en done outside of the great trade associations, which
form the natural instrumentalities for organizing such
combination. They offer the mechanism, the mutual knowledge,
the preliminary training in habits of combination, which
together should form the proper conditions for the
development of co-operation. Is it not a singular thing,
considering the manifold benefits that would come to labor
from such a development, that the attention of these great
and powerful organizations has not heretofore been seriously
called to this matter. * * *

The story of such attempts as have already been made in
this direction is one of a sad and discouraging nature to
all who feel the gravity of this problem. Again and again
great organizations have risen on our soil, seeking to
combine our trade associations and promising the millennium
to labor, only to find within a few years suspicion,
distrust, and jealousy eating the heart out of the order,
and disintegration following rapidly as a natural
consequence. The time must soon come let us hope, when the
lesson of these experiences will have been learned.

These are some of the salient faults of labor--faults which
are patent to all dispassionate observers. The first step to
a better state of things lies through the correction of
these faults. Whatever other factors enter into the problem,
this is the factor which it concerns labor to look after if
it would reach the equation of the good time coming. No
reconstruction of society can avail for incompetent,
indifferent, thriftless men who cannot work together.
Self-help must precede all other help. Dreamers may picture
utopias, where all our present laws are suspended, and
demagogues may cover up the disagreeable facts of labor's
own responsibility for its pitiful condition, but sensible
workingmen will remember that, as Renan told his countrymen
after the Franco-Prussian war, "the first duty is to face
the facts of the situation." There are no royal roads to an
honest mastery of fortune, though there seem to be plenty of
by-ways to dishonest success. Nature is a hard
school-mistress. She allows no makeshifts for the discipline
of hard work and of self-denial, for the culture of all the
strengthful qualities. Her American school for workers is