The individual bargain is made at the entrance to the factory, the shop, the mill, or the mine; the collective bargain is made usually in the office of the employer. When the period covered by the collective bargain has expired and the conditions under which labor has been carried on for a specific period become unsatisfactory to either or both, a conference is held and a new agreement endeavored to be reached under which industry and commerce may be continued. When there is failure to agree, a strike occurs. The effort at best in the joint bargaining or in the strike is the effort to secure the best possible conditions for the wage-earners. Much as we deplore strikes and endeavor to avoid them, they are the highest civilized expression of discontent of the workers in any part of the world. China has no strikes. The people of India have no strikes, but in the highest developed and most highly civilized countries strikes do occur. In China, when discontent arises, we see it manifested in revolution against constituted authority, the venting of prejudice against the foreigner; the stiletto, the bludgeon, war brutality are the manifestations of the discontent of the poor and of the workers of those countries. I am not here to defend strikes, nor to find an excuse for them, but that we may more clearly understand the subject to which we are giving attention, it may not be amiss to at least set ourselves right concerning strikes. Our forefathers, when establishing our government, wisely reserved to the popular branch of our federal government the right to control revenue and expenditure, a right which had been struggled for and secured by the House of Commons of Great Britain. The strike of labor is in another form the holding of the purse-strings of the nation, to protest against injustice and wrong being meted out to the laborers. It is the determination of the workers that in the last analysis, if there be no other means by which their rights may be accorded and their wrongs righted, they may say with Lincoln, “Thank God, we live in a country where the people may strike!” Nevertheless a strike ought to be avoided by every means within the power of every man, capitalist, laborer, or the neutral citizen, and he who would not give his best efforts and thought to prevent a strike is scarcely doing justice to his fellow-men, nor is he loyal to the institutions under which we live. But I re-assert that there are some things which are worse than strikes, and among them I include a degraded, a debased, or a demoralized manhood.