The Preservation of Industrial Peace

Abstract

THE war has certainly left us in America in a most peculiar situation-a victorious nation, restored to the ways of peace, finds itself, notwithstanding victory, in the midst of a most serious industrial crisis. No man would, I presume, have believed in 1914, while thinking of the possibilities of the future, that the differences between capital and labor could come to be so tense as they actually are today. Yet the tenseness is a fact. Situations have developed which were unknown to our pre-war social and industrial economy, and they have been produced, it seems to me, because, after all, as a well-known philosophical lawyer said in Washington soon after the end of the actual war, the great struggle of 1914 to 1919 constitutes one of the two or three great convulsions that the world has had in all its history. He said that it was almost impossible for those who lived in the days of the gradual disintegration of the Roman Empire to understand the forces which were at play at that time, and that it was quite a time before those who lived and played their part in the convulsion in Europe that we call the French Revolution appreciated the end to which that great political movement led. And we today are still groping, so to speak, he said, because we are unable to appreciate the extent of the convulsion through which we have lately passed. In consequence, we are uncertain as to how we can get to a more just appreciation of the changed conditions. Fortunately in America we at least have the people broadened by the war so that the national mind looks clearly forward to a sane but more soundly progressive human society than anywhere else on the face of the earth.