I have heard men in the well-paid, highly skilled, splendidly organized trades speak even contemptuously of the prospect of organizing the nomad laborers of the land, recognizing no moral claim laid upon themselves by the very advantages enjoyed by themselves in their own trade, advantages in which they took so much pride.  That is discouraging enough, but more discouraging still was it to gather one day from the speech of one who urged convincingly that while both for self-defense and for righteousness’ sake, the skilled organized workers must take up and make their own the cause of the unskilled and exploited wanderers, that he too drew his line, and that he drew it at the organization of the Chinese.[A]

[Footnote A:  I am not here discussing the unrestricted admission of Orientals under present economic conditions.  I merely use the illustration to press the point, that organized labor should include in its ranks all workers already in the United States.  A number of the miners in British Columbia are advocates of the organization of the Chinese miners in that province.]

Others again, while they do not openly assert that they disapprove of the bringing of women into the trade unions, not only give no active assistance towards that end, but in their blindness even advocate the exclusion of women from the trades, and especially from their own particular trade.  The arguments which they put forward are mostly of these types:  “Girls oughtn’t to be in our trade, it isn’t fit for girls”; or, “Married women oughtn’t to work”; or, “Women folks should stay at home,” and if the speaker is a humane and kindly disposed man, he will add, “and that’s where they’ll all be one of these days, when we’ve got things straightened out again.”  As instances of this attitude on the part of trade-union men who ought to know better, and its results, the pressmen in the printing shops of our great cities are well organized, and the girls who feed the presses, and stand beside the men and work with them, are mostly outside the protection of the union.  Some of the glass-blowers are seriously arguing against the suggestion of organizing the girls who are coming into the trade in numbers.  “Organization won’t settle it.  That’s no sort of a solution,” say the men; “they’re nice girls and would be much better off in some other trade.”  Just as if girls went into hard and trying occupations from mere contrariness!  It is too late in the day, again, to shut the door on the women who are going in as core-makers in the iron industry, but the men in the foundries think they can do it.  Men who act and talk like this have yet much to learn of the true meaning and purposes of labor organization.