THE TRUSTS WILL INEVITABLY COMPEL THE LABOR UNIONS TO BECOME POLITICAL UNIONS.

TRUSTS WILL MAKE IT CLEAR TO UNIONS THAT THEIR ONLY HOPE IS IN POLITICAL ACTION WHICH SHALL GIVE THEM THE POWER TO CONTROL LEGISLATION.

When individual firms are competing the injustice of one firm may be punished and controlled by a strike.

THE TRUST WILL RENDER THE STRIKE LAUGHABLE AND USELESS.

Suppose all the shops or manufactories of a certain kind to be under the control of one trust. What good will a strike do? The concern in which the strike occurs will simply stop work. Its business will go to other concerns in the trust; the firm in which the strike occurs will calmly draw its share of the trust profits and laugh at the strikers. The latter will lose their wages and time--no one else will lose anything.

What does one paper mill care for a strike if all the other mills in the Paper Trust are running, and making the money which it nominally loses? ----

Perhaps the workingmen think they can stop ALL the manufactures of a certain kind. In the first place they probably cannot--with trusts that reach across 3,000 miles of country.

And if they could, what about the TRUST OF TRUSTS?

If the trusts are not already formed into a formal union for mutual support they soon will be. And the union of trusts already exists so far as practical sympathy goes.

Havemeyer will gladly spend millions of trust money--not his own--to help Morgan in a coal-trust fight.

Rockefeller will spare a few hundred thousand if necessary to buy a small State Legislature and prevent pa.s.sage of laws threatening a weak little trust now and dangerous to him in the long run.

Jealousy, mistrust, and the lack of really competent leaders may delay political union among workmen for a time.

But the political union must come. Bigger work must be done by American workmen than chattering about little local wage regulations or quarreling about hours or overtime.

The question at issue is:

SHALL ORGANIZED CAPITAL CONTROL THE PEOPLE, OR SHALL THE PEOPLE CONTROL ORGANIZED CAPITAL AND LIMIT ITS POWER?

The workingmen are the people. They are the interested parties, and they have got to vote together pretty soon or fight together a little later.

THE TRUSTS ARE NATIONAL SCHOOL TEACHERS

Look at the coal strike, the opinions that it calls forth, and notice how respectability dances and hops from one foot to the other when the RESPECTABLE shoe pinches and the RESPECTABLE toe suffers.

A little while ago the man who spoke against trusts and general monopolies of public necessities was called demagogue, socialist, anarchist, inciter of the ma.s.ses against the cla.s.ses, and so on.

But along comes the Beef Trust and begins to punish even the respectable "upper" cla.s.ses. Double prices for food mean a serious difference even in a very respectable income.

Then you have the respectabilities also suddenly developing signs of demagogism, socialism and anarchy.

They want the tariff taken off of foodstuffs. They want the managers of the Food Trust put in jail.

The Beef Trust teaches the nation one interesting lesson--namely, that by excessive extortion the trusts will lose soon their respectable friends and unite all of the people against them.

The Beef Trust also teaches that the language called socialistic and anarchistic, when confined to working people, becomes profound political economy when uttered by some respectability with a pinched toe. ----

The Coal Trust is a later and even more radical national teacher.

The respectable individual who a short time ago could see no difference between advocating Government ownership of national resources and communism or thievery has seen a wonderful light while gazing on his coal fire at Twelve Dollars a ton.

Judges on the bench, eminently respectable newspapers--by which we mean those newspapers representing the interests of men who think with their pockets--are expressing the most radical out-and-out socialistic ideas.

One of the mildest suggestions made by these respectabilities is that the Government should seize the coal mines and work them for the benefit of the people, setting aside the preposterous claims of the Coal Trust.

Papers like the Springfield Republican, the Philadelphia Ledger and other solemn organs of antiquity are advocating, without knowing it, ideas which mean inevitably universal government ownership of monopolies.

The Coal Trust as a public educator is an undoubted success, more of a success than it would like to be if it could understand the nature of its teachings.

If the Government has a right to seize coal mines and work them for the people, as respectability now declares, why has it not a right to seize railroads, telegraphs and all the other great industries whose value depends entirely upon the national population? ----

Many men in this world hated their teachers while they were being whipped in the old- fashioned way, but look back with grat.i.tude later on to those same teachers and those same whippings.

Our national teachers, the trusts, are severe teachers. Their lessons are hard lessons, and they believe in very unpleasant forms of corporal punishment--inflicting hunger and cold upon their pupils.

This nation in time will look back with grat.i.tude to the lessons and to the whippings of the trusts.

The trusts are teaching us inevitably that compet.i.tion is antiquated; that organization is the real basis of industry.

They are teaching us that it is feasible and necessary for the nation eventually to take possession of and manage its own properties, industrial as well as others.

A WOMAN TO BE PITIED

Why is it that comparatively few women find intense enjoyment in life after middle age?

Why is it that you cannot duplicate among women such careers in old age as the careers of Spencer, Gladstone, Huxley, or any of the great men whose interest lies in mental activity and mental achievement?

One reason is this: A great majority of women are inclined to accept and adopt without question the ideas formed for them.

THEY GIVE UP THINKING EARLY IN LIFE.

When a human being stops thinking, that human being's life practically ends.

All over the country you may see thousands and hundreds of thousands of calm, settled, placid-faced, middle-aged women.

They admire themselves and they are admired generally. They ought to be pitied.

They think now on all subjects just as they thought ten or twenty or thirty years ago.

They view with horror things which they know nothing about. They reject opinions which they don't understand; they have unlimited faith in matters of which they know absolutely nothing. ----

Every one pities a man whose existence and enjoyments are limited to the physical, sentimental side of life.

We all feel that a man of fifty, unless hard conditions and want have ground interest and vitality out of him, ought to be at his best. He ought to be active, alert, OPEN TO NEW IDEAS.