n the interest of a genuinely
democratic organization of labor, be rejected; and he should be rejected
as emphatically, if not as ruthlessly, as the gardener rejects the weeds
in his garden for the benefit of fruit-and flower-bearing plants.

The statement just made unquestionably has the appearance of proposing a
harsh and unjust policy in respect to non-union laborers; but before the
policy is stigmatized as really harsh or unjust, the reader should wait
until he has pursued the argument to its end. Our attitude towards the
non-union laborer must be determined by our opinion of the results of
his economic action. In the majority of discussions of the labor
question the non-union laborer is figured as the independent working man
who is asserting his right to labor when and how he prefers against the
tyranny of the labor union. One of the most intelligent political and
social thinkers in our country has gone so far as to describe them as
industrial heroes, who are fighting the battle of individual
independence against the army of class oppression. Neither is this
estimate of the non-union laborer wholly without foundation. The
organization and policy of the contemporary labor union being what they
are, cases will occasionally and even frequently occur in which the
non-union laborer will represent the protest of an individual against
injurious restrictions imposed by the union upon his opportunities and
his work. But such cases are rare compared to the much larger number of
instances in which the non-union laborer is to be considered as
essentially the individual industrial derelict. In the competition among
laboring men for work there will always be a certain considerable
proportion who, in order to get some kind of work for a while, will
accept almost any conditions of labor or scale of reward offered to
them. Men of this kind, either because of irresponsibility,
unintelligence, or a total lack of social standards and training, are
continually converting the competition of the labor market into a force
which degrades the standard of living and prevents masses of their
fellow-workmen from obtaining any real industrial independence. They it
is who bring about the result that the most disagreeable and dangerous
classes of labor remain the poorest paid; and as long as they are
permitted to have their full effects upon the labor situation, progress
to a higher standard of living is miserably slow and always suffers a
severe