The very same misgivings as are felt and expressed by employers and by the public regarding the effect of legislation for the regulation of wages have been heard on every occasion when any legal check has been proposed upon the downward pressure upon the worker, inevitable under our system of competition for trade and markets.  What a cry went up from the manufacturers of Great Britain when a bill to check the ruthless exploitation of babies in the cotton mills was introduced into the House of Commons.  The very same arguments of interference with trade, despotic control over the right of the employe to bargain as an individual, are urged today, no matter how often their futility and irrelevance have been exposed.

The question of organization and the white alien has been dealt with in another chapter, but organization cannot afford to stop even here.  It will never accomplish all that trade unionists desire and what the workers need until those of every color, the Negro, the Indian, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Hindoo are included.  The southern states are very imperfectly organized, and trade unionism on any broad scale will never be achieved there until the colored workers are included.  In this the white workers, neither in the North nor in the South, have yet recognized their plain duty.  It is not the American Federation itself which is directly responsible, but the national and local unions in the various trades, who place difficulties in the way of admitting colored members.  “Ordinarily,” writes Dr. F.E.  Wolfe in his “Admission to Labor Unions,” published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, “the unimpeded admission of Negroes can be had only where the local white unionists are favorable.  Consequently, racial antipathy and economic motive may, in any particular trade, nullify the policies of the national union.”  This applies even in those cases where the national union itself would raise no barrier.  I think it may be safely added that there are practically no colored women trade unionists, the occasional exception but serving to emphasize our utter neglect, as regards organization, of the colored woman.

Yet another world waiting to be conquered is the Dominion of Canada, Canada with its vast area and its still small population, yet with its cities, from Montreal to Vancouver, facing the very same industrial problems as American cities, from New York to San Francisco.  The organization of women is, so far, hardly touched in any of the provinces.

One encouraging circumstance, and significant of the intimate connection between the two halves of North America, is the fact that the international union of each trade includes those dwelling both in the United States and in Canada; these internationals are in their turn, for the most part affiliated with both the American Federation of Labor and the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada.

Whenever, then, the women of Canada seriously begin to unionize, advance will be made through these existing international organizations.  As mentioned elsewhere, the Canadian Trades and Labor Congress of Canada has endorsed the work of the National Women’s Trade Union League of America, and seats a fraternal delegate from the League at its conventions.