by those of Moses or Confucius, but by the devil's maxim, "Every man for himself."

It is asked, How can the decisions of a court of justice be enforced upon the contestants in a labor controversy? Labor controversies which assume proportions sufficient to justify public interference are generally controversies between a corporation and a labor organization. Enforcement of the law against the corporation is a very simple matter. If a railroad corporation does not pay interest on its bonds the government takes the railroad, manages the road itself, and so pays the interest on the bonds. It puts the railroad into the hands of a receiver, and so cares for the interests of the creditors. The right of the nation in the highway is greater than the right of either stockholder or bondholder. It would be a perfectly simple thing for the law to provide that when the corporation cannot run its trains, through a labor war, a receiver shall take the road and manage it.

"This is all very well," replies the objector, "as a means of enforcing the decree of the court on the corporation; but how will you enforce it on the laborer? Will you require him to work for less wages or during more hours than he approves ? To do this is to establish slavery." No, no one proposes to establish slavery, or to compel any man to work under any other compulsion than such as is involved in the law, "If a man will not work, neither shall he eat." And no other compulsion would be required. Whenever the law provides

no remedy for a wrong, the wronged take the law into their own hands. The law makes no adequate provision for punishing the seducer. The husband or friend, therefore, shoots the seducer at sight; and juries habitually acquit in such cases, not because the avenger is insane, but because the law is inefficient. Now the American workingman is without a remedy for wrongs which he thinks exist, and which an increasing number of disinterested spectators also think exist. He strikes because the law furnishes him no other remedy for real or fancied injustice. When, as in England, by the consent of the employers, a remedy is provided, he ceases to strike. If, without the consent of the employers, a remedy was provided by law, he would cease to strike. And if he did not, the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Debs case has made it clear that a combination of employees for the purpose of blocking the highways of the nation is a criminal conspiracy; and it would not be a difficult matter to frame a law which should forbid men employed on the great transportation lines to leave in a body without adequate notice, provided the law also furnished them some other remedy for wrong than such combination.

Conciliation, the recognition by employer and employed that they are partners in a common enterprise; arbitration, the adjustment of all questions of self-interest, that cannot be adjusted through conciliation, by reference to a mutually

chosen tribunal; and the intervention of law where public rights are infringed upon by controversy between laborer and capitalist, this seems to me to be the application of Christ's method for the solution of the labor war, until we come to the full recognition of the fact that workingman and capitalist are partners in a common enterprise, and the very motive of war ceases to exist.

CHAPTER XI.

CRIMINALS: THE ENEMIES OF THE SOCIAL ORDER.

IN establishing a new social order upon the earth, an order of righteousness, peace, and happiness, Jesus Christ and his disciples have to meet and overcome, not only ignorance, prejudice, and indifference, but open, deliberate, and purposeful hostility. That measure of righteousness which man has already recognized and organized in human society we call law; the violation of such law is crime; those enemies of the social order who not merely obstruct the development of society toward its ideal, but set themselves against righteousness as already organized in institutions, we call criminals. There is in every community a considerable class of such enemies of the social order. Some are so simply through ignorance or bad education; some through inherited vices; some through adverse social influences. For the wrong-doing of some, society is responsible, even more than the individual wrong-doer. Some have drifted into habits of crime gradually and unconsciously; some have, of set purpose, engaged in criminal life, - have devoted themselves to crime as men devote themselves to law, medicine, or the ministry. The sta

tistics of our criminal population must be taken with a great deal of allowance. It is a migratory population; banished from one State or from one city, the criminal flees to another. Thus the same man is counted in the statistical reports of different institutions and even of different States. But it has been estimated that the criminal population of the United States, including in that term not only the criminals themselves, but those who are dependent upon them, numbers about 700,000; in other words, that about one in every seventy of the population is more or less aggressively and deliberately an enemy of the social order. This criminal class is increasing more rapidly than population. Says Havelock Ellis: 1

"The level of criminality, it is well known, is rising, and has been rising during the whole of the present century, throughout the civilized world. In France, in Germany, in Italy, in Belgium, in Spain, in the United States, the tide of criminality is becoming higher steadily and rapidly. In France it has risen several hundred per cent.; so, also, for several kinds of serious crime, in many parts of Germany; in Spain the number of persons sent to perpetual imprisonment nearly doubled between 1870 and 1883; in the United States, the criminal population has increased since the war, relatively to the population, by one third. . . . Insular Great Britain alone appears to be relatively unsubmerged by the rising tide of criminality; but even here

1 H. Ellis, The Criminal, p. 295.