Sec. 15. #The public and labor legislation.# It has come to be recognized that in every serious labor dispute, especially in such as develop into strikes, those concerned are not merely the two parties, employers and employees, but a third party, the public, consisting of every one else whose interests are not directly or indirectly bound up with one of the other two parties.  The line of demarcation is not easy to draw exactly.  An individual may be divided in sympathy, inclining to the one party perhaps because of some personal friendships or class loyalty or to the other party because of material investments, while in the main having interests distinct from either.  But wherever the public is drawn in as a party, it includes far more persons and embraces far larger interests than does either of the other two parties or than do both of them together.  The public becomes a party primarily because it consists of the purchasers and consumers of the products, who are deprived of the usual supply of goods, more or less essential to their welfare or even to their existence.  With the increasing division of labor and complexity of industrial organization more and more kinds of business have, in a greater and greater degree, become “affected with a public interest.”  The public becomes an unwilling party, therefore, in every serious labor controversy.

In order that any kind of labor legislation shall be enacted, it is necessary (so far as we have a government by public opinion) for a majority of the public to be convinced that the conditions are such as call for governmental interference.  It becomes so convinced in two broadly distinguishable classes of cases:  one, when the masses of unorganized workers are too weak to secure for themselves conditions of work and wages consistent with health and morality; and the other, when strong bodies of organized workers, in their attempts to win their ends in an industrial dispute, exceed their private rights and invade the public welfare.

Sec. 16. #The public and compulsory arbitration#.  Where the railways are owned and operated by the state (as is now the case pretty generally except in America and Great Britain) the question of the “right to strike” arises from time to time, in critical forms.  The logic of the situation compels even those officials that are of the labor party or are most favorable to labor, to maintain an uninterrupted service on the public railways.  The experiences of that nature in France and in Australasia have been notable.  Nowhere in the United States has the principle of compulsory arbitration been adopted, but at the time of the great anthracite strike, in 1902, public sentiment grew strong in favor of it.  As a result of the intolerable conditions in the mines of Colorado was passed the compulsory investigation act of 1915 in that state.  In 1916 the threat of a general railroad strike brought from many quarters strong expressions of condemnation in principle, of the strike as a method of settlement of wage disputes on the railroads.  And in the end the organized laborers themselves accepted, apparently with much satisfaction, a law involving the legal fixation of wages and the principle of compulsion as applied to the employers.