Neither can the unions depend upon support from mechanics and laborers outside of the large cities and of villages and manufacturing centres which are tributary to large cities. The carpenter, mason and blacksmith in a country town feels insulted when asked to organize or join a trade union. He does not feel the need of any protection. He, with good right, considers himself as smart as any merchant or manufacturer or capitalist in his vicinity, and he not only does not see the need of any protection against such people, but he thinks himself smart enough to overcome them all in matters pertaining to his own business. Experience proves that he is right. Such a man slowly but surely becomes a proprietor, and thus an employer himself. The idea that he is always to be a laborer is extremely distasteful to him, and even if he were convinced that such were to be the fact he would not admit it. He would feel that he would be voluntarily taking a lower level by making any such admission. The natural consequences may be seen by any man who has done business in a number of small towns or villages. The journeyman workman in any trade whom he knew ten or fifteen years ago, in his beginning, is probably now an employer and a proprietor himself. Quite possibly he has “struck a big thing,” as the saying goes, and has money of his own; his sons are being as well educated, his daughters as well dressed, as those of any of his neighbors, and his wife associates on terms of equality with the families of the judge or Congressman or whosoever else the local magnate may be. So far as labor expects to be helped by public sympathy, which is always on the side of the unfortunate and oppressed, it cuts its own throat by denying the right of any laborer to work at cheaper rates than his fellows. The abuses and indignities to which so-called scabs have been subjected have alienated public “sympathy” from labor movements to a most deplorable degree. No American, not even the millionaire, is free from the influence of competition in business, and the richest are sometimes those who suffer the most. Competition has been defined as the soul of business, and no one yet has been skilful enough to deny or modify the assertion. If employers may compete, if clerks, teachers, salesmen, lawyers, physicians, even clergymen, may compete with one another for wages or compensation for their services, why may not workmen? Can any one imagine a body of clerks, or dry-goods salesmen, or lawyers, forming a clique and standing at dark corners with clubs and pistols to bully other men of their own profession into demanding certain wages on penalty of refusing to do any business at all?