A series of article upon the labor question by Mr. John Keith, recently published in Harper's Weekly, has been. of special interest because they are typical of a mental attitude toward this subject that has become unfortunately frequent among magazine and newspaper writers. The prevalence of this mental attitude is not hard to explain. Up to the time of the anthracite-coal strike the public had paid little more than passing notice to the labor question. The direful possibilities when zero weather loomed up before the nation with empty coal-bins at that time set everybody thinking, talking, or writing on the great labor problem. About the same time some of the most conspicuously offensive incidents in the labor movement cropped out, such as Sam Parksism in New York; picketing funerals in Chicago; expelling union men for belonging to the State militia in Schenectady, etc., etc. These occurrences naturally gave the new students of unionism a very unfavorable impression, as their trenchant pens have since given innumerable evidences. Mr. Keith in his very interesting article, whether one of the old students or of the new, evidently was not searching for trade union virtues; and if there were any excesses he overlooked I do not now recall them. If the view were re

No. 1.

stricted to the array of hostile witnesses he summons, the reader would be quite ready to believe his conclusion:

"It may be set down as a general truth that the labor-union acts in no way as a spur, but in a thousand ways as an obstacle to the development of the country along the most scientific lines of economic advancement."

But suppose this method of criticising labor-unions were applied to other social institutions, what would be the conclusion? Only the other day there was a hurry call for the police reserves to a restaurant to prevent students of Columbia University from pounding one another into bloody insensibility during a class fight. The week before the daughter of a president of a college in Illinois was dragged out of bed by a gang of hazing students. Only a short time before that, in another institution of learning, a young man was taken out at night, hammered until several bones were broken, and thrown into a pond. Is it fair to single out such instances and to say that, therefore, higher education "acts as an obstacle to the development of the country?"

Again many writers lay undue stress upon the fact that in isolated cases labor-unions have broken "solemn " agreements with employers. Every