The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1894-07-20
THE RIGHTS OF AGGREGAT1oNs.

The recent strike has brought into
view again the foundation principles
upon which our democratic institutions
rest. The difference between an i'm
perialism and a democracy is that one
is an exponent of personal will, and
the other an exponent of laws that
are supreme and superior to all indi-
viduals. 1t is the aim of the laws to-
establish the responsibility which each
individual owes to the government
and to other individuals, and once let
this responsibility be denied. govern
ment will be only possible through the
arbitrary will of some one individ.-al
who may happen to control the most
powerful faction.
In the strikes of national Importance
that have occurred, capitalist and
workmen alike have sought to estab-
lish regulations and rules for the gov
eminent of their respective interests,
foreign to those Formulated in the
laws. In the trades unions this has
been accompanied with disability to
enforce their rules and regulations
even upon their own membership, and
each great strike has invariably es
capped from the control of it's leaders
and some to an extreme not contem-
plated in the movement that led to it's
inauguration. And it failed because it
went so far as to lose all sense of re-
sponsibility to the public, to the laws
or to the government and to arouse the
instinct of self-preservation that is
the binding influence of society in a
condition OF civilization.
1t is true that the laws appear to
be deficient in respect to the estab-
lishment of the responsibility of ag-
gregations, whether of capital or la
Dor. Whether either like it or not, it
remains true that capital and labor
are in effect partners in industry. If
that is true, neither abstractly has
the right and should not legally
have the power to dissolve the part
nership when such a dissolution
threatens the welfare of the entire
population, as it has done in the sus-
pension of industry during the war of
these two factions in the recent rail-
way strike.
The rights of individuals in relation
to each other are already well defined
in the laws. But the division of labor
and the vastness of the modern in
dustrial scale have merged many in
dividual rights into aggregations.
Many millions of capital and many
thousands of men are required to
carry on even single industries, that
unless they are aggregated could not
be carried on at all. If one individual
comes to represent these millions of
capital, and another is delegated by
his companions to represent these
thousands of workmen, it is not clear
that these TWO individuals should have
the legal right to apply the powers
which the law has guaranteed to
each as individuals over the entire ag-
gregations which they represent. 1t
would therefore appear that laws
should be enacted to define what pow
lers these individuals shall exercise in
respect to their respective aggrega-
tons.
The law must rise supreme over
capital and labor and must establish
( an equity between them as aggrega-
tions.' or we shall cease to have a
government of law, and will revert to
personal rule of whichever force or ag-
gregation that may for the moment
succeed in exercising power, and
might be equally constituencies and
| tyranical whether exercised by capt.
tai or labor. For the faint of the an
tediluvian deviltry of human nature
yet remains in it, and nothing will
prevent the full exercise of the selfish
instincts except the lack of power, and
so far as the general public is con-
cerned it would matter very little
whether that power were exercised
by the representative of capital or a
chief of labor. by junta of trades
unionists or a syndicate of capitalists.
Either would probably take the earth
and the fullness thereof entirely unto
| itself