among individual laborers, and in this way to secure for labor a larger share of the total industrial product.  A democratic government has little or less reason to interfere on behalf of the non-union laborer than it has to interfere in favor of the small producer.  As a type the non-union laborer is a species of industrial derelict.  He is the laborer who has gone astray and who either from apathy, unintelligence, incompetence, or some immediately pressing need prefers his own individual interest to the joint interests of himself and his fellow-laborers.  From the point of view of a constructive national policy he does not deserve any special protection.  In fact, I am willing to go farther and assert that the non-union industrial laborer should, in the interest of a genuinely democratic organization of labor, be rejected; and he should be rejected as emphatically, if not as ruthlessly, as the gardener rejects the weeds in his garden for the benefit of fruit-and flower-bearing plants.

The statement just made unquestionably has the appearance of proposing a harsh and unjust policy in respect to non-union laborers; but before the policy is stigmatized as really harsh or unjust, the reader should wait until he has pursued the argument to its end.  Our attitude towards the non-union laborer must be determined by our opinion of the results of his economic action.  In the majority of discussions of the labor question the non-union laborer is figured as the independent working man who is asserting his right to labor when and how he prefers against the tyranny of the labor union.  One of the most intelligent political and social thinkers in our country has gone so far as to describe them as industrial heroes, who are fighting the battle of individual independence against the army of class oppression.  Neither is this estimate of the non-union laborer wholly without foundation.  The organization and policy of the contemporary labor union being what they are, cases will occasionally and even frequently occur in which the non-union laborer will represent the protest of an individual against injurious restrictions imposed by the union upon his opportunities and his work.  But such cases are rare compared to the much larger number of instances in which the non-union laborer is to be considered as essentially the individual industrial derelict.  In the competition among laboring men for work there will always be a certain considerable proportion who, in order to get some kind of work for a while, will accept almost any conditions of labor or scale of reward offered to them.  Men of this kind, either because of irresponsibility, unintelligence, or a total lack of social standards and training, are continually converting the competition of the labor market into a force which degrades the standard of living and prevents masses of their fellow-workmen from obtaining any real industrial independence.  They it is who bring about the result that the most