I have frequently said that there was a conflict between two classes of society. They must necessarily come into contact with each other under the present regulations. And there are times when McCormick, in his blind conception of what he thinks is his interest, attacks the means of livelihood of those who have no property and no machines. I said that when this side of the case was presented to the present organization, which maintains the present social relation, there was nobody that came to the assistance of the classes which were attacked by McCormick. I drew the inference that the arrangements were wrong, because of the fact that those who protect McCormick when he is attacked, do not protect the working classes when they are attacked by McCormick. They will necessarily come in conflict under these regulations. How? Sometimes McCormick has reduced wages. Wages are the means of existence to those who have no property, and who are compelled to live by the sale of their labor. It is their machinery, and the police have never come to the assistance of the working classes, when their means of living have been attacked in that way. Sometimes they are attacked by a machine. Do not understand me to say that I blame McCormick for buying a machine, because under the present social and industrial system men have the right to buy machines, if the system is right. But if the system is wrong, they have not, and it is the system that is responsible, and not they.
I am given to understand, and I believe it to be true, that about a year ago McCormick introduced some moulding machines into his factory. McCormick employed about 125 moulders before the introduction of these machines. Before that time he had a strike of his men owing to a dispute about wages, or about the regulations of the Union to which these moulders belonged. McCormick had acceded to certain terms. He had to do it because of the strength of the Union. He could not get any moulders to do his work because the Union resolved that it would not work except its terms were acceded to. But there was something else which McCormick found out that was not subject to any Union. That was a moulding machine. And when McCormick had got possession of the moulding machine he had got possession of machinery which did with the assistance of twenty-five men what it had required 125 men to do before. Don't you think, your honor, that that was an attack upon the interests of these twenty men out of twenty-five, or 100 out of 125? It would not make any difference whether he had a right to do it. 1 am not speaking of that phase of the question. These men had families after the introduction of those machines as they had before. The families cried for bread. The children cried for shoes, and the women cried perhaps for a sewing machine. These hundred men were turned out, and then McCormick said: "Now I am master of the situation. I will take back all the conditions that I have made with my men when I needed 125 of them."
The rate of wages is regulated by the number of men who are out of employment. When four men out of five are turned out of employment, there is nothing in the world for these four men to do but to bid and see how much lower each one can work on that man's job who is retained than the others. It tends to a reduction of wages. And the introduction of machinery in that way is a direct attack upon the interests of those who have no means and cannot have any. Maxwell Brothers introduced some box-making machines
