(9) incorporation tees and increases of capital stock; (10) license fees; (11) duplicate federal taxes. Sometimes all three governments, federal, state, and municipal, exact the same kind of toll, such as license fees and other choice assortments of tax wonders. The old barons on the hills had much to learn. The corporation may be soulless and heartless, yet for usefulness and tax purposes it surpasses anything in ancient or modern times. The marvel is that it survives at all. Sometimes it migrates, because, although it is a useful beast of burden, there is a limit to the load. When that limit is reached it silently folds its tent and steals away; just as capital always does if it can. The corporation then incorporates in another state or perhaps takes refuge in no par value stock. This New York device for issuing something that may represent little or nothing is a pretender in the corporate world -a "blind pool." The Attorney General of Michigan was right when he said such stock "has in most cases no tangible value except as it is given such by the earnings of the corporation."

Finally the corporation is the pet subject of experiment in the hospital of sociology. That new philosophy, which as applied by radicals would subvert constitutional principles, overturn stare decisis, teach a new jurisprudence to the young, and devote all things to social uplift, makes a specialty of operating on friendless corporations. Being impersonal and reputed to be rich, and having a bad reputation, the corporation is carved up for social regeneration. If it dies, it is a case of just retribution; if it lives, it is an exemplification of supreme art. It is the victim of the top-lofty theories of sociology which resemble the toplofty sails of Yankee craft, captured by the Europeans in the Napoleonic wars. The Europeans found them too flighty and so cut them out.

Great is the American, though somewhat ungrateful. The corporation is his faithful dog, his useful donkey, his sevenleagued camel. It serves equally the high and the low, the rich

and the poor, the wicked and the honest, the industrial king and the humble plodder. It is a wonder the greatest of modern times. And it rules the world because it absorbs most of the talent of the world.

Unfortunately the corporation, having "no body to be kicked or soul to be damned," respects power more than persons. To it the American Constitution and American institutions are governmental forces, useful for protection and aggrandizement. The corporation is impersonal wealth; it is capital; it is the trust; it looks out for itself all the time and bends rather than breaks. It has no sentiment or pride and can change face quicker than a politician. And yet after all it is safer for American institutions than other forms of aggressive wealth, because the corporation has placed its very life in the hands of the legislature and courts. It can be decapitated if it goes too far.

The danger to the republic from great corporations is the danger from great wealth with the added danger that men will often do in the name of a corporation that which they would not do in their own name. These men are patriotic but they often fail to see the dangers they create for American institutions by their acts.*

*The corporation is further considered in pp. 285, 286, infra.

CHAPTER XXII

LABOR UNIONS

THE primeval curse is said to be that "By the sweat of thy brow thou shalt earn thy daily bread." A better view is that this curse is a primeval blessing, in that it is a substitute for men preying on each other. A practical view is that the primeval question is "How am I to get a living?" This question faces every young man whose parents are poor and might better face those whose parents are rich.

The law of Nature throughout the animal kingdom that the fittest shall survive and that the strong and crafty shall dominate and destroy the weak, has for thousands of years made human labor the servant or slave of the rich and strong. Nature increases population beyond the supply of food, and then decimates that population by war, pestilence, and famine, always favoring the strong. Only the higher civilization, itself also a product of nature, alleviates the sufferings of the unfortunate.

Gradually the laboring man — especially the mechanic and factory worker - forces some recognition of his right to a fair wage, where profits justify such wage. This produces a conflict with capital, owned by the rich and strong. Labor finds that by union and the strike, better wages can be obtained.

Then come the abuses of this power. Not content with labor unions and the strike, the strikers attack non-union laborers, and destroy the property of the employer, and finally by force and violence interfere with traffic on the great railroads. That was the situation recently. Railroad wages, which during and after the war advanced to a high figure by reason of the shortage of labor and the necessity of handling an immense traffic, are not

now being reduced in accordance with the natural law of supply and demand, but are being held up by the railroad unions, relying on the strike and violence. Meantime the agricultural and clerical classes suffer.

"A school has arisen," says Lecky, "among popular workingclass leaders which no longer desires that superior skill, or industry, or providence should reap extraordinary rewards. Their ideal is to restrict by the strongest trade-union regulations the amount of work and the amount of the produce of work, to introduce the principle of legal compulsion into every branch of industry, to give the trade union an absolute coercive power over its members, to attain a high average, but to permit no superiorities. The industrial organization to which they aspire approaches far more nearly to that of the Middle Ages or of the Tudors than to the ideal of Jefferson and Cobden. I do not here argue whether this tendency is good or bad. No one at least can suppose that it is in the direction of freedom. It may be permitted to doubt whether liberty in other forms is likely to be very secure if power is mainly placed in the hands of men who, in their own sphere, value it so little." 1

Labor unions may be divided into two classes: first, those in factories, trades, manufacturing, etc.; second, railroad and coal unions.

Unions in factories, etc., will work out their own cure. If they resort to violence, the police can control them. If they raise wages too high and the employers raise the price of the goods, there comes a "buyer's strike," in that the public will not buy. Then factories close and unemployment begins, until wages are readjusted. Meantime certain outrageous practices of the unions meet public condemnation. President Eliot with great clearness of thought and expression characterizes them as non-democratic. He shows the injustice and selfishness and misuse of power by the unions in limiting the number of apprentices, in the boycott, the union label, the clash of unions as to

what work belongs to each, the refusal to allow even trivial overstepping of the line of division of work, the limit on the amount of output a man shall produce, thus limiting his work, the refusal to use material from a non-union source, the minimum wage which results in a uniform wage a wage more than the poor workman earns and less than the skilled workman could earn, and President Eliot summarizes by saying, “It is high time it should be generally understood that trades unionism in important respects works against the very best effects of democracy." 1 He says it is the duty of capital to combat these practices and that capital alone can cope with them. The building trade unions are the worst offenders. They bring reproach on the very word "union."

But with the railroads the case is different. Moorfield Storey says, "Some months ago [1919 or 1920] Mr. Gompers, the eminent leader of organized labor, said to a committee of the United States Senate that if a law were passed making strikes by railroad employees illegal and punishable, he should not hesitate to defy the law. The statement probably defines the attitude of two or more millions of men, who practically can arrest the business of the United States, and thus presents a very serious question. No state can interfere with interstate commerce in any way, but these men claim a power which is denied to New York or Ohio, and which the people would never by law entrust to any one. When a man like Mr. Gompers, as the leader of perhaps millions of men, defies Congress and threatens civil war if it exercise its undoubted power in a way which he does not approve, he should be made to realize that his attitude is hardly to be distinguished from treason."2 This threat of Gompers was probably bluster and bluff, because the Government has a reach long enough and a grip strong enough to imprison those who defy its authority and laws, but when the president of a labor organization representing three million men indulges in such talk as this the American people instinctively scent danger and will meet force with force. A