r happier times to-day, and
there are few corners of the civilized world where conditions so evil
prevail now. But without the organization of labor, the status of
workingmen would be much farther removed from what is just and right
than it now is. Every employer who is wise and honest, and who has the
true spirit of a gentleman, will see that his workmen are treated with
the respect that is their just due. Discipline there must be, but it is
a wrong view of discipline that makes it consist of oaths and brutal
insults delivered according to the prevalent good temper or ugliness of
the overseer. Unfortunately, not every man who is placed in authority is
wise, honest, and a gentleman. Bodily violence is no longer permitted by
law, but too often the curses and insults which are heaped on men with
no due cause are a violence which is more severe to many a man than
actual cuffs and kicks. No man can take such treatment without
resentment, and maintain his dignity and self-respect. Yet in how many
places is petty tyranny of this sort still active, and its victims are
cowed into submission for fear of taking the bread from their children's
mouths.

But the member of a strong labor organization need not be cowed or
tamely accept insult. He has the right to resent it, and has the power
of his fraternity to support him. He knows this, and his employer knows
it. Overseers, big with their importance, and inclined to show it by
attacking the self-respect of the men under them are no longer in
demand.

It is very unfortunate that many people misconstrue this result of the
organization of labor as a move toward the abolition of all social ranks
and grades. It is nothing of the kind. Social gradations cannot be
created or brushed away by any legislative enactment, or the acts of
any single class. The combination of the workmen to secure their right
to protect themselves from insult is indeed a movement toward making
them better and nobler men, just as the abolition of slavery in all its
forms was a move in this direction. But no man is truly free if he is
not secure in his right to immunity from personal insult as well as from
bodily violence. It is not strange, however, that the workman, conscious
of the strength of the fraternity behind him, sometimes grows arrogant
and insolent toward those who must necessarily be in authority over him.
Unaccustomed for generations past to other government than fear of one
sort or other, he is all