A democratic government has little or
less reason to interfere on behalf of the non-union laborer than it has
to interfere in favor of the small producer. As a type the non-union
laborer is a species of industrial derelict. He is the laborer who has
gone astray and who either from apathy, unintelligence, incompetence, or
some immediately pressing need prefers his own individual interest to
the joint interests of himself and his fellow-laborers. From the point
of view of a constructive national policy he does not deserve any
special protection. In fact, I am willing to go farther and assert that
the non-union industrial laborer should, in the interest of a genuinely
democratic organization of labor, be rejected; and he should be rejected
as emphatically, if not as ruthlessly, as the gardener rejects the weeds
in his garden for the benefit of fruit-and flower-bearing plants.
The statement just made unquestionably has the appearance of proposing a
harsh and unjust policy in respect to non-union laborers; but before the
policy is stigmatized as really harsh or unjust, the reader should wait
until he has pursued the argument to its end.
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