  It cannot too often be stated that the labor problem is not a class affair, but that it concerns the entire human race. There may be a class of aristocrats, of plutocrats, of criminals, of society idlers, or of any such group whose instinct is to withdraw itself from the common mass of humanity. But for laborers this is an impossibility. They remain, and must remain, part and parcel of the whole people. They are the people. There can be no laboring class. It is a contradiction of terms. Especially is this true in America, where from the President of the country down to the coal-heaver everybody is supposed to Just by what route the millennial state of simple equity shall come we cannot say, but come it surely will, and the profits of individual labor of brawn or brain shall go to the individual, and the profits arising from the state or social combination shall go to the state, to the people as a whole. One of the most far-reaching acts of 1914 was the statement by the national congress, in its passage of the anti-trust law preventing the use of the Sherman act against trade unions, that “the labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce.” The implications of this declaration it will be difficult to see for some time. It seems now to strike a blow at the very centre of the old system of business under which the world has operated for some six thousand years. It means that humanity does not consist of employers and endowed persons, of nobles, wealthy people, and professional men—doctors, lawyers, priests, and squires; that culture, schools, courts, and senates are not for these only, and that the employed, the clerks, and workmen, who make the money for these upper classes, are not on the |
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