Should Trade Unions Be Incorporated? sense also there is responsibility—the law, through the imperfections of legislators or of judges or of jurors or of other officials, w H not in fact be executed, the wrongdoer thus exempt is said to be irresponsible. It is in this last sense that irresponsibility has been attributed, perhaps inaccurately, to the own ers of a building carried to an unlawful height in the most conspicuous square of Boston. In short, one is not fully responsible if no action is given against him by the theory of the law, or if he is so poor as to be below the law, or if he is so influential as to be above the law. It is certainly desirable that everyone who is conceived to be possibly a wrongdoer should be responsible in each of the three senses explained; and hence the next ques tion is whether in one or all of these senses the incorporation of trade unions tends to create, or at least to increase, responsibility. Throughout the discussion it must be borne in mind that any workman personally committing a wrong against person or prop erty is responsible legally, and that in a busi ness sense he is responsible to the full extent of his property—less exemptions from execu tion,—and that in case he has been guilty of a crime or of disobedience to an injunction he is subject to imprisonment. Further, it must be borne in mind that, in addition to this individual liability ' of workmen, trade unions, though unincorporated, are in the le gal sense responsible for the wrongs done through the orders of their officers while act ing within the general purposes of the asso ciations, and that this last responsibility at taches to the common funds. Still further, the contracts of individual workmen and of unincorporated organizations create respon sibilities in the same sense as do wrongs against person or property. Finally, it is not known that there is any jurisdiction in which individual workmen or their organizations are above the law. The principal difficulties in gaining satisfaction against workmen and
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unions are practical; namely, that they are not wealthy and that it is not easy to identify perpetrators of wrongs to person and prop erty, and that it is still'less easy to prove con nection between wrongs and the unions. The question whether incorporation would materially alter the situation suggests a dis tinction as to the kinds of incorporation now available in many jurisdictions. On the one hand workmen may be incorporated for benevolent purposes exclusively; and on the other hand they may be incorporated wholly or partly for business purposes. If we suppose that the corporation has ex clusively benevolent purposes, it will collect money from its members and will pay it back to them or to their respresentatives in such emergencies as sickness, death, and lack of employment. This is a sort of insurance— objectionable, by the way, from the point of view of insurance men, for the reason that the whole fund may be destroyed by one disaster, and questionable from the point of view of the general public, because it is not desirable that workmen, and especially work men in any one business, should treat them selves for charitable or social purposes as a distinct class, and also because the existence of a large fund for the unemployed encour ages unnecessary and unsuccessful strikes precisely as excessive wealth promotes ex travagance and idleness. Now, it is obvious that it is foreign to the purposes of a bene volent organization to promote directly its members' business interests—for example, to declare strikes or boycotts and to make con tracts as to rates of wages. Yet it is not in conceivable that the officers might do such acts in the supposed interest of the corpora tion; and in that case, in the absence of ex press authorization or subsequent ratifica tion by the members, there is a difference of opinion upon the question whether such acts are to be deemed the acts of the corporation. If the view should prevail that such acts create no corporate liability, the result is that
