But can the condition of labor be improved? Yes, if labor is entirely in earnest about it. Labor’s principal need is brains. I don’t mean they must increase their own brains; but in their conflicts with employers the laboring men should be led, or their interests should be managed, by men who know both sides of the question. Are there such men in the ranks of the laborers? It appears not; if there were, such men would not be laborers at all. How many men there are whose hearts have been strongly stirred up by the wrongs endured by labor in the United States, who have longed for an opportunity to assist the working classes with their sympathy and counsel, but who have been repelled again and again by the utterly unbusinesslike and senseless methods of the very men whom they desired to help! During the strikes in the cotton mills of New England, a few years ago, it was remarked by a millionaire, a man of leisure, who desired to assist the operatives with his time, his money and his legal ability, that could he have such a faculty of working as the laboring class had of blundering he would be the greatest man who ever lived.
There is no objection, on the part of Americans, to workingmen enjoying all proper rights and protection under the law; the only trouble is in unwise methods of procedure. President Cleveland puts the whole matter in a nutshell as follows:
“Under our form of government the value of labor as an element of national prosperity should be distinctly recognized, and the welfare of the laboring man should be regarded as especially entitled to legislative care. In a country which offers to all its citizens the highest attainment of social and political distinction, its workingmen cannot justly or safely be considered as irrevocably consigned to the limits of a class and entitled to no attention and allowed no protest against neglect. The laboring man, bearing in his hand an indispensable contribution to our growth and progress, may well insist, with manly courage and as a right, upon the same recognition from those who make our laws as is accorded to any other citizen having a valuable interest in charge; and his reasonable demands should be met in such a spirit of appreciation and fairness as to induce a contented and patriotic co-operation in the achievement of a grand national destiny. While the real interests of labor are not promoted by a resort to threats and violent manifestations, and while those who, under the pretexts of an advocacy of the claims of labor, wantonly attack the rights of capital, and for selfish purposes or the love of disorder sow seeds of violence and discontent, should neither be encouraged nor conciliated, all legislation on the subject should be calmly and deliberately undertaken, with no purpose of satisfying unreasonable demands or gaining partisan advantage.”