"This may be the beginning of a great civil war in this country,
between labor and capital, that is bound to come. It only needs
that the strikers at Martinsburg, or here, or elsewhere, should
boldly attack and rout the troops sent to quell them--and they
could easily do it if they tried--to set the spark to the magazine,
and the explosion would follow at once. The workingmen everywhere,
and of all classes of trade, are in the fullest sympathy with the
strikers, and only waiting to see whether they are in earnest
enough to fight for their rights. They would all join and help
them, the moment an actual conflict took place. Against such an
uprising, what would capital have to oppose? The militia? Why, have
not we seen how the militia at Martinsburg fraternized with the
mob; how at Wheeling only thirty men responded to the Governor's
call to arms; how Mr. Garrett, in his appeal to the President,
acknowledges that the militia is in such full sympathy with the
strikers that they were of no use at all? And do not we see,
to-day, in the ridiculous response to the calls upon the Grays to
turn out--a corporal's guard--that the militia is of no more use
here? The Governor, with his proclamations, may call and call, but
the laboring people, who mostly constitute the militia, will not
take up arms to put down their brethren. Will capital, then, rely
on the United States army? Pshaw! These ten or fifteen thousand
men, available men, would be swept from our path like leaves in the
whirlwind. The workingmen of this country can capture and hold it,
if they will only stick together, and it looks as if they were
going to, this time, sure."
"Of course, as you say, the capitalists.... Many of the unemployed
would be glad to get work as soldiers or extra policemen. The
farmers, too, might turn out to preserve your 'law and order.' But
the working army would have the most men and the best men. The war
might be bloody, but right would prevail. Men like Tom Scott, Frank
Thomson, yes, and William Thaw, who have got rich out of the
stock-holders of railroads, so they cannot pay honest labor living
rates, we would hang to the nearest tree. Honest incorporate
management would be enforced, and labor would demand and receive
its fair share of the profits that are made by means of it."
"But even if the workingmen should fail--even if so-called law and
order should beat them down in blood--why, that would be better
than starving. We would, at least, have our revenge on the men who
have coined our sweat and muscles into millions for themselves,
while they think that dip is good enough butter for us, and do not
care whether our families get a living or not. We would inflict
more loss on them than the last ten per cent. reduction would net
them gain in ten years, and if we died in this cause, we would only
end lives of degradation and misery. Civilization! You say we
should endanger civilization, if we succeeded in enforcing our
demands by violence! Well, what has civilization done for us?
Better the times of the Conestoga wagon, when everybody lived fat,
than these railroad times, when labor goes around begging. Better
than both, perhaps, the time when every man had his own farm, or
lived by his brow; they had enough to eat then, and did not have to
work so hard as we do now. What care we for civilization that is
grinding us down, down, down to starvation and nakedness by one ten
per cent. reduction after another, and one doubling up of crews
after another, until the workingman shall be the white slave of his
employer, and work for his board, if he gets even that."
It is well that the community should know something of the ideas
that are circulating among the strikers and their friends at this
time; the hates, and hopes, and aspirations, and half formed plans
that animate the more impassioned leaders of them, and therefore we
give the above, which is a faithful re-production of what a
representative workingman said on the subject this morning. It will
be seen, that he is really a communist, and there is no doubt that
communistic ideas have widely spread, even among the most
respectable, and most thoughtful classes of American workingmen.
There is no gainsaying either, that the picture this man draws of
the hardship which the present business depression has subjected
labor to in many cases is not exaggerated, and it is true, that the
sympathy of nearly the entire community, is with the railroad
strikers in the present case, who are called to endure still
another turn of the screw, which is cutting down their wages to the
danger limit. Nor is it wonderful, that these men, contrasting
their hard lives with the luxury and extravagance with which
certain railroad men live, and the brutal disregard to their
sufferings, which one of them is alleged to have shown, should be
goaded to revengeful and bitter thoughts, and even desperate talk.
But when all these allowances are made, it still remains to be
said, that threats of violence, of war, of communism, are worse
than folly on the part of strikers or the workingmen general. Of
one thing there is no doubt, and that is, that resort to violence
will not accomplish its object. Widely spread as is the sympathy
with the strikers, it is a fallacy to suppose that lawful force
will not be found to put down unlawful force. There never yet was a
case in this country, where mob violence triumphed in the end,
however apparently righteous the cause in which it was invoked, and
there never will be such a case, until the American people loses
its strong instinct for the preservation, at all hazards, of the
established law and order. The people will turn out and enforce the
law, so soon as they really think that the law is in serious
danger, and there will be no war, nor even a serious insurrection,
but all will yield to the majesty of established authority. And
then the violent will see that they have accomplished nothing, and
that their vengeance has mainly re-acted upon themselves. It will
be a long time, before, in this free country, the communists can
achieve even such a temporary success, put down speedily as it was,
in fire and blood, as the Paris communes of 1871.
We are glad, therefore, to see that these enthusiastic,
extravagant, and bitter ideas are being met in the counsels of the
workingmen themselves, with solid arguments for moderation, and the
use of pacific means only. If the employés of the Pennsylvania
railroad can prove, by simply abstaining from work, that the
railroad cut down their wages too low, and cannot properly fill
their places with other men, everybody will be very glad. If that
would show that labor is worth more than was supposed, and the
price of labor is the measure of the prosperity of the whole
community. But if they attempt to force the railroad to accede to
their demands, and prevent any person else from working, they will
only make their friends everywhere sorry for them, and insure for
themselves a certainty of discharge from their positions in the
end.
[Leader, July 21.]