They have been very successful in accomplishing their object.  In spite of the flood of alien immigration the American laborer has been able to earn an almost constantly increasing wage, and he devoutly thinks that his unions have been the chief agency of his stronger economic position.  He believes in unionism, consequently, as he believes in nothing else.  He is, indeed, far more aggressively preoccupied with his class, as contrasted with his individual interests, than are his employers.  He has no respect for the traditional American individualism as applied to his own social and economic standing.  Whenever he has had the power, he has suppressed competition as ruthlessly as have his employers.  Every kind of contumelious reproach is heaped on the heads of the working men who dare to replace him when he strikes; and he does not scruple to use under such conditions weapons more convincing than the most opprobrious epithets.  His own personality is merged in that of the union.  No individual has any rights as opposed to the interests of the union.  He fully believes, of course, in competition among employers, just as the employers are extremely enthusiastic over the individual liberty of the working man.  But in his own trade he has no use for individuality of any kind.  The union is to be composed of so many equal units who will work the same number of hours for the some wages, and no one of whom is to receive more pay even for more work.  The unionist, that is, has come to depend upon his union for that material prosperity and advancement which, according to the American tradition, was to be the inevitable result of American political ideas and institutions.  His attachment to his union has come to be the most important attachment of his life—­more important in most cases than his attachment to the American ideal and to the national interest.

Some of the labor unions, like some of the corporations, have taken advantage of the infirmities of local and state governments to become arrogant and lawless.  On the occasion of a great strike the strikers are often just as disorderly as they are permitted to be by the local police.  When the police prevent them from resisting the employment of strike-breakers by force, they apparently believe that the political system of the country has been pressed into the service of their enemies; and they begin to wonder whether it will not be necessary for them to control such an inimical political organization.  The average union laborer, even though he might hesitate himself to assault a “scab,” warmly sympathizes with such assaults, and believes that in the existing state of industrial warfare they are morally justifiable.  In these and in other respects he places his allegiance to his union and to his class above his allegiance to his state and to his country.  He becomes in the interests of his organization a bad citizen, and at times an inhuman animal, who is ready to maim or even to kill another man and for the supposed benefit of himself and his fellows.