The difficulties of organizing labor in the South are such as always mark the initial efforts at organization. The union men are out of the Alabama mines, just at this time, for instance, and new men have their places. The new men are being trained to their work, and are receiving practically, if not exactly, the wages asked for by the union. As the number of these skilled workmen increases, the necessity of organization will become more apparent to them all, and the larger the number of men trained for the work, the more effective the union will become. The union wins victories for others oftentimes where it is itself nominally defeated. The question is asked, and with propriety, of the leaders of organized labor, why it is, if organized labor offers or promises the best workmen, that employers constantly resist its encroachment and turn it out and replace it with unorganized labor if they can. There are several reasons why this is so. It is not, as the labor leader frequently answers, because the employer is short-sighted and imagines that when he can get cheap labor he is making money, although it is at times due to the want of discernment and enlightenment on the part of the employer. The objection made to organized labor by its very best friends among the employers is the short-sighted policy of the organization in winking at or permitting the well-known tyranny of the unions, and also that air of proprietorship which petty labor leaders so often assume. I have never denied the right of labor to organize, nor can I deny the necessity for labor to organize; and, in the very nature of things, it seems to me that it is best that capital deal with labor as a unit. But at the same time I have, in pursuing my duties in adjusting labor disputes, been brought in contact with labor leaders here and there whose insolence and arrogance, whose absurd claim of being labor’s unselfish and only friend,—made me wish the whole world of organized laborers and their leaders at the bottom of the sea. More than one true friend of organized labor has been lost to a worthy and noble cause for no other reason than that they have been grossly offended and outraged by unworthy representatives of labor organizations. While the slow growth of the union in the South is no doubt a discouragement to labor organizations, it is a benefit to labor in the long run. It is also at the same time an advantage to capital that labor is being slowly organized. Looking to the future it is an advantage both to capital and labor that the growth of the labor organization does not go too far in advance of the education of the laboring classes and that the employer class may, if it has an eye to its own interest, organize in order successfully and intelligently to treat with organized labor when it has become a force to be dealt with in the South.