designed to improve the condition of the working classes. In 1870 the people of Zurich rejected a cantonal law which reduced the period of work in factories to twelve hours a day, etc." This last is true. The reasons for this rejection are given to me by Hon. Charles Burkly, of Zurich, who has been in the legislative council, and who is still working for the people, although seventy-three years old. He says: "The reasons for this rejection are manifold. First—A great number of industrial workingmen only worked twelve hours anyway, and a large part of them, if not a majority, worked only eleven, ten and a-half and ten hours. These, of course, voted 'No,' fearing that such an ugly legal working day might lengthen their working time. Secondly-The poor, half-starved weavers and spinners feared a reduction of wages, as their masters authoritatively told them would be the case; and, thirdly, the bulk of the peasantry, being impartial and not at all concerned, would not force it on the city workers when it was very evident that they did not want it. So that only 18,216 voted 'Yes' and 26,983 voted 'No.'" When workingmen, who work less than twelve hours, vote against a twelve-hour day, it puts an entirely different face on the vote than to state the bald fact. It also shows how a half-truth is the worst kind of misstatement.

Mr. MacDonald says again: "In 1877, rejection of a similar federal law," and Mr. Lowell makes the same assertion. This is not true. In 1877 the Swiss people accepted a law fixing eleven hours as the legal working day, by a vote of 181,204 “Yes” against 170,857 "No," and in Zurich the vote was 26,443 "Yes" and 26,492 "No," a slight majority for rejection. These facts were published in the Direct Legislation Record for September, 1894, and in German in the book, entitled, “Initiative and Referendum," by Herr Heinrich Stulsi, the Zurich secretary of state. Such a misstatement might be expected in a newspaper article, but not by a scholar in a magazine of standing. To show the popular feeling about the working-day, it is only necessary to state that the first normal working-day legally fixed on the continent of Europe was enacted in 1864, in the canton of Glarus, by the landsgemeinde, or by direct legislation. Also in Zurich, on August 12, 1894, a law for protecting female workers to ten hours a day was adopted by a vote of about 45,000 "Yes" against about 11,000 "No."

Mr. Lowell says that in 1878 they rejected a law establishing a school of weaving, and, “moreover, they have repeatedly rejected measures for increasing the amount of education in the public schools (1872, 1885, 1888 and 1891), and they have refused to sanction bills to provide free text-books for the children (1887 and 1888).” These facts are true, because, as Mr. Burkly says, "Our peasantry and factory hands are too poor to send their children to school two years longer, as these laws of 1872, 1885, 1888 and 1891 intended. They do like the English gentlemen in parliament, who do not make laws against their own interest. Our peasants said, 'It's all very well and

we're grateful for the good meaning, but we are not rich enough to do it, and therefore we reject it.'" Yet the canton of Zurich and its communes (municipalities) spend yearly (1892) six and a half million francs (about $1,300,000) for education, and the population is about 350,000 (the census of 1888 shows 338,580). This is an average of $3.71 per head of population. According to the Statesman's Year Book, an acknowledged authority, there was spent on education in Italy in 1887-88, by the state, 41,000,000 lire; in 1886, by the provinces, 5,000,000 lire, and by the communes in the same year, 62,000,000, or a total of 108,000,000 lire, which is, in round figures, $21,600,000, or reckoning the population at 30,000,000 (it was 30,565,253 in 1888), this would be 72 cents per head. Following the same method, using facts obtained from the same authority, one finds that Prussia pays 57 cents per unit of population for education; Wurtemberg, 55 cents; France, 74 cents; the United States just under $2, and, using facts furnished by David A. Wells in "Recent Economic Changes," Great Britain and Ireland pay $1.45. It strikes me that it will hardly do for an Englishman, or even an American, to throw stones, as far as educational matters are concerned, at the "mobocracy" of Zurich. Switzerland is a poor country, compared with either England or the United States, yet the canton of Zurich, under the referendum which Mr. Lowell says "has purely a negative effect," and which Mr. MacDonald calls the "phylloxera of legislation," spends, in proportion to its population, nearly double the amount spent in Mr. Lowell's country for education, and more than two and a-half times the amount spent in Mr. MacDonald's home, and from four to six times the amount spent in surrounding countries.

Also remember that Zurich has the obligatory referendum, and every one of these laws appropriating these large amounts for education has been approved by the people. Therefore, they must be credited with knowing a good thing. And it is no wonder that amongst all of the laws submitted to the people, some could be found which, while good in themselves, were too expensive for the people to adopt. Likely, these laws were passed by the legislative body just so that they could get the opinion of the people on this question of expense and heavier taxes.

The same thing is true of factory and labor legislation, in which Zurich, as being one of the principal manufacturing cantons, is pre-eminent, and in which Switzerland as a whole is abreast, if not ahead, of the most advanced parts of the United States or Great Britain.

Mr. MacDonald says: "The most reactionary and backward cantons use the referendum the most." "The contrary is true," writes Mr. Burkly. "The most reactionary canton, Friburg, has not yet got the referendum-the only canton in Switzerland with neither the referendum nor initiative."

[Concluded in the August number.]

LABOR AND INDEPENDENCE. Mankind is endowed with certain unalienable rights, among which are the right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.- Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.

Who can hear or read these immortal words without feeling the blood warming and tingling with gratitude to the noble savants and heroic fathers of our revolution for national independence? Who can calmly contemplate these lofty aspirations bursting forth from the innermost springs of pure, human hearts, without feeling that mankind was made the better for their utterance? A rubicon had been passed by

their coinage; a goal of the highest order had been erected for men to set their pace, to tone their voice, to clarify their mental vision.

In celebrating independence day none should be unmindful of the fact that, apart from creating a new nation, the declaration of the independence of that nation coupled with it even a higher, a nobler conception and charter of the rights of man.

We have every reason to feel a pride in the achievements of our people; we have right to expect that they will perform their highest duty to their fellow-men, that the glorious heirloom of freedom and independence, to which they are the legatees, shall neither be neglected nor lost by over-conceit, over-confidence or indifference.

With our songs and heart-swells of joy in celebrating our national independence, are mingled the sympathy with and the indignation at the wrongs suffered by myriads of our people, unhappy and disconsolate at the thought of natural wants unappeased, rational desires frustrated, human hopes blasted, and freedom groaning under the weight of a galling yoke.

The gilded palaces of the pampered few to the miserable hovels where poverty, misery and despair almost abound, are but a few rods apart. The one made separate and distinct from the other by artificial and unnatural laws. Foisted upon our people through the cunning and chicanery of the one, the ignorance, or better, the indifference of the other. That "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" to-day as much so as a century past, must be plain, even to the most casual of observers. To exercise that vigilance is the duty of the hour.

The rich, the wealth possessors, no longer have any choice of country in which liberty is more readily accorded or denied them. For them the whole world is not only a cradle, but one complete realm of liberty and freedom.

From time immemorial it has always been and is so now the mission of the workers, the wealth producers of the world, to struggle for liberty, to maintain that degree of freedom already achieved and still to battle, to suffer and to bear the burdens and sacrifices that the last vestiges of wrong and injustice may be overcome and real, true liberty established in the full noon-day of her glory.

And for the workers, what to them is the means by which their vigilance may be aroused, exercised and maintained. To the wage-earners the trade unions are the school of political liberty, the hope for economic freedom. pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night," to lead the hosts of labor onward and upward to the goal of their emancipation.

"A

Truly may we repeat the inspired poet's chant when singing an ode to the trade unions:

They upward, upward press the people to that pure, exalted plane

Where no throne shall cast a shadow, and no slave shall wear a chain.

They have trampled on the fagots, broken crucifix and wheel,

Banished block and thong and hemlock and the headsman's bloody steel.

Forced the churchhold to surrender stake and scourge and bolt and bar,

Torn the key from off its girdle, thrown the gates of truth ajar.

They have forced the titled tyrants human rights to recognize,

And, with the lance of knowledge, slain a legion lies. They are lighting lamps of freedom on a million altar

stones

With torches they have kindled at the blaze of burning thrones.

And this light will sweep and circle to the very ends of earth,

Touching with immortal beauty every heart on every hearth,

Thrilling every human being underneath the silent skies,

And transfiguring our planet to a perfect paradise.
As we higher march and higher on in this light serene
Every man will be a kaiser, every woman be a queen.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MISERY. Perhaps there is no more ludicrous spectacle in connection with the labor movement than is the attitude of the men who, committed to one school or another of so-called scientific thought upon the labor question, decry all efforts directed to uplift the masses of labor to day and the near future, the schools of thought (?) which produce the pessimists who denounce the trade unions, their efforts and achievements as paliatives, and who assert that they cannot secure better conditions for any long period; the men who seek their destruction because they, as they say, stand in the way of more radical results.

One may really look on with surprise how conclusions so erroneous can be reached; how men, in the light of the achievements of the workers in trade unions, even dare breathe a word against the organizations which have done so much, and will do more to raise the workers from the slough of despondency and despair to hope and determination to achieve their full rights, to struggle, suffer and conquer, until their emancipation is complete.

The basic thoughts of these theorists are, as we have said, that the trade unions are unable to secure any improvement in the conditions of the workers. When shown the great changes and improvements which have been accomplished through trade union effort, they shift their position immediately and urge that the condition of the workers must become much worse before they will move in any line to attain radical, permanent results.

The fact that the world does not progress by jumps and bounds, that all forward movements in the world have been by easy stages of development, by evolutionary processes, that all attempts at "giant strides" have brought their reaction, leaving the workers in a more hopeless condition, counts for naught with these philosophers of misery.

Surely, if the deterioration in the condition of the workers, if wretchedness and poverty would produce radical and permanent_good, the labor movements of the United States, and England, should be in the lowest rungs of industrial reform and the Chinese stand at the head of civilization.

The trade unions are the natural organizations of the wage-workers; they are the associations of the wealth producers, defending their own interests against the encroachment of all others in the complex interests of the social, industrial, commercial and professional world.

The purpose of the trade union is to maintain a minimum and to secure a maximum standard of life for all; to steadily, but surely, step by step, advance the whole body of the wage-workers to the attainment of the highest possible condition of civilized existence.

To attain that end, however, it requires something more than the fond hope of the mere enthusiast or the day dreams of the phantasmagoria hunters. To secure for the working class equal opportunities, freedom, justice and emancipation requires the assertion of their ability to comprehend and take advantage and to administer the affairs of the altered social conditions. To become possessed of these qualifications necessitates the experience which can and will only come to them from the management of their own organizations of their own class-the trade unions-the germ of any future state of society into which the present may merge or develop.

The trade unions' first mission is to organize the workers more thoroughly, compactly and aggressively, that the toilers may be in a position to defend their interests under all conditions and circumstances and on all fields; to provide for the strike or lockout, and thus prevent their frequent recurrence; to make advances and inroads on the profit-monger in whatever garb he may appear; to secure less hours of labor for the over-employed and remunerative toil for the unemployed; to rescue the young and the innocent children from the clutches of the grab-all-almighty-dollar worshipper and place them in the playground and the school room; to undertake and wage to-day the ceaseless, endless battles of labor and not shirk the duties, responsibilities or the sacrifices which should be borne and made,

so that the struggles of those who are to follow us may be aware of the fact that we in our day did our share in life's struggles for a better and happier life, for he is, indeed, a coward who would shift the battles of to-day from his own upon the shoulders of the generations to follow, when they would become more intense, bitter and brutal.

The trade unions are the natural and legitimate heirs of all the struggles and battles, the sacrifices and heroism, the victories or adversities of the working class of all ages and all times. They are the naturally and historically developed organizations of the wage-workers, reaching the highest possible point of numerical growth, comprehensive breadth and aggressive force as measured with the most advanced state of the general intelligence, wants, desires and demands of the workers of their time. Therefore, to antagonize the movement of the working class, for the working class, by the working class-the trade union-is to range one's self on the side of the enemy of the working class.

To pretend that antagonism to the trade union is for the workers' interests is as shallow as the theories upon which they are founded, as sophistical, weak and defenseless.

Regardless from which side the opposition to the trade union is directed, whether from the callous, soulless, cruel defenders of present economic conditions or the bigoted doctrinaire whose philosophy and theories are out of harmony with the facts, and hence denounce the facts, we may write them all down as the natural enemies of labor's progress-the toiler's emancipation.

Workers, organize in your unions. Unite in a broad, comprehensive federation, that you may more readily defend yourselves from the open enemy, as well as the pretended friend, who has the dulling, deadening opiate of his theory to offer as a substitute for the substantial relief and prospective remedy secured and struggled for by the trade unions.

Well may the trade unionists declare that it is not only the philosophy of misery which is preached to them, but that these pseudo friends (but real enemies) make a woeful exhibition of the misery of their philosophy.

A UNION AND ITS LIBELERS. In a recent article, that mud-slinging, would be union-wrecking organ of the socialist party of New York, The People, undertook to declare to the enemies of labor that the Cigarmakers International Union was bankrupt. The figures in the report of the organization were falsified, its predictions of the downfall of the organization were simply the wicked wish

which was father to the thought, and its statistics criminal.

Unquestionably, in the desperation of this delectable socialist editor, who steeps his pen in gall every time he writes anything in connection with a trade union, has over-reached himself and endeavored to substitute subtraction for addition. He plainly says that adding two to two leaves nothing. It is a plain case of malicious falsification of the accounts of a progressive, aggressive and substantial trade union-the Cigarmakers International Union.

But, even were the condition of the organization as precarious (which it is not) as he would have the world believe, we appeal to the unprejudiced in all walks of life whether it would then be right to play into the hands of the enemy by giving him the weaknesses of the organization and pointing out its vulnerable spot, if such there be?

A few weeks ago a labor paper was launched in the interest of the trade union movement. In its salutatory as to its purposes, it said: "It · is desirable to print the various transactions of the meetings of each union save and except those matters, which, if printed, would put the enemy on guard and threaten the material interests of organized labor." How different the tone, how different the sentiment, how different the principle involved, declared by this trade union paper to the bombastic, Judas Iscariot sheet, The People.

Sometime ago we called attention to the fact that the triangle leaders of the New York socialist party consisted of a professor without a profession, a lawyer without a brief, a statistician who will prove anything anyone desires for the revenue there may be in it. We said, too, that these acts lead one to suspect them of being Pinkerton detectives, hired for the purpose of destroying the trade union movement and placing the workers in a helpless position, at the tender mercies of the corporate and capitalist classes; they certainly acted like Pinkerton men, and that soon this would be manifested. It has come to pass sooner than we anticipated, for it may now be safely asserted that Professor (?) Daniel DeLeon, alias Loeb, has followed in the footsteps of Professor Garside, and is the paid hireling of the Pinkerton agency.

The Cigarmakers International Union will endure long after its libelers and detractors have passed the rubicon of this life. It will live to fight, and fight the battles of the trade for the upbuilding of the organization, the improvement in the condition of its workers; and will be found struggling and conquering, shoulder to shoulder with the advance guard of the trade unions of America now and evermore, until the dawn of emancipation day.

EDITORIAL COMMENT. THE old and terse saying that there are three kinds of liars in this world-plain liars, damn liars and statistic-receives an all-'round corroboration. The

People.

Wonder whether that organ of viciousness was on the point of making a confession when it declared this fact, and whether it had in mind the plain liar, Daniel DeLeon, alias Loeb; the d-d liar, Hugo Vogt, and the statistician, Lucien Saniel?

THE speech Gov. John P. Altgeld, of Illinois, delivered at the Chicago Auditorium on "Bimetalism," in reply to the speech of Secretary Carlisle, has been made a part of the Congressional Record. Union members desiring a copy of Governor Altgeld's thoughtful and excellent speech can obtain it free by writing to the senator of their state or their member of congress.

MR. J. C. ANDERSON has been expelled from the socialist party of Omaha because he would not retract what he did not publish or say, and because he would not write a statement which he did not believe. Another charge was that he had written a letter to a labor paper which was not an organ of the socialist party. If this is a precursor of what justice would be under socialist party domination, give us Ricks, Taft, Grosscup, et al.

DURING the past month a number of central bodies have been furnished with the names of able and qualified speakers to deliver addresses at the Labor Day demonstrations. We have the names of several more able speakers who have consented to officiate in that capacity upon very moderate terms. If there are other central bodies who are desirous of the services of qualified speakers, they would do well to communicate with the office of the American Federation of Labor at once.

THE remarkable growth of the American Federation of Labor is evidenced in the fact that during the month of June last year there were but twenty local and one national charters issued, while during the same month this year there have been forty-two local, three national, and three city central charters issued. The Brotherhood of Boilermakers and Iron Ship Builders, the National Union of Textile Workers, and the Federated Association of Wire Drawers are the latest to get into line with their fellow workers, and also the central labor unions of Leadville, Col., Lockport, N. Y., and Biddeford and Saco, Me. The application of the State Federation of Utah has also been received, and several local applications are pending proper endorsement. The above showing does

not, of course, include the large number of local charters issued by uational unions attached to the Federation, which issue their own charters, and which report surprising gains all along the line. We tender our congratulations to our fellow workmen.

THE New York Volkszeitung is the twin sister to the People, the socialist organ of the socialist party. So contemptible, malicious and falsifying were its reports of the meetings of the New York Central Labor Union that a resolution was passed by that body debarring the representatives of that paper from attendance at its sessions. One can imagine the falsifications and malicious representations in that sheet when it is borne in mind that the representatives of all newspapers, capitalistic and otherwise, have free access to the meetings of the New York Central Labor Union.

IN our last issue we commented upon the attitude of the Cleveland Citizen, urging local unions when in trouble to demand that the American Federation of Labor should support them. We then stated that the Citizen could be engaged in better work; that if it desired the American Federation of Labor should be in a position by which such demands could be complied with it were better to create an agitation by which a great defense fund could be founded. The Citizen replies that this was its purpose. It asserts that the American Federation of Labor "is an unwieldy machine and almost useless, and that Mr. Gompers is aware of that fact.'

In reply we would say, that the Citizen is starting in at the wrong end. If its purpose is to start an agitation to build a fund, let our worthy contemporary and others aid us in our efforts to impress upon the minds of the workers the necessity of contributing higher dues to their unions, and the unions in turn to contribute higher dues to the American Federation of Labor. This is the way by which a defense fund can be created, not by the failure to contribute to the unions and the American Federation of Labor, and in the meantime to make demands on the latter for funds which the Citizen knows do not exist for such purposes, and toward which the members have not contributed.

The British Trade Union Congress has no defense fund in case of strikes, notwithstanding it has been in existence for more than a quarter of a century, yet no one undertakes to say that it is an unwieldy machine and almost useless." The American Federation of Labor proposes to be something more to the American wage earners than is the British Trade Union Congress. It purposes the idea of aiding the workers on all fields of agitation, education and