[Socialism As It Is by William English Walling]@TWC D-Link bookSocialism As It Is CHAPTER V 23/31
To abolish strikes, then, is to take away the employees' chief means of offense or defense; while to pretend to abolish strikes _and lockouts_ is to leave in the hands of the employers the ability to discharge or punish in other ways the men with whom they are dissatisfied. When it was proposed to introduce the Canadian law in Massachusetts, no unionists of prominence indorsed it, but it was favored by a very large number of employers, while those employers who objected did so for widely scattered reasons.
Mr.Clark is probably right in suggesting that, while such a law will not be enacted in the United States as things are now, it is very probable that it can be secured after some industrial crisis--and there is little doubt that President Eliot and perhaps also Mr.Roosevelt, for whom Mr.Clark was investigating, and many other influential public men, are expecting this time to arrive soon. The attitude of a large minority of British unions and of a considerable part of the British Socialists is similar to that of the Canadian and Australian majority.
When in 1907 the railway employees of Great Britain were for the first time sufficiently aroused and organized, and on the point of a national strike, a settlement was entered into through the efforts of Mr.Lloyd George and the Board of Trade (and it is said with the assistance of King Edward) which involved an entirely new principle for that country.
A board was constituted to settle this and future strikes of which the Master of Rolls and other British functionaries were the leading elements.
Actually the workers consented for several years to leave in the hands of the judges over whose election and appointment they have only an indirect and partial, if indeed any, control, complete power over their industrial life.
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