The boycott is a conspiracy to injure another person, and as such indictable at common law.  A strike, if a conspiracy only to raise wages or to reduce hours of labor, may not be indictable, if its object cannot be shown to be the injury of another, though that may be incidentally its effect.  But in its incidents, such as violence, intimidation, and in some cases injury to the public welfare, it often becomes an indictable offense.  The law of conspiracy is the most ill-defined branch of jurisprudence, but it is safe to say of the boycott and the strike that they both introduce an insupportable element of tyranny, of dictation, of interference, into private life.  If they could be maintained, society would be at the mercy of an, irresponsible and even secret tribunal.

The strike is illogical.  Take the recent experience in this country.  We have had a long season of depression, in which many earned very little and labor sought employment in vain.  In the latter part of winter the prospect brightened, business revived, orders for goods poured in to all the factories in the country, and everybody believed that we were on the eve of a very prosperous season.  This was the time taken to order strikes, and they were enforced in perhaps a majority of cases against the wishes of those who obeyed the order, and who complained of no immediate grievance.  What men chiefly wanted was the opportunity to work.  The result has been to throw us all back into the condition of stagnation and depression.  Many people are ruined, an immense amount of capital which ventured into enterprises is lost, but of course the greatest sufferers are the workingmen themselves.

The methods of violence suggested by the communists and anarchists are not remedial.  Real difficulties exist, but these do not reach them.  The fact is that people in any relations incur mutual obligations, and the world cannot go on without a recognition of duties as well as rights.  We all agree that every man has a right to work for whom he pleases, and to quit the work if it does not or the wages do not suit him.  On the other hand, a man has a right to hire whom he pleases, pay such wages as he thinks he can afford, and discharge men who do not suit him.  But when men come together in the relation of employer and employed, other considerations arise.  A man has capital which, instead of loaning at interest or locking up in real estate or bonds, he puts into a factory.  In other words, he unlocks it for the benefit partly of men who want wages.  He has the expectation of making money, of making more than he could by lending his money.  Perhaps he will be disappointed, for a common experience is the loss of capital thus invested.  He hires workmen at certain wages.  On the strength of this arrangement, he accepts orders and makes contracts for the delivery of goods.  He may make money one year and lose the next.  It is better for the workman that he should prosper, for the fund of capital accumulated is that upon which they depend to give them wages in a dull time.  But some day when he is in a corner with orders, and his rivals are competing for the market, and labor is scarce, his men strike on him.