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both of the wage-earners and their employers, he feared certain of its tendencies. He regarded it "as an imported article" which had aroused a natural prejudice against itself in this country, because its policy was that of aggressive warfare against capitala warfare which was to be relentless and which was "at variance with American institutions," because it introduced a spirit of mutual suspicion and antagonism instead of a spirit of mutual confidence into the heart of American industrial life. But he believed that the program of the Civic Federation would "fit the unions to their surroundings and conditions in the country." The Federation would not countenance sympathetic strikes, the boycott, or any restriction of production in order to enhance prices. If the unions insisted on these policies, they would be converting themselves into industrial and social outlaws. As a condition of recognition they must make themselves worthy of approval by abandoning all practices based on an essential antagonism between their own interests and the demands of industrial efficiency and social well-being. He hoped to make the Civic Federation a constructive educational agency, which would gradually teach the two contending parties how far they could properly go without destroying a fair basis of conciliation and fruitful coöperation.

His purpose was fundamentally to re-create good feeling between employers and their employees by means of a personal intercourse and the mutual application of the "Golden Rule." "My theory is," he said in the Chautauqua speech, "that when you bring the men to you, every employee will feel that you are treating him as a man. Appeal to his heart and to his mind and you will succeed in establishing a bond of confidence." In all his utterances on the question he reiterates this fundamental idea. "Every man is vulnerable in some part," he says in his article on "Socialism and Labor Unions," "and it is a rare thing to find any man proof against methods of kindness and justice. If every man is treated as a Man, and an appeal is made to his heart as well as to his reason, it will establish a bond of confidence as a sure foundation to build upon. This is the condition aimed at by the Civic Federation-absolute confidence on both sides. Many of the ills that have crept into labor organizations are importations from older countries and will

not live here because thay are not fitted to our conditions. While labor unions may have proved a curse to England, I believe that they will prove to be a boon to our own country when a proper basis of confidence and respect is established. We have, perhaps, been too busy and too engrossed in our rapid expansion to look upon the ethical side of this question, and have forgotten that two factors contributed to the prosperity of our nation, the man who works with his hands and the man who works with his head-partners in toil who ought to be partners in the profits of that toil."

It will be admitted, I think, that the foregoing program is based upon a sound analysis of the immediate causes of ordinary strikes and that it prescribes a remedy which offers in the present emergency a fair chance of being useful. Of course the machinery whereby Mr. Hanna proposed to bring organized capital and organized labor together broke down. The Industrial Department of the Civic Federation did not continue to be an effective agency either for the settlement of labor disputes or for the establishment of better relations between American wage-earners and wage-payers. The employers came in the end to resent its unofficial interference. The unions no longer allow their leaders to coöperate with the Federation. The ill-feeling and the mutual suspicion between the two contestants have increased during the past ten years. But it is not fair to dismiss the whole program because the Federation itself did not prove to be as permanently useful a conciliating agency as it was during Mr. Hanna's leadership. The results which Mr. Hanna hoped to accomplish informally by the agency of a private organization backed by public opinion evidently demand a more powerful and authoritative engine of the social will-one which he himself might have been loathe to call into action.

Nevertheless it would not be fair to attribute the temporary success of the Industrial Department of the Federation merely to Mr. Hanna's personal and political influence. This factor counted, but it would not have counted much, unless Mr. Hanna had been disinterestedly engaged on behalf of what he believed to be a practicable plan of conciliation. His success was due, that is, not merely to his personal hold on business

men and union leaders or his personal skill as a negotiator, but to his enthusiastic interest in the question and his increasing mastery of it. When he said to his audience at Urbana: "Oh! my friends, you have got to be with these men, among them and a part of them to understand this labor question thoroughly,” he was describing his own actual position. He had remained, if not a part of them, at least close to them. They mutually understood and trusted one another. His friends in the unions had that very confidence in his good faith, which in a generalized form he postulates as the essential condition of any permanent improvement in the relations between capital and labor. They recognized his genuine sympathy with the wageearner's ambition for a higher standard of living. He earnestly endeavored to instil the same feeling into his audiences and into his business friends; and whenever it is shared by a larger number of people of all classes, the labor question will lose much of its present critical character.

Many people who did not know him questioned the sincerity of his sympathy with organized labor and the validity of his ultimate purposes. He advocated labor unions, they said and still say, because he found it much more easy and convenient to get what he wanted out of a few labor leaders than out of a mob of unorganized workmen. Be it admitted that some such motive may have partly determined his preference for the unions. But the sincerity of his attitude was not thereby affected. Economic radicals, who believe in the inevitability and righteousness of class warfare, like to read into the mind of every representative of wealth a "class consciousness" similar to their own, and they insist upon interpreting every action of such a man as the result of a more or less conscious purpose of exploitation. But "class consciousness" of any kind was precisely the kind of consciousness which an American like Mark Hanna did not have. There welled up in him a spring of the old instinctive homogeneity of feeling characteristic of the pioneer American. His whole attitude towards labor and his program of conciliation are, indeed, the product of an innocent faith that his country was radically different economically and socially from Europe, and that no fundamental antagonism of economic interest existed among different classes of Americans.

All they had to do was to deal fairly and feel kindly one towards another.

He was, of course, too shrewd a political leader not to understand the added strength which advocacy of the labor unions gave to his advocacy of big business. His labor policy was undoubtedly framed partly as a supplement to his corporation policy. "I believe," he said in his speech to the Ohio State Convention in May, 1903, "I believe in organized labor, and I believe in organized capital as an auxiliary." But here again the labor program did not engage his support merely because it might sweeten the corporation pill for the palate of the American people. He was one of the first of our public men to understand that the organization of capital necessarily implied some corresponding kind of labor organization. He saw clearly that the large corporations could not survive in case their behavior towards their employees was oppressive, and that they would in the end strengthen themselves by recognizing union labor. Derived as the two forms of organization were from analogous sources, the future of both depended partly upon their ability to find some basis of mutual accommodation and coöperation, not incompatible with the public interest. In grasping this connection, and in insisting upon it, Mr. Hanna travelled far ahead of prevailing business and political opinion. The large corporations have at best been paternal in their policy towards their employees; and whether paternal or not they have usually been inimical to the unions. If their directors had understood the political and business interests at stake as clearly as Mr. Hanna did and had conciliated union labor, their situation at the present time in the face of American public opinion would have been very much better.

At bottom, however, and most of all, Mr. Hanna's labor policy was the expression of personal kindliness and good-will. As an embodiment and advocate of pioneer economics, he had always been sincere in his belief that business expansion and prosperity would be of as much benefit to the wage-earners as to the capitalist. But he was obliged to recognize that the former were not satisfied with the share of the product which they received under competitive conditions; and he came to realize that they were right in not being satisfied. His evident

sincerity in introducing this exception into his general system of a state-aided process of economic production, but a socially irresponsible distribution of its fruits, proves his sincerity in \claiming, as he always had, that he wanted to represent not one class but the American people as a whole. By emphasizing this exception, by proclaiming that capitalists had systematically exploited their employees and that in their dealing with labor a humane motive should be substituted for the ordinary economic motive-in assuming such an attitude he was showing once again how clearly he could read and profit by the lessons of his experience. His whole plane of political and economic thought was raised to a higher level. He had liberated and made articulate the underlying humanity of his own personal feeling towards the mass of his fellow-countrymen.

But in this instance, as in the other more important developments of his public personality, the revelation had been in a way imposed upon him. He had simply responded to a stimulus. In 1900 he had not the slightest expectation of attempting to alleviate the conflict between capital and labor. If it had depended on his own conscious will, he might have remained inarticulate until his death, and his friends would have been deprived of the most lucid and unalloyed public expression of his honest interest in the welfare of the laboring class. But the Civic Federation happened to be organized. His practical interest in the labor problem had left a trail behind it. The officials of the Federation found him out and went to him for help, not he to them for an opportunity. He responded to the call, divined the opportunity, seized it, and in seizing it, not only made it bigger, but made himself big enough to put it to good For the first time in his public career he became a reformer, dedicated consciously to the task of converting other people to a better way of dealing with a fundamental problem; and the best of it was that his public appearance as a labor reformer was the natural, although fortuitous, expression of his lifelong personal feelings and behavior.

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