If
our men have not self-control, then they are not capable of that great
thing which we call democratic government. A man who takes the law into
his own hands is not the right man to cooeperate in any formation or
development of law and institutions, and some of the processes by which
the struggle between capital and labor is carried on are processes that
come very near to taking the law into your own hands. I do not mean for
a moment to compare them with what I have just been speaking of, but I
want you to see that they are mere gradations in this manifestation of
the unwillingness to cooeperate, and that the fundamental lesson of the
whole situation is that we must not only take common counsel, but that
we must yield to and obey common counsel. Not all of the
instrumentalities for this are at hand. I am hopeful that in the very
near future new instrumentalities may be organized by which we can see
to it that various things that are now going on ought not to go on.
There are various processes of the dilution of labor and the unnecessary
substitution of labor and the bidding in distant markets and unfairly
upsetting the whole competition of labor which ought not to go on.
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