from their wages by the employers who turn these funds into the union treasury in lump sums.

Wage scales did not come up before these meetings, for the joint interstate convention is the proper body to deal with such matters. According to their own statements, the operators met "in the interest of the joint trade agreement, not in the interest of wage reduction or any similar movement." Their publication, Fuel declares:

The system of joint trade agreements should be universally adopted, and will be universally adopted just so soon as it is managed according to the most approved business rules. But we may be sure that the system never will be a satisfactory business system until the organization on the part of the workmen and on the part of the employers is a perfect system.

They acknowledge that either side, were it to get overwhelmingly the upper hand, would follow the dictates of human nature and proceed to take more than is their due. "There is but one remedy," they say, "and we need not go far to seek it. It is to make both parties to the system of joint agreements as nearly as can be equally strong."

The State of

As the date for the as

Affairs in the sembling of the United

East. Mine Workers in convention at Shamokin approaches, interest is renewed in forecasting what the result of Mr. Mitchell's thorough organizing tour of the summer and early fall will prove to be. On December 14 there will come up for discussion the question as to what will be the demands of the union next April when the period of the award of the Anthracite Coal Commission expires. As has been widely known, Mr. Mitchell in all his speeches throughout the Pennsylvania coal fields iterated and reiterated two cardinal points; first, that the miners, all of them, should receive the eight-hour day; second, that there should be recognition of the union in collective bargaining and trade agreement.

In reply the operators have vigorously declared that they never will submit to the latter, while the former is in practical effect now in the case of a large proportion of the mine workers.

341

Speculation has been rife as to the prospects of a repetition of the strike of 1902. Mr. Mitchell, and the United Mine Workers' Journal have insisted that nothing in his speeches or in the editorials of the Journal can be construed as meaningthat they expect another strike. The Journal has declared "President Mitchell's mission to be one of peace, to bring the workers into a solid union so as to insure peace." The reports that the operators and coal railroads are laying up immense stores of coal, say the Mine Workers' officials, are circulated by stock jobbers who want to reap large profits from deals in stocks affected by a 'scare.'" These same men, says the Journal, are the ones trying to exaggerate Mr. Mitchell's statements.

To come down to the actual facts of the situation, there can be little doubt, as a man thoroughly conversant with the conditions has told us, that the United Mine Workers have suffered greatly from a dépletion in their membership. According to our informant, the organization reached so low an ebb that it was barely paying administrative expenses last summer. It was a matter of necessity, then, for Mr. Mitchell to adopt strenuous measures, and even veiled hints of a strike, to build up the union and get the men in line. "Mr. Mitchell has not the slightest intention of going into a fight," says this observer, "and does not think there is any danger of one. The crux of the whole situation, however, is whether in lashing the men into paying dues he may not get too many wild horses in his team." In other words, will some of the more radical men in the United Mine Workers, encouraged by the strong statements of President Mitchell throughout the state, be able to force the Shamokin convention to adopt more radical demands than Mr. Mitchell himself would stand for? The only answer to this will come when the convention actually meets. But it hardly seems likely that Mr. Mitchell will fail to control the situation as he has often done in the past.

There is on the other hand a very real line of cleavage in the anthracite field over this question of union recognition, collective bargains, and trade agreements. It may not come this time. But Mr.

Mitchell and all of the men well up in the United Mine Workers are known to regard the system in vogue in the western bituminous fields as the one that must eventually come in the East.

The Citizens' Industrial Association.

As if encamped in hostile array, another segment of the industrial interests met at St. Louis while the American Federation of Labor was holding the first few sessions of its Pittsburg convention. From the statements of C. W. Post, president of the Citizens' Industrial Association, the 400 delegates represented the employers of 3,000,000 men. Here are the principles adopted in resolution by this organization at St. Louis :

1. The open shop, demanding only good faith and fair dealing, discriminating against neither union nor non-union labor.

2. The freedom of the apprentice and the right of the individual to have a trade and to follow it.

3. The right of private contract, with equal obligation upon employer and employé.

4. The right to work. Limiting the hours of labor, whether of brains or of the hand, is a matter of mutual agreement, not a subject for arbtrary legislative enactment.

5. The enforcement of the law.

After calling on the federal and state authorities to curb the great trusts of capital, "which seek by monopoly and illegal arrangements and contracts to stifle competition, dominate industry and exact unfair and exorbitant prices from the public," the association declared that "certain associations of organized labor in their methods and practices and in their openly avowed objects and purposes are seeking to establish and maintain by unlawful contracts, by coercion and intimidation and by organized oppression a labor trust or monopoly of the labor market."

The following resolution was then carried:

Resolved, That this association hereby expresses its belief that such organizations of labor, as in their conduct and purposes, are manifestly labor trusts, should be investigated by the authorities, both state and national, and that so far as said organizations are found to be illegal they should be prosecuted vigorously in like manner as are trusts of capital, and without fear or discrimination.

After passing congratulatory resolutions to the "able judiciary of the country for interpretation of the law which the association believes will make for permanent good to all classes and conditions of man," the association chose to hear, not from the judges who have recently upheld the Missouri eight-hour law for miners, but from Judge Jesse Holdom, of Chicago, who recently issued the very extreme injunction against the printers, restraining them. from the use of moral suasion that might be detrimental to employers who hire nonunion men where union printers are on peaceable strike.

Judge Holdom cited statistics showing the great losses that labor has sustained in its large number of strikes during recent years, and urged that "union men respect the law and cease attempting to force their demands by violence and crippling the employers' business." He hoped that employers might "become interested in the welfare and happiness of their employés." By these means he declared industrial strife would be less frequent.

Judge Holdom put his emphasis, as he has in the past, upon mere philanthropic paternalism by employers, as a substitute for the gaining of industrial rights by the organized workers. Another speaker on the program was D. M. Parry, who discussed the Progress of the Open Shop. C. W. Post, whose antipathy to labor organizations is well known, was re-elected president, and another man devoted assiduously to "union smashing," Frederick Job, secretary of the Chicago Employers' Association, was placed upon the executive committee.

MR. HIRAM BROWN,

No. 1.

Secretary Board of State Charities,

CARITON, CARITANA.

My dear Nephew:-Your letter with the news of your appointment as secretary, came to hand last week. Glad of it, it's a good job and fits you-you can do something good for the state if you and your board will keep your heads level, dig hard for facts and not try to rush things. The usual fate of new boards of the kind has been to make so many enemies, while their friends were still uncertain about them, that they got themselves wiped out by the first incoming legislature. It's true that most of them were reorganized a year or two later, but they didn't always retrieve the lost ground. Not that you can avoid making enemies. You won't amount to much if you do. But make more friends, so as to have a credit balance on your side. The most important thing for a public man is to do right. The next and perhaps equally important is to seem to do right. You must avoid the appearance of evil. This isn't original, it's a quotation from a well-known governor of Primaposit, giving advice to a new man in a position much like yours.

Of course I shall be glad to advise you; send along your troubles and worries. I can always do as the old Scotchman, I once heard about, did for a friend. He was staggering home one muddy night from a convivial meeting, when he spied a boon companion whose jag was a size larger, sitting on the sidewalk holding on to a lamppost. After vainly trying to get him on his feet, he declared, "I canna lift ye up, but I can sit doun alongside ye." Perhaps I cannot always tell you what to do, but I can always sit in the mud alongside you and sympathize. I have had lots of troubles of my own.

Your new law is all right. I don't find the objections you see to it. It's true the board's powers are quite vague, but so they ought to be. If they were clearly defined, they would limit you, while as the law reads, the whole field of charity and correction is wide open and you can do just

as much as you have tact and sand for and as the dear public will support you in.

Your member who kicks because you have no power to do anything; that no matter how rotten you find things you have no authority to set them right, is decidedly off. Just suppose you had authority to change things? A nice load you would have on your shoulders, with a dozen state and a hundred and fifty county and municipal institutions to be responsible for. No, my dear boy, don't ask for any more power to control the public institutions of your state than this law, backed up as you will be by your best citizens and the newspapers (if you do your duty and don't talk too much) will give you.

You have a good state to work in. I know the. people of Caritana pretty well. They are as good as get made nowad friendly, honest, hospitable both to new men and new ideas, and on the average, considering their recent prosperity, reasonably humble-minded. They don't imagine, like some very good people who live nearer the sunrising do, that they know it all, that what they are now doing is the best there is. On the contrary, you will find the average, cultured Caritanian imagining that things are not being well done in his state, that other states are ahead. That was the idea that lead up to the new board and there is lots of truth in it. Now that's the best possible frame for the mind of the public to be in when it comes to reforming things.

I am amused by your governor's desire to see you rip things up. The good man feels lonesome. It was an adroit gerrymander that happened four years ago, with the result that the governor is a publican and the majority of the legislature are sinners. But they did make a bad break when they took the appointing power away from him. There's no worse way to appoint institution trustees than by a caucus of the legislative majority; it scatters responsibility until there's none left on any man. But you know the old man's rather stalwart, not to put too fine a point on it, and if he could have had his way there would have been a pretty

clean sweep. Not that a clean sweep is an unmixed evil. I suppose there really is no such a thing in the world as an evil that has not some little spice of good in it. Even cyclones that wreck cities, clear the air; and the clean sweeps of the party politicians, evil as they are, and badly as they set back many good things, do get rid of a lot of barnacles, that have clung to the ship of state long after their usefulness has ended.

But don't let the governor and your impatient member (I know the kind of man he is) drive you to the ripping-up process. You can't do any lasting good that way. Suppose you do force a few reforms on institutions? You get the letter of reform without the spirit and you know the letter killeth. In a few weeks the spasm is over, the papers quiet down, the public forget; and the same old conditions creep in again, perhaps with a new method for some things, which ill applied, may be worse than the old on

Contrast this outward with the inward method. You find things in some hospital for insane or reform school in bad shape. You talk to the man in charge. Don't tell him what you think should be done, not on your life. Tell him what some other fellow in another hospital or school in the state of Altruria or Primaposit is doing. Get him to study the thing for himself and see with a fresh eye. Without putting yourself forward, get him to see things as you do, until he really wants to make changes. something doing, boost him; praise him up to his own board and to yours, perhaps to the governor, if the old man will listen. Let the newspaper boys know that Dr. Jones or Superintendent Smith is studying the new ideas in his specialty and proposes to have his part of the charitable work of Caritana as good as the best. Then when the reform takes effect you have gained something that will stay gained. That's the method of inwardness, the true reform method.

Then when there's

Of course on this plan you miss the glory, but you must not be in a hurry for your halo. You have your choice; you can make a splurge, get into the limelight and pose as a great reformer and do nothing. Or you can work quietly and let the other

fellow pose and accomplish much-you can't do both.

But it takes tact and patience, hard work and close observation. Go slow, learn how things really are before you start in to mend them. The average reformer goes at things half ready. He sees symptoms and thinks they're the disease. He prescribes some remedy, as an old school doctor prescribes a drug; always something for somebody else to do or to see to; and the result is as often to increase evils as to abate them.

One word more about yourself. Win the men in charge of the institutions you inspect, by your manner and your method. To inspect is not to detect. When you visit them, call on the superintendent first, not only the first time but always. When I began twenty years ago, in a place like yours, I was advised by an old functionary, as much older than I was then as I am than you, that the new board might do something with the county institutions, but that those of the state were too big game for us. His, in his state, were too big for him, chiefly from his method,

which was that of a detective. He used to play the spy, happening in by the back door at five in the morning, and such foolishness. Of course the institution men had no use for him and he enjoyed just as little influence with them as he deserved.

You have one mighty good point in your favor, you have inherited from my brother the family failing that we laughed at for, that all our ducks are

are often

swans. We always over-estimate a new acquaintance. Of course we are often disappointed in our friends because they turn out to be less splendid fellows than we fondly thought them. But if it is a fault it's a good one and makes things go much better than the opposite fault of underestimating folks. When you really think well of a man he is half won and sometimes, finding what a good fellow you think him, he really improves. You know George Eliot says: "One can begin so many things with a new acquaintance, even to begin to be a better man."

Write

Let me know how you get on. often, especially if you strike a snag. Yours affectionately. UNCLE HENRY.