basis.  You have the oil industry, controlled by the Standard Oil; you have the lumber industry, controlled by the Lumbermen’s Association of the South and West, and you have the steel and copper industry, all organized on an industrial basis resulting in a fusing, or corporation, or trust of a lot of former owners.  Now the I.W.W. say if they are to compete with our employers, we must compete with our employers as an organization, and as they are organized so we must protect our organization, as they protect themselves.  And so they propose to organize into industrial unions; the steel workers and the coal miners, and the transportation workers each into its own industrial unit.

This plan of organization is extremely distasteful to the employers because it is efficient; because it means a new order, a new system in the labor world in this country.  The meaning of this can be gathered, in some measure, from the recent experiences in the steel strike of this country, where they acted as an industrial unit; from the recent experiences in the coal mining industry, where they acted as an industrial unit.  Instead of having two or three dozen other crafts, each working separately, they acted as an industrial unit.  When the strike occurred it paralyzed industry and forced concessions to the demands of the workers.  That is the first thing the I.W.W. stands for and in some measure and in part explains the attitude capital has taken all over the country towards it.

In the next place it says that labor should organize on the basis of some fundamental principle; and labor should organize for something more than a mere bartering and dickering for fifty cents a day or for some shorter time, something of that sort.  It says that the system is fundamentally wrong and must be fundamentally changed before you can look for some improvement.  Its philosophy is based upon government statistics which show that in a few years in this country our important industries have crept into more than two-thirds of our entire wealth.  Seventy-five per cent of the workers in the basic industry are unable to send their children to school.  Seventy-one per cent of the heads of the families in our basic industries are unable to provide a decent living for their families without the assistance of the other members.  Twenty-nine per cent of our laborers are able to live up to the myth that he is the head of the family.  The results of these evils are manifold.  Our people are not being raised in decent vicinities.  They are not being raised and educated.  Their health is not being cared for; their morals are not being cared for.  I will show you that in certain of our industries where the wages are low and the hours are long, that the children of the working people die at the rate of 300 to 350 per thousand inhabitants under the age of one year because of their undernourishment, lack of proper housing and lack of proper medical attention and because the mothers of these children before they