Part 25 (1/2)

Now, I hear a lot of talk from employers that sounds fine but is no better, when you come to pick it to pieces, than the talk of the agitators. Oh, I'll believe you if you tell me they're sincere, and believe what they say! But that does not mak' it richt for me to believe them, too!

Here's your employer who won't deal with a union.

”Every man in my shop can come to my office at any time and talk to me,” he'll say. ”He needs no union delegate to speak for him. I'll talk to the men any time, and do everything I can to adjust any legitimate grievance they may have. But I won't deal with men who presume to speak for them--with union delegates and leaders.”

But can he no see, or wull he no see, that it's only when all the men in his shop bind themselves together that they can talk to him as man to man, as equal to equal? He's stronger than any one or twa of them, but when the lot of them are leagued together they are his match.

That's what's meant by collective bargaining, and the employer who won't recognize that right is behind the times, and is just inviting trouble for himself and all the rest of us.

Let me tell you a story I heard in America on my last tour. I was away oot on the Pacific coast. It was when America was beginning her great effort in the war, and she was trying to build airplanes fast enough to win the mastery of the air frae the Hun. She needed spruce for them--and to supply us and France and Italy, as well. That spruce grew in great, damp forests in the States of Oregon and Was.h.i.+ngton--one great tree, that was suitable for making aircraft, to an acre, maybe.

It was a great task to select those trees and hew them doon, and split and cut them up.

And in those forests lumbermen had been working for years. It was hard, punis.h.i.+ng work; work for strong, rough men. And those who owned the forests and employed the men were strong, hard men themselves, as they had need to be. But they could not see that the men they employed had any richt to organize themselves. So always they fought, when a union appeared in the forests, and they had beaten them all.

The men were weak, dealing, each by himself, with his employer. The employers were strong. But presently a new sort of union came--the I.

W. W. It did as it pleased. It cheated and lied. It made promises and didn't keep them. It didn't fight fair, the way the old unions did.

And the men flocked to it--not because they liked to fight that way, but because that was the first time they had had a chance to deal with their employers on even terms.

So, very quickly, the I. W. W. had organized most of the men who worked in the forests. There had been a strike, the summer before I was there, and, after the men went back to work, they still soldiered on their jobs and did as little as they could--that was the way the I.

W. W. taught them to do.

”Don't stay out on strike and lose your pay,” the I. W. W. leaders said. ”That's foolish. Go back--but do as little as you can and still not be dismissed. Poll a log whenever you can without being caught.

Make all the trouble and expense you can for the bosses.”

And here was the world, all humanity, needing the spruce, and these men acting so! The American army was ordered to step in. And a wise American officer, seeing what was wrong, soon mended matters. He was stronger than employers and men put together. He put all that was wrong richt. He saw to it that the men got good hours, good pay, good working conditions. He organized a new union among them that had nothing to do with the I. W. W. but that was strong enough to make the employers deal fairly with it.

And sae it was that the I. W. W. began to lose its members. For it turned out that the men wanted to be fair and honorable, if the employers would but meet them half way, and so, in no time at all, work was going on better than ever, and the I. W. W. leaders could make no headway at all among the workers. It is only men who are discontented because they are unfairly treated who listen to such folk as those agitators. And is there no a lesson for all of us in that?

CHAPTER XXV

I've heard much talk, and I've done much talking myself, of charity.

It's a beautiful word, yon. You mind St. Paul--when be spoke of Faith, Hope, Charity, and said that the greatest of these was Charity? Aye-- as he meant the word! Not as we've too often come to think of it.

What's charity, after a'? It's no the act of handing a saxpence to a beggar in the street. It's a state of mind. We should all be charitable--surely all men are agreed on that! We should think weel of others, and believe, sae lang as they wull let us, that they mean to do what's right and kind. We should not be bitter and suspicious and cynical. G.o.d hates a cynic.

But charity is a word that's as little understood as virtue. You'll hear folk speak of a woman as virtuous when she may be as evil and as wretched a creature as walks this earth. They mean that she's never sinned the one sin men mean when they say a la.s.sie's not virtuous! As if just abstaining frae that ane sin could mak' her virtuous!

Sae it's come to be the belief of too many folk that a man can be called charitable if he just gives awa' sae muckle siller in a year.

That's not enough to mak' him charitable. He maun give thought and help as well as siller. It's the easiest thing in the world to gie siller; easier far than to refuse it, at times, when the refusal is the more charitable thing for one to be doing.

I ken fine that folk think I'm close fisted and canny wi' my siller.

Aye, and I am--and glad I am that's so. I've worked hard for what I have, and I ken the value of it. That's mair than some do that talk against me, and crack jokes about Harry Lauder and his meanness. Are they so free wi' their siller? I'll imagine myself talking wi' ane of them the noo.

”You call me mean,” I'll be saying to him. ”How much did you give away yesterday, just to be talking? There was that friend came to you for the loan of a five-pound note because his bairn was sick? Of coorse ye let him have it--and told him not to think of it as a loan, syne he was in such trouble?”

”Well--I would have, of course, if I'd had it,” he'll say, changing color a wee bit. ”But the fact is, Harry, I didn't have the money--”