men who wish to promote intemperance because they will make a profit out of it. Two bodies of men cannot work together for contrary ends, and no endeavor to compromise the ends to be sought is likely to be successful. But they can compromise, and should be ready to compromise, respecting the methods to be employed. If some of the hundred men are in favor of State prohibition, some in favor of local prohibition, some in favor of license, and some in favor of simple moral influ

mise

To the Editors of The Outlook:

A young man working for municipal reform condemns a prominent clergyman working towards the same end, because the latter yielded the strict letter of the principle for which they stood, in the hope, which the issue justified, of gaining a step in the direction of reformi.

Again, a young minister holds clear and deep convictions which his church does not, and probably will not, share. He must be true to truth as he sees it, and at the same

ing which of these methods shall be pursued, by allowing the majority to choose the method, or by combining in the one method in which they are all agreed-the moral suasion, for example

leaving those who desire to pursue the other methods to pursue them separately.

Simple as this proposition is, if it were generally recognized, it would put an end to a great many of the divisions which now interfere with moral reform. If, for example, the Protestant churches