Social Progress and Problems (Part 3)

Labor and capital have not yet made their peace with each other, though a spirit of conciliation is in the air. The decrees of the trades-unions are hard to deal with. Great strikes occur, a truce is patched up, adjustments are made for the sake of each side equally, as both are heavy losers. How it fares afterwards with the weaker in the fight is not usually made known. The condition of general unrest is thus described by Professor Albion W. Small in the American Journal of Sociology. He discusses "the social movement," as it is called. In his view it comprehends something more than the impulse among men to better themselves, for men have always had that impulse; but now there is a new note in their purpose, a new force and a changed outlook. By the new note in men's purpose is meant this: men used to accept the situation, and tried to make themselves as comfortable as possible in it-to-day they propose to change the situation. Besides trying to better themselves in the condition to which they were born, they now try to better the condition itself.

" They are not content with trying to get better wages. They want to overthrow the wage system. They do not stop with plans to provide for a rainy day. They want to abolish the rainy day. They are not content with conjugal fidelity. They want to reconstruct the family. They are not satisfied with improvements in the working of governments. They want to eliminate governments. They look with contempt upon adjustment of relations between social classes. They want to obliterate social classes. The emphasis to-day is on change of conditions rather than upon adjustment of conditions. Consequently too much of the labor problem is simply the problem of avoiding labor. Instead of feeling a pride and obligation in service, men and women through all the grades are debauched by the vision of escape from service, or, what amounts to the same thing, exchange of work for a state that seems to require less work. Not how to do well the work of our present condition, but how to get into a condition which seems to promise release from work, is the question which teases the least respectable and sometimes the more respectable of those who make the social movement. In the older countries Americans are constantly surprised by evidences of pride in being the latest of several generations in the line of fathers and sons who have succeeded to the same lowly occupation and still find satisfaction in conducting it well. With us the rule is discontent unless the occupation of the children promotes them to conditions supposed to be more dignified than those of their parents."