_Obstacles to fair understanding._--The necessary ills connected with advancing civilization, in the laying aside of old methods for new, in the adoption of extensive machinery, and in the more perfect competition with the world, fall upon both profit-maker and wage-earner. The wage-earner feels the immediate loss of his usual opportunities. The profit-maker feels the weight of providing new machinery, devising new methods and taking the longer range of chances. All these ills are met in time by intelligent and hopeful struggles for the best. In the worst conditions ever brought by improved machinery, a very few years have brought relief and improvement to the very class of laborers injured.
The danger is that wholesome competition upon a clear basis of fair understanding and free range of enterprise may be checked by legislation or organization for class purposes. Against the interests of the mass of the people are all extended franchises, giving arbitrary control for long periods of years over any industry; monopolies sustained by patent rights or protective duties; trusts, so far as they imply a combination of men to resist the law of supply and demand; and laws which in any way favor one class of people engaged in one kind of industry as opposed to any or every other.
Quite as prominent are those hindrances which come from every kind of fraud, including adulteration and misrepresentation of products, deception as to market conditions, false credit, and violence of every kind. The more perfect the light thrown upon all the conditions of production, the better the understanding which all men may have of a neighbor's welfare, and the easier it is to put ourselves in our neighbor's place.
_Strikes._--The methods of warfare between wage-earners and profit-makers are quite generally understood under the names of strikes, boycotts and lockouts. The occasion for a strike, which means a sudden stopping of work by the employés of an establishment, is usually some question of immediate advantage to the workmen. A desire for increased wages, fewer or different hours of labor, or the removal of some restriction upon habits or associations, gradually becomes general, and through some permanent or temporary organization united action is taken. Quite frequently a strike is occasioned by a sudden and apparently arbitrary reduction of wages, affecting a large body of men. Many strikes are inaugurated in the interests of discharged workmen, when the organization to which they belong is supposed to be interested.