POLITICS FOR YOUNG AMERICANS
Chrales Nordhoff
Paperback
(RareBooksClub.com, May 18, 2012)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1877 Excerpt: ...if need be do something else, and he is no longer surplus, but highly necessary to civilization. More than one half of our planet still lies waste and useless, and suffers for lack of strong arms and stout hearts to redeem it. 322. And here I come to one of the most mischievous blunders of the trades-unions. They teach, if not directly, yet by the spirit of their doctrines, that men have a vested right in their employments: that a mason has a right to remain a mason, and that society owes him a living by that trade. I wish particularly to warn you against this error. No man has the least right to subsistence as merely a mason, or a shoemaker, a lawyer, a clergyman, a tailor, a bricklayer, or a miner. If his labor as a mason is surplus, if no more masons are wanted when he comes along with his trowel, it is his duty, not to conspire against society with absurd regulations about apprentices and hours of labor, but to go at something else. A man who regards himself as only a shoemaker, a mason, a tailor, a lawyer, a physician, or a clerk, becomes thereby a contemptible object. '. He loses his independence, and makes himself the sport of circumstances. In our days, when new inventions continually change the methods of labor, it is-especially hazardous for men to bind themselves for life to a single employment; and those only can hope to benefit both themselves and their fellow-laborers who, when they find their occupation overcrowded, have courage and independence enough to seek a new calling, and if possible a new field of labor. 323. Trades-unions and labor societies arise out of a perfectly just feeling, among hired laborers, that they are less comfortable than they wish to be. Education has, in all civilized countries, given to the great class of laborers f...