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epresentatives. The day has gone, never to return,
when you can advance your cause by force
and violence. Public opinion in the United States
has decided this once and for all, and it has further
decided that we have advanced far enough
along the highway of Christian civilization to
adjust our differences without resort to abuse or
violence.
In these observations made to-day, I have endeavored
to show that business methods, and the
highest business character, are prerequisites to a
general or universal recognition, by the employer
class, of the system of joint trade agreements, and
I confidently believe that whenever you are able
to prove unquestioned ability to do business in a
businesslike manner, and shall have discarded
many of the worthless rules and shameful practices
that have been a blot upon your record and
a check to your more rapid growth—rules and
practices that too often repel fair-minded employers—just
so soon will you achieve a lasting
triumph, not before, and not otherwise. For permanent
success is possible only where correct
economic laws are observed. To expect permanent
success otherwise is as unreasonable and
hopeless as to expect the earth to yield a harvest
where all the laws of nature are ignored—where
there is no sun to warm, no rain to moisten and
no fertilizing elements to enrich the son in which
seed and plant have been unscientifically deposited.
The sooner we comprehend these prerequisites, the
sooner shall we witness a steady, if not a very
rapid, increase in the recognition of joint trade
agreements by the great industries of our country,
and the sooner the better.
But I am expected to give my reasons for advocating
the general adoption of the system of joint
trade agreements. Of one thing I can assure you,
and tnat is that I favor the system for no selfish
or sentimental reason, but because it is a business
system pure and simple.
REASONS FOR FORMING TIIE JOINT TRADE AGREEMENT.
I favor it, because I believe it tends to broaden
and enlighten those who participate in it. I favor
it because I believe it will eliminate from the rank
of employers the men who are responsible for
what is known as a "cut-throat" policy in trade—
a policy responsible always for low wages—and
further that it will ultimately drive from positions
of honor and trust in labor organizations a
class of ruffians who are its greatest disgrace and
its chief menace—a class of men half fools, half
rogues.
This system may not make us, perhaps, less
eager to obtain everything that is our right, but
it will tend to open our eyes to the rights of
others. It will help us to see that the question of
labor and its compensations is an economic question
and nothing else. I favor the system not
THE COAL TRADE BULLETIN. 33
only for what it has already done, but for what I
believe it will do in the future. In the coal
mining industry of the country, for example, if it
has done nohting else, it has at least brought the
coal mine operators closer together, and to the
end that they are less suspicious of each other,
and, therefore, hold each other in higher respect.
None of us are either so good or so bad as we
seem, and if our relations become sufficiently intimate,
so that we may be seen by each other just as
we are, the cause of truth and justice will be advanced.
I am for the present system of joint trade agreements,
not because that system has proven to be
approximately perfect, but because I believe out
of it can be evolved a system that will be perfect.
It surely does what, nothing else so far has been
able to do for the employer class, and that is that
it has had the effect of opening their eyes to their
actual needs. Long ago. in attending joint conventions,
I was impressed with the fact that the
workers were not properly organized, and that
the employers were very poorly, if at all, organized.
The fact is that neither side seemed to have
a fair, correct, common-sense idea as to the basis
of organization for the parties to a joint movement,
where the ends to be accomplished were
simply the making of contracts. That the individuals
were not properly equipped was not due
to any mental deficiency, but rather to a lack of
the right sort of training so absolutely necessary
where the employer and the employe class are expected
to cope with each other, and where, jointly,
they are expected to cope with the problems that
concern both.
I favor the system because I know it has brought
together kindred souls in different walks of life
who otherwise might have been drawn farther and
farther apart, increasing the bitterness felt by
one for the other—of one class for the other—and
has thus, have learned to know and appreciate
each other—made them at times influences in preserving
peace where otherwise a long, bitter conflict
would have been inevitable.
It has cleared away doubt in many minds, and
has often made of unreasoning radicals, wise and
helpful conservatives.
THE SYSTEM FULL OF PROMISE.
It is too much to expect that this young system
has brought peace everywhere in the industrial
world, and it cannot bring universal peace until
we are universally more enlightened—of kindlier
and fairer and less selfish dispositions. It will be
a long time before wars and rumors of war between
nations or classes shall cease—and that
time may never come—but if the joint trade agreement
helps to move us in the right direction; if it
is, as I contend, the best system so far evolved;