The Coming of CoalBruère, Robert W. (Robert Walter)
History
The Coming of Coal
Bruère, Robert W. (Robert Walter)
Coal; Coal trade -- United States
In their volume on The Church and Industrial Reconstruction, the
Committee on the War and the Religious Outlook, an interdenominational
group appointed by the joint action of the Federal Council of Churches
and the General Wartime Commission of the Churches, declare that
"Democracy is the attempt to realize this fundamental right of every
personality to self-expression through cooperation with others in a
common task. In the political sphere it has already found large
recognition.... It applies, or should apply, in the sphere of organized
religion, which is the Church. It applies in the sphere of industry.
Indeed, it may be of relatively small significance for men to have the
right of political self-expression, unless they have similar opportunity
for self-expression in their daily work. For the conditions which affect
them in industry touch them more closely than the concerns of the
state."
It is for this reason that the study of the growth of democratic
organization and government in industry inevitably stresses the growth
of organization and orderly processes among the workers, the commoners
of industry. The political revolution of the eighteenth century
emancipated the owners of property from the autocratic control of the
monarchical state. But, as Sidney and Beatrice Webb have pointed out,
"the framers of the United States Constitution, like the various
parties in the French Revolution of 1789, saw no resemblance or analogy
between the personal power which they drove from the castle, the altar,
and the throne, and that which they left unchecked in the farm, the
factory, and the mine. Even at the present day, after a century of
revolution, the great mass of middle-and upper-class 'Liberals' all over
the world see no more inconsistency between democracy and unrestrained
capitalist enterprise, than Washington and Jefferson did between
democracy and slave-owning. The 'dim, inarticulate' multitude of
manual-working wage-earners have, from the outset, felt their way to a
different view. To them, the uncontrolled power wielded by the owners of
the means of production, able to withhold from the manual worker all
chance of subsistence unless he accepted their terms, meant a far more
genuine loss of liberty, and a far keener sense of personal subjection,
than the official jurisdiction of the magistrate, or the far-off,
impalpable rule of the king. The captains of industry, like the kings of
yore, are honestly unable to understand why their personal power should
be interfered with.... The agitation for freedom of combination and
factory legislation has been, in reality, a demand for a 'constitution'
in the industrial realm."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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