The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1919-03-07

Tn q life of forty-eisht years, twenty-five of which have been spent in intensive professional activity among the same kind of mon I am facing tonight, I have co-cluded that it is s rare exception to find a bus mess rlar. merchant, or manufac- turer who employs labor whose sym Dathies do not respond promptly to an appeal for justice and fair play. I have also been inevitably led to con cI1l5ae that the reason our syTnpathies are not more often aroused in behalf of our financially less fortunate brothers is becauase so few men of capacity in our country take time to study any. problems except the one of personal gain.
 An Illustration
 To dieress for a moment to relate an incident which aptIy illustrated to me mems absorption in the pursuit Of their financial interests, let me tell you that not long ago in one of the great clubs of New York city where men gather sometimes late on Sunday afternoon for an interchange of views , I was sitting about a. table with ten men. all of large means and all splen- ! did. honest. successful American bus mess men, than whom there are no more decent kind in the world. The whole ten were heartily condemning our federal Congress and charging the men engaged in making our laws l at Washington with rank incOmpe- tence. From this they shifted to our ! New York State Legislature, Assem- | bly, and Senate. before which was ] then pending some very important measures. What they had done to the i federal Congress was pale in conpaT- l ison with what they had to say of the makeup of the State Assembly and
 Senate. During a luu in this whole sale condemnation, I suggested that I would be willing to make a, bet with l each man at the table that he could
 not tell the name of the United States congressman or State asseublyuan or State senator from the district in
 which he lived. I felt confident when | I made the offer that I would win seven out of ten bets, but, as a mat
 ter of fact, I wouBdl have won every
 wager had any been made, as there
 was not one man in the ten who
 could answer the question correctly. Doubts Own Justice. | remember the first doubt that | ever entered my mind as to the jus
 tice of my own attitude against la | bor combinations or unions was 20
 years ago, when I was called upon as
 counsel for the Fraser Chalmers com l pany of Chicago to break up a strike
 by securing from the courts an in
 Junction against union pfcketing. 1
 succeeded, but my work carried me
 so deep into the conditions surround
 ing the men that got less satisfaction 1 from the result than have ever had
 from any legal victory. I had a feel ing when I had finished that my eli ents and I had not been engaged in an even fight on open ground but, on the contrary, that we had been behind breastworks sniping an enemy outside of our Qualifications, who by
 some hocus pocus of the law had re-
 strained from forbidding reinforce
 ments from coming through their lines to join us in our position.
 It seemed to me that the workman had no well defined position in soci-
 ety's structure; that if the workman
 as an individual is to fbe allowed no
 voice or vote respecting the manage ment of the business upon which his
 very life depends, and the employer is going to refuse ito deal with him in
 combination or except as an indi-
 vidual, then he is dfsfranchised in
 dustriaily, which is @ deal more i'm portant to him that being enfran- chised politically.
 1 Employers in Combination
 | My Investigations at that time dis
 closed what I might have known. but never fully realized before, that while l the employ~ -7as refusing to deal E with the employees in combination. s5he employer himself was in eonabir-