sary instrumentality of that free market, the indispensable means of enabling the sellers of labor to take due care of their own interests under a system of competition.'

This has a strangely modern ring. It need hardly be said that concerted action is even more essential where labor has to deal, not with a "rich employer," but with a combination of powerful corporations, and when free competition is subjected to peculiar lets and hindrances. Under these conditions, our philosophy of individual liberty, though sound enough in itself, ceases to have any industrial bearing or significance whatever. It is true, but irrelevant.

Perfect and complete liberty of the individual is conditioned upon absolute isolation of the individual, and this is an inconceivable state of existence. We insist that the wage-earner shall be free to work or not, as he chooses; but our insisting that he shall be does not make him so. He cannot, in the very nature of the case, be free. As a non-union man, and, in the absence of organized action, he has no choice but to work on such terms as employing corporations or individuals offer. His alternative is to submit to the dictates of an organization of his fellows. In either case his freedom is restricted. Nor is this all. During the recent struggle organized labor has not been content with asserting its right to organize; it has gone farther and asserted — less frankly, perhaps, but no less really the right of organized labor to compel individual workmen to submit, even against their own free choice, to the dictates of the organization. Here, it is felt, is a serious transgression of individual liberty, and it is unquestionably so whenever the organization resorts to violence, or intimidation of any sort. So long, however, as corporations wield the power of their organizations to crush out individual enterprise, whenever it bids fair to endanger their interests, they cannot themselves, with a very good face, presume to criticise labor organizations for similar action. It is certainly entirely in order to ask how far the organization of industry is inimical to the exercise of individual freedom. The community has long had to face the problem of capitalistic corporations forcing out

'Principles of Political Economy, Vol. II, p. 553.

individual employers. This, it is maintained quite justly, is the inevitable consequence of industrial development. Well, then, the appeal of organized labor must rest also upon the necessity of organization to secure certain advantages - never, it is needless to say, upon threats of violence or intimidation, which are in any event conclusive evidence of weakness and of early dissolution. A union is strong only in proportion as its members are loyal, and wherever force is resorted to there is necessarily engendered a feeling of disloyalty, which sooner or later breeds dissension, open rupture and disintegration. Where a union seeks legitimate objects it may safely depend upon the force of individual interest to establish it firmly and to increase its membership. The surrender of individual liberty must not exceed the gain in power which comes from the ability to bargain collectively for wages. Nor, on the whole, has it exceeded that limit. A workman's right to act independently within any industrial group is to be preserved so long as, and in those cases where, the welfare of the industrial group demands that it shall be preserved; but it is conceivable that in any such isolated group of wageearners as that of the coal miners individual liberty should be considerably restricted. It is conceivable, for example, that every certified coal miner should be expected and virtually forced to join the Miners' Union, and so make himself amenable to the specifications of any contract for labor entered into with employers. It is quite conceivable that employers should themselves force this action as a condition of employment in the mines. Indeed, throughout the soft-coal region, this has been for some years virtually the condition of employment. As is well known, the mine owners in the bituminous fields negotiate wage compacts with representatives of the United Mine Workers annually, and the individual miner has no status, under these compacts, except as a member of that organization. In other countries. membership in a labor organization is made more or less compulsory by legislative enactments, and it is no more a transgression of divine right than certain other social requirements. Individual liberty or constraint in this matter is not an affair of statute legislation, nor of public opinion, nor of social theory,

but a question of fact. Is the small manufacturer, or operator, or employer of labor freer to engage in industry because there is no statute forbidding him to engage in business with a capital of less than $500,000, or $1,000,000, or $100,000,000, or $1,000,000,000? Not in the least. Amount of capital is not the sole constraining condition encountered by individual employers, nor even the chief one. The constraint may be inherent in the existence of a natural monopoly, such as undeniably exists in the anthracite coal region, or in the control of transportation facili

Whatever the conditions, the fact that there are not any statute enactments, or that public opinion assents or dissents, does not make them less oppressive and effective in restricting individual liberty. Nor is the wage-earner made free by the simple mandate of public opinion that he shall be so. On the contrary, under existing conditions in certain industries, he will probably in the near future be forced to choose between joining the union and taking up some other trade. It should be noted, to their credit, that unions are commonly disposed to enroll as members all who wish to join their ranks. Should they ever close their doors and become close corporations, such as the trade guilds of the Middle Ages, the community might be justified in protesting vigorously.

Coming now to a consideration of the general question, whether or not an organization of labor, such as the United Mine Workers' Union, can force an advance in wages and thereby enable an industrial group to raise its standard of living, it is clear that its power to do this is strictly limited by the ruthless working of economic laws. As regards the wages earned by anthracite-coal miners, however, these laws, though they may not work uncertainly, certainly do work obscurely, and it would be unwise to venture any prediction as to the probable economic consequences of a given rise in wages. It is conceivable that the present rates of wages are as high as the industry will bear; that any increase in those rates would necessitate a rise in the market price of hard coal, which would occasion a considerable restriction in the demand for it. There is, however, no way of determining beforehand what would be the effect upon demand of a given rise in

price. Moreover, the margin of profit in mining coal is not the same at any two mines, and it is not at all likely that any contemplated rise in wages could make coal-mining unprofitable under the more favorable conditions existing at the richer mines, even if the market price of coal were left unchanged. On the other hand, any rise in wages, however slight, might, and probably would, wipe out the small margin of profits now earned at the poorest mines, and certain shafts might have to be abandoned. It is a significant fact, however, that those operators who have seemed to be most seriously embarrassed in the past, when wages have been forced up, have been the independent mine owners. There is no reason to believe that the properties operated by these independent firms are poorer than some of the properties operated by the coal-carrying and coal-mining corporations, and the inference has been pretty freely drawn that the embarrassment of these firms resulted from excessive freight charges exacted by the coal-carrying companies. It is obviously a matter of indifference to those companies engaged in the mining and transportation of coal, whether their profits represent earnings on one service or the other; but where they receive coal from independent operators for transportation to market, they have clearly an incentive to force up freight charges. Whether these charges have been kept unduly high or not is a question of fact which may not be easily determined, but the burden of proof that rates. are fair certainly lies with those corporations which have "persistently defied the efforts of two sovereign states" to keep the coal-carrying service and the coal-mining service under separate corporate management. At the present time the independent operator finds the market price of coal fixed for him by these great corporations. The rate of wages which he must pay is, or will be, absolutely fixed by wage compacts binding throughout the region; and the companies determine also what he shall pay for transportation. Under these conditions the fact that an independent operator cannot afford to advance wages is not in itself. conclusive proof that his property is naturally too poor to work, nor that the rate of wages ought not to advance; it may be evidence that a portion of his legitimate profits, and of the miners'

legitimate earnings in mining coal is diverted into the hands of the carrying companies.

It is, however, extremely puerile to discuss the cost of mining coal and the cost of bringing it to market, as though these were real factors determining the price of coal in the market, and so conclude that the price will in the future maintain any nice relation to these factors, rising as cost of production rises, and falling as it falls. Into this cost of production, as it is commonly figured, enters the element of interest charges on the capitalization of the properties, and this capitalization has been itself determined by dividend yielding capacity. So that any margin of income over what is commonly understood as constituting a normal rate of profitthat is to say, income representing monopoly value of these properties has long since been capitalized and is today accredited to to the interest account; and so it becomes nominally an item in the cost of production of coal. Any other cost of production than one including this perfectly elastic element of interest or dividend charges is intangible and unrelated to price. The price of coal in the market is, in fact, not at all related to cost of production, in the common understanding of that phrase, but to supply forthcoming, and it is, according to Dr. Roberts, the opinion of experts that the output from the mines during the last few years has approached very nearly to the maximum possible. So that in the absence of any artificial limiting of supply by the coal companies, we have a fairly definite limit to any considerable increase in natural conditions. With supply fixed and the demand increasing from year to year, as it must tend to do as population increases, the price of coal will inevitably rise, quite independently of cost of production. The countervailing factors tending to diminish the profits of the companies will lie in increased cost of working the mines at greater depths and in narrower seams, in the competition of other fuels, and the exploitation of other sources of heat and energy, such as winds, tides, and water-courses, and, finally, advance in rates of wages through the organization of labor, or from other causes. Any such advance is, however, under the circumstances, decidedly problematical, and is quite offset by the possibility that wages will