The cost of strikes is expressible only in the aggregate of the savings of labor consumed in idleness, of the loss to the productivity of the country, of the disturbance of the whole mechanism of exchange, and of the injury wrought upon the delicate social organization by the strain thus placed upon it.  The famous Pittsburgh strike is estimated to have cost the country ten millions of dollars.  When so costly a weapon is found to miss far more often than it hits, it is altogether too dear. * * *

Trades-unions in this country seem to me to be gravely at fault in clinging to such an obsolete weapon.  They should have turned their attention to our modern improvement upon this bludgeon.

Arbitration is a far cheaper and more effective instrument of adjusting differences between capital and labor—­a far more likely means of securing a fair increase of wages.  It places both sides to the controversy in an amicable mood, and is an appeal to the reason and conscience—­not wholly dead in the most soulless corporation.  It costs next to nothing.  It is already becoming a substitute for strikes in England, where the trades-unions are adopting this new weapon. * * *

Trades-unions ought, among us, to emulate the wisdom of European workingmen, and use their mechanism to organize forms of association which should look not alone to winning higher wages but to making the most of existing wages, and ultimately to leading the wage-system into a higher development.  The provident features of the English trades-unions are commonly overlooked, and yet it is precisely in these provident features that their main development has been reached.  Mr. George Howell shows that a number of societies, which he had specially studied, had spent in thirty years upward of $19,000,000 through their various relief-funds, and $1,369,455 only on strikes.  Mr. Harrison speaks of seven societies spending in one year (1879) upward of $4,000,000 upon their members out of work.  He shows that seven of the great societies spent in 1882 less than 2 per cent of their income on strikes; and states that 99 per cent of union funds in England “have been expended in the beneficent work of supporting workmen in bad times, in laying by a store for bad times, and saving the country from a crisis of destitution and strife.”

Trades-unions ought to be doing for our workingmen what trades-unions have already done in England. * * * It has been by the power of combination among the workingmen, developed through the trades-unions, that this long list of beneficent legislation—­factory acts, mines-regulation acts, education acts, tenant-right acts, employers’ liability acts, acts against “truck,” acts against cruelty to animals, etc.—­has been secured.  It has been wrested from reluctant parliaments by the manifestations of strength on the part of the laboring classes. * * *