4S8 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
demanded a guarantee that he should not be obliged to throw away all those years of training, simply because too many men were allowed to enter the trade and reduce its wages.
All this was nearly analogous to the plea of the inventor when he applies to the government to protect his invention, which has cost him years of work and study, from the unlimited competition of others ; and possibly even more analogous to the position of the author who wishes to be secured by a copyright. Only the federal government can undertake to perform either of these functions. The disorder again arises from the fact that the trades unions undertake to do for themselves what they are not authorized by society to do, rather than from the pur- pose and end to be attained. If all the living inventors formed a voluntary organization, and declined to allow more than a limited number of new inventors to enter it, we should doubt- less have scenes of violence. It required a discussion of many years by the most learned men in the nation to discover the ethical basis of the author's copyright.
6. We see a great sympathetic strike ramifying throughout the entire unions of a trade and its allied trades ; we suddenly hear of men all over the country leaving their work, places which they may have held for years, which they know that it may be difficult, and perhaps impossible, again to secure. They cer- tainly do this under some dictate of conscience, and under some ethical concept that stands to them as a duty. Later many of them see their wives and children suffer, and yet they hold out, for the sake of securing better wages for work- men whom they have never seen, for men who are living in another part of the country, and who are often of another race and religion. We see this manifestation, and read about it, and do not make a really intelligent effort to discover its ethical sig- nificance. We say the men are foolish and doomed to fail ; we allow our minds to become confused between the motives of the strike, and the riots and militia which often become associated with it. We are lost in its manifestation, and do not even com- prehend that at such a time a great accumulation of moral force has overmastered hundreds of our fellow-citizens. They are, for
