(3) Their social effect has been greatest.  They have amalgamated our stream of heterogeneous immigrants and fired them with common understanding and purpose; they have taught the ignorant to cooperate, made them think, frowned to some degree upon vice, insured their members to. some extent against illness and death, and promoted general friendliness among the laboring classes.

On the other hand, their methods have been productive of much harm: 

(1) The economic loss due to strikes has been enormous; the employers have suffered heavily, the public has suffered heavily; the laborers have suffered most of all.  Social amelioration certainly ought not to have to come about through such wasteful methods and such bitter privation.

(2) The inconvenience caused the public by strikes has often been very great, especially where the coalmines or railways have been affected.  Only a few years ago a veritable tragedy was barely averted, when President Roosevelt succeeded, after the most strenuous efforts, in ending the general coal strike in the winter season.  A strike of locomotive engineers means obviously a great peril to the traveling public.

(3) The antagonisms and class hatreds engendered by this sort of industrial warfare do infinite moral harm, and retard heavily the peaceful solution of the problems.  The class organs always denounce in bitterest terms the opposing class, and lawlessness always lurks in the background.

(4) Apart from their conduct of strikes, the labor unions must answer to many serious indictments.  They have endeavored to restrict output, in order to raise prices.  They have sought to restrict the number of apprentices in a trade, and have opposed trade schools, in order to keep down the competition for positions.  They have insisted on a uniform wage without regard to efficiency.  They have opposed scientific management and the increase of efficiency in various industries, in order to retain more workers therein.  They have insisted upon the retention of incompetent employees, thereby directly causing railway accidents and other evils.  They have often antagonized such other ameliorative methods as profit sharing and government regulation, and have rejected overtures from employers, because these-to quote from a union pamphlet-"remove the scope and field of trade-unionism.”  They have at times been run in the interests of selfish leaders and seemed chiefly a moneymaking scheme of a few grafters.

There can be no question, on a dispassionate consideration, that the militant methods of the trade unions are an unfortunate and temporary expedient.  The grievances which they have sought to remedy are very real and very bitter; and perhaps, on the whole, the unions have done more good than harm, and accomplished results that would not so soon have been effected in any other way.  But they have been rather strikingly unsuccessful.  After fifty years of propaganda, seventy per cent of all industrial workers remain non-unionized; and there has been a relative loss in their numbers during the past decade.  They have never succeeded in cornering the labor market, and there seems to be no prospect of their succeeding.  In all events, for a permanent and thoroughgoing solution of labor troubles we must turn to some other method.