Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, May 1899: Volume LV, No. 1, May 1899Various
History
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, May 1899: Volume LV, No. 1, May 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
We can not approve of their violence, but let us not be unduly alarmed
by it. If society becomes so ossified in its usages and habits and
thinking that a newer and better thought can not get in, a nobler way
of living for all be entered upon, it sometimes seems as if in the
very nature of things violence must come to rend away the
obstructions. I believe that labor organizations are as much the
instruments of progress as the town guilds and craft guilds of old.
They will do their work, and the world will be the better for it. They
tend to make society more democratic industrially as well as
politically, as their predecessors did, and therefore better. For what
is democracy but a practical recognition of the brotherhood of man? If
Christianity amounts to anything, what higher aim should we have than
that?
Many students of the problems involved state that in the long run
labor still does not receive its full share of the profits; that in
order to keep up the standard of living which the wage-earner already
has reached he must have a larger reserve fund. In other words, he
must be able to save more. To do that and still live as he claims he
ought, his share in the profits, his wages, must be larger than now.
We can not claim that the standard is too high because admittedly it
is higher than ever before. Hon. Carroll D. Wright, in a recent
address, says: "Under the iron law of wages as announced by Ricardo,
it [the labor question] is a struggle simply to secure barely enough
of food and raiment and shelter to preserve the working physical
machine, the rule being that wages ought not to be paid over the bare
necessities. To-day the standard of living of the ordinary wage
receiver involves margins above the iron law of from ten to fifteen
per cent, out of which margin is to be found what are now called
spiritual necessities, means of leisure, reading, music, recreation,
etc., so that the demand of the worker in all civilized countries is
for the expansion of this margin. He feels entitled to this because
society has insisted upon educating him, giving him a taste for higher
things, making him a social and political factor; in fact, fitting
him for membership in a democratic community."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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