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New York, The Macmillan company; [etc., etc.]
The social unrest; studies in labor and socialist movements
The social unrest; studies in labor and socialist movements
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This is an OCR edition with typos.
Excerpt from book:
CHAPTER II POLITICS AND BUSINESS There are roughly three points of view in the social question: that of the employer, that of the laborer, and that of the public which includes them both. " Social politics" takes for granted that the social welfare is above either of these partial interests. It is politics of the common good rather than that of any class or party. Into it has entered all those regulative measures which extend and adapt what was first called factory legislation. In no country of the first rank is this legislation so weak as in the United States. Nowhere is there such fatal lack of unity, and nowhere is it so easy to discredit sound legislative proposals by the fear that local business will suffer. This half paralysis of legislation that is really social; that guards labor as carefully as it guards capital, is the more unhappy in its results because large commercial interests never used the government for its private ends with more unconcealed audacity than among ourselves. Here, too, the laborer is learning the uses to which government and politics may be put. Looking to the city and government for help has been taught to the common people by the most successful business men in this country. Our magnates of industry have not preached paternalism, but, in season and out of season, they have practised it. They have practised it so long and so openly, and with such conspicuous profit to themselves, that it is grotesque drollery for them to cry out against paternal legislation. They have not merely looked to the government to assist their enterprises, they have taken possession of it. Hat in hand, they have begged with such importunity that the law-making power, federal, state, and municipal, seems to have been looked upon as a private preserve. Yet these w...
This is an OCR edition with typos.
Excerpt from book:
CHAPTER II POLITICS AND BUSINESS There are roughly three points of view in the social question: that of the employer, that of the laborer, and that of the public which includes them both. " Social politics" takes for granted that the social welfare is above either of these partial interests. It is politics of the common good rather than that of any class or party. Into it has entered all those regulative measures which extend and adapt what was first called factory legislation. In no country of the first rank is this legislation so weak as in the United States. Nowhere is there such fatal lack of unity, and nowhere is it so easy to discredit sound legislative proposals by the fear that local business will suffer. This half paralysis of legislation that is really social; that guards labor as carefully as it guards capital, is the more unhappy in its results because large commercial interests never used the government for its private ends with more unconcealed audacity than among ourselves. Here, too, the laborer is learning the uses to which government and politics may be put. Looking to the city and government for help has been taught to the common people by the most successful business men in this country. Our magnates of industry have not preached paternalism, but, in season and out of season, they have practised it. They have practised it so long and so openly, and with such conspicuous profit to themselves, that it is grotesque drollery for them to cry out against paternal legislation. They have not merely looked to the government to assist their enterprises, they have taken possession of it. Hat in hand, they have begged with such importunity that the law-making power, federal, state, and municipal, seems to have been looked upon as a private preserve. Yet these w...