HAS PRIVATE OWNERSHIP LOST GROUND?
Has private ownership of great public utilities been strengthened or weakened by the contest? “As concerns the coal industry,” says Mr. Roberts, “a considerable proportion of the correspondents and editorial writers incline to favor something like Nationalization, perhaps temporary, perhaps partial, though recognizing that when coal mining has once become the Nation’s business it may stay so. One editorial writer remarks that ‘as an independent, self-regulated industry, old King Coal is having his last chance.’ However, I detect little, if any, enthusiasm in the effort to find a substitute for private ownership. The effort appears to spring from what might be called emergency opinion. Then, too, it is offset by an effort to keep us from ‘seizing things.’ How should we manage them after they were seized? You notice that the Grand Rapids ‘News’ remarks: ‘The Government represents all the people. If it takes control of the coal mines, it will not pay without question the wages the miners demand. The Government would be concerned first of all in securing a steady supply of fuel for everybody. There would be no right to strike against wages or conditions then. Strikes would be little short of rebellion.’ On those terms, where should we obtain miners? That difficulty is not overlooked by the press. In the case of the railways, you remember that the New York ‘Times’said lately that, ‘even if Congress should authorize the President to commandeer the roads, it could not give him power to compel men to work on them if they were unwilling to do so.’”

HAS NATIONALIZATION GAINED?
The Outlook asks if the contest in the coal and railway industries has tended toward or away from Government ownership of public utilities. “Among the railway employees,” says Mr. Roberts, “there is a pronounced leaning in that direction. See how the New York ‘Times’ puts it: ‘Their view is that Government operation of the railroads would permanently erect the unions into a privileged class, recelving higher wages than their fellows and given a political power which could be used to terrorize Congress and intimidate the Administration.’ But popular opinion, as reflected by the press, is radically opposed to such a measure. People have not forgotten our war-time experience with Federal control, and, for that reason partly, they oppose Government ownership of the coal mines. However, one recognizes a general demand, summed up in the sentence I have marked in this cutting from the New York ‘Herald,’ that the coal industry ‘be put on a sound economic and solid business basis, under private ownership and management but at the same time under Government sanction and regulation.’ That nothing short of thorough reorganization can prevent trouble is fully appreciated. See what the ‘Survey’ has shown in an article signed by two Government geologists. That during the last thirty years the, bituminous mines have lost three working days out of ten. That, although the most that has ever been burned or exported in a year is 550,000,000 tons,’ our mines ‘are developed to an annual capacity of 750,000,000 tons’-the ‘chief cause of intermittency.’ As Messrs. Tryon and MeKinney, the geologists I have quoted, tell us, ‘the over-development is the result of free competition playing on a resource so widely distributed as to be almost a free gift of nature.’ So it is not the managers fault. ‘Without concerted action of the kind forbidden by the anti-trust laws, they cannot control the economic forces that surround them.’ And now let me read you a few paragraphs from an editorial in the New York ‘World:’

“‘Bituminous mining in the United States hardly deserves the name of a business. It is a chaos, and a bloody one. Because of seasonal production and uneven demand, there are nearly twice as many men in mining villages as are needed. Because there are too many for the jobs on hand and because they are isolated from communities that might furnish other employment, the miners can’t enforce their demands under normal conditions. With surplus labor keeping wages low, the pits will show a profit in a good year even when run without modern machinery.

“‘They are so run, and according to the Federal Trade Commission, they do show a fair profit. At the same time a majority of the men are poorly paid upon an annual income basis and often desperate. When they strike, they are met by the solid facts that there is not enough money for higher wages and that there are not enough orders to run more than sixty per cent of the mines. They are met also by the autocracy of the mine-guard system, established to handle desperate employees.

“‘There is no final solution except a complete reorganization of bituminous production. Until that is done it will be necessary to restrain both sides from violence in a dreary series of conflicts ever menacing civil warfare. One after another, strikes will recur, bringing violence with them if continued, so long as coal is mined in this country as it is mined now.’

“Have I made my point clear? What the people want is not Government ownership, either of railways or of coal mines, but successful, because scientific, Government regulation. They approve when such a paper as the San Antonio ‘Express’ declares that, coal being ‘just as essential to National life as the transportation system, further Federal regulation is inevitable.’ ”

MONOPOLIES OF MONEY AND MEN
The Outlook’s question, “Has this contest tended toward or away from monopoly?” seems to Mr. Roberts somewhat vaguely worded. “You mean the One Big Union?” he asks. “And a corresponding unionization of capital? Then a fight between the two, with no mercy on the consumer? In that case, I may say that it is a question not at all widely discussed in the press. However, on its labor side, there are labor journals that deal with it more frankly than is usual, and they have been led to do so during the strikes, though not wholly because of them. Over the announcement of the Supreme Court’s decision making labor unions suable there was deep resentment. The New York ‘Call,’ a Socialist paper, termed this ‘the most staggering blow ever aimed at the organized working class: Though declaring it would be ‘as futile as was the crucifixion of Christ,’ the Minneapolis ‘Labor Review’ saw in it an ‘attempt to abolish the unions.’ The Seattle ‘Union Record’ said, ‘It is pie for the direct actionist who preaches that Government is designed solely for the purpose of keeping the working class in a state of subjection to employers.’ It was then that the Indianapolis ‘Union’ asserted: ‘The Reds and Bolsheviki will thrive on such decisions. They say triumphantly, “Didn’t we tell you the courts were against the worker? Join the One Big Union and kick the bucket over. Seize every-thing.” , But observe. Even here the point is made indirectly. There is nothing like ‘Who says so? We do!’”

THE GOVERNMENT AND THE PEOPLE
Has the policy of the Government under this Administration shown weakness or strength in our Governmental structure? “There has been criticism of the President,” says Mr. Roberts, “but not of our Governmental structure except by Socialists and Radicals. And when critics of the Administration assail Mr. Harding the Democratic New York ‘Times’-I had the cutting in my hand a moment ago, let me take it up again as I was saying, the New York ‘Times’ remarks: ‘Those who accuse him of hesitancy and weakness should in fairness point out what warrant of law he has for doing otherwise than he has done. The fault lies, not in him, but in the happy-go-lucky spirit in which Congress has permitted the country to drift into seeming helplessness in the presence of a Nation-wide strike. There ought to be remedial and safeguarding legislation. But it is foolish in the extreme to fancy that this can be framed overnight or put into effect in a panicky state of mind.’”

THE CURE
This brings us squarely in front of The Outlook’s concluding question: What legislation, if any, does the situation call for from Congress and the States? In reply, Mr. Roberts quotes the very general assertion that we must provide the Labor Board with “teeth.” It has none whatever at present. The “New Republic,” he reminds us, has been saying: “The law grants the Board no power to enforce its decrees. Public opinion is its only police, and publicity its only weapon of punishment.” Also, he reads aloud from an editorial in the Philadelphia “Evening Public Ledger,” which declares: “The Transportation Act is working badly, and in its labor provisions it is working very badly. The Labor Board which it created is based on the mistaken principle that the wages problem can be artificially segregated from the general financial problem. Experience has now confirmed what was freely predicted in 1920, that since wages are so large a part of costs, wage policies must be regulated by the authorities that regulate the other aspects of railway finance. The immediate trouble has arisen through failure to recognize this fact.” When discussing the President’s demand for legislation to make the Labor Board’s decisions binding, Mr. Roberts takes up a clipping from the Philadelphia “Bulletin,” which contends that what the Board should have, in order to prevent strikes, is “the power to compel arbitration of railroad labor disputes”-a concrete suggestion, but offset by the Norfolk “Ledger-Dispatch’s” remark that “no decision of the Labor Board could compel a man to work.”

The President demands “a National investigation of the coal industry, so as to provide constructive recommendations for legislation to govern its conduct,” and Mr. Roberts tells us that, while the Brooklyn “Eagle” predicts that “the factfinding commission will amount to nothing,” a number of influential papers warmly approve. Among them is the Philadelphia “Public Ledger,” which, so Mr. Roberts points out, believes that “the proper sort of commission would in the end do more than prevent labor troubles at the mines; it would put coal mining and distribution upon a scientific basis, and at the same time bring down the price of bituminous and anthracite coal.”

But perhaps the most important step toward the prevention of strikes in both the coal and the railway industry has already been taken. Recalling once more that the Supreme Court’s decision in the famous Coronado coal-strike case pronounced “such organizations suable in the Federal Courts for their acts” and declared that “funds accumulated to be expended in conducting strikes are subject to execution in suits for torts committed by such unions in strikes,” Mr. Roberts quotes an attorney for the American Federation of Labor as admitting that, accordingly, if the railway unions strike, they will be liable under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act for conspiracy in restraint of trade.

It is not surprising to find that Mr. Morris Hillquit calls the decision “a serious blow to organized labor,” or that Senator La Follette complains, “It is most ominous in what it foreshadows.” From their point of view, both gentlemen are right. Labor has enjoyed special privileges hitherto. Under the Clayton Act it has been free to conspire in restraint of trade, whereas capital could not. At last we have arrived at something “ominous” -namely, one law for all. From a file of clippings Mr. Roberts selects an editorial that recently appeared in the Ohio “State Journal” and concludes with this brief but significant sentence: “If Government has the right to exercise control over organizations of capital, so has it over those of labor.”