is more costly than the experiments
at Woolwich. Mr. Dolles, in his new work on political
economy, gives some statistics which abundantly illustrate
the folly of strikes, although he only gives one side of the
case, namely, the losses which fall directly upon the
laborers themselves. If to these were added the losses of
capitalists, the aggregate would become colossal. In 1829
the Manchester spinners struck, and lost $1,250,000 in wages
before the dispute was at an end. The next year their
brethren at Ashton and Stayleybridge followed their example
in striking and in losing $1,250,000. In 1833 the builders
of Manchester forfeited $360,000 by voluntary idleness. In
1836 the spinners of Preston threw away $286,000. Eighteen
years afterward their successor, seventeen thousand strong,
slowly starved through thirty-six weeks and paid $1,200,000
for the privilege. In 1853 the English iron-workers lost
$12,000 by a strike. Such losses marked, too, the strikes of
the London builders in 1860, and tailors in 1868, and the
northern iron-workers in 1865. The strike of the Belfast
linen-weavers, which was ended a few weeks since by the
mediation of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science, cost the operatives $1,000,000.

The cost of strikes is expressible only in the aggregate of
the savings of labor consumed in idleness, of the loss to
the productivity of the country, of the disturbance of the
whole mechanism of exchange, and of the injury wrought upon
the delicate social organization by the strain thus placed
upon it. The famous Pittsburgh strike is estimated to have
cost the country ten millions of dollars. When so costly a
weapon is found to miss far more often than it hits, it is
altogether too dear. * * *

Trades-unions in this country seem to me to be gravely at
fault in clinging to such an obsolete weapon. They should
have turned their attention to our modern improvement upon
this bludgeon.

Arbitration is a far cheaper and more effective instrument
of adjusting differences between capital and labor--a far
more likely means of securing a fair increase of wages. It
places both sides to the controversy in an amicable mood,
and is an appeal to the reason and conscience--not wholly
dead in the most soulless cor