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.

Conversely, take the workman settled down to work in the mill, at the best wages attainable at the time.  He has a house and family.  He has given pledges to society.  His employer has incurred certain duties in regard to him by the very nature of their relations.  Suppose the workman and his family cannot live in any comfort on the wages he receives.  The employer is morally bound to increase the wages if he can.  But if, instead of sympathizing with the situation of his workman, he forms a combination with all the mills of his sort, and reduces wages merely