t, or by the fear of
violence, in any degree however slight, there is present an element of
personal coercion by the organized laborers. This is the price others
are made to pay for a favorable effect on the wages of the organized
laborers. Now the strictly economic question concerns merely the part
as to the effects upon wages, and the economist (as such) is going
outside of his special field when he pronounces on the moral rectitude
(and the desirability in law) of such acts and policies. One who fully
shares the feelings of the organized workers will believe that the
winning of a strike or the general improvement of the strikers'
condition is so important that it outweighs the evils to other
individuals and to society as a whole. Indeed, to one in that state
of mind the evils appear very small or nonexistent. The economist can
only issue the warning that the commonest illusion he encounters
is the belief of each class--commercial, banking, manufacturing,
wage-earning--that what is for its particular interest is, in a
peculiar manner, for the general interest, so much as to justify
favoring legislation or special exemption from the general law, or
even sheer lawlessness.

Sec. 16. #The public's view of unions.# We may, however, observe the view
of the onlooker striving to be impartial. The attitude of the public
in labor disputes, and particularly in regard to the closed shop, is a
vacillating one. The general public sympathizes in large measure with
the unions in their efforts up to a more or less uncertain point;
but the public does not like to see organized labor with the power to
dictate terms absolutely to the employers any more than it likes to
see employers crush the union. The unions are effective in varying
degrees in strengthening the bargaining power of the workers, and
accordingly the results vary not merely in degree but in kind. The
public wishes to see "fair play," and up to a certain point the
union is a device to get fair play. In truth, what is in the public's
thought, somewhat vaguely, is approval of unions so far as they go
to establish a real equality in competitive bargaining with the
employers, but disapproval where the power of the union gets greater
and becomes monopolistic. It is at this point that organized labor
loses the sympathy of most of "the general public" outside of unions.
When the union tries to force a higher wage than the market will
warrant, when it strives not to establish but