The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1871-02-24
AN AMERICAN DEsPOTIsM.


Esrth.
The New York Journal of Commerce pub
fishes in late issue the following article on
the subject of the Trade Union to which our
coal miners belong, and which has been the
cause of so much trouble. 1t is headed ''The
Worst Tyranny on the Earth
''In grand prize show Of the syrsnuies of
all nations America could make entry that
would take the first medal. She has within
her limits an oligarchy which for iron cruelty
beats the worst system that any living em-
peror czar, sultan, or chief dares impose
on his SUBJECTS The most despotic rulers
of European, Asiatic or African countries
hold the lives of their vassals cheap enough,
but they do not compel them to forego
all work and starve. They leave them
at least the poor privilege of labor, in order
to keep their miserable bodies and souls to-
gether The wretches may be taxed as
heavily as their masters like, bat out of the
toll which they perform there is residuum
of clear gain in money or fruits of the earth
with which they can sustain life. The Ameri-
can tyranny to which we refer is the Grand
Council of the Coal Miners Union of Penn
sylvania. With q strange mockery of the
awful truth, the Union is called the sWork-
ingnep's Benevolent Association 1t was
established with the free consent and
had, until lately, the support of
bad hearted but mostly good and well-mean-
ing persons, naturally sober and Industrious,
with wives and children whom they devotedly
love. But they are ignorant ignorant of
their own true interests, iguorant OF the COM
monest laws of trade, ignorant that other
people have rights as we'll as themselves,
Ignorant of the far-reaching evil that they
do outside of their own neighborhood-
being ignorant, OF course they are bigoted,
ma
Council of thirty-one, in whom they fool
ishly vested all their power aud all their
rights, the oligarchy being chosen out of the
miners who were most unreasonable, uncom-
promising, and ferocious toward all opposi-
ton, all criticism, all good advice. The worst
form of government that the world ever saw
is an oligarchy, and it matters not whether it
was elected by blind and infatuated people,
or by an assembly of aristocrats or republi-
cans, or whether it usurped its authority. The
Grand Council of the thirty-one deriving its
power from one hundred thousand miners,
has not belied the bad reputation which
olIgarchies have ever won in history. All
questions connected with labor and strikes
are submitted to it, and its decisions are with
out appeal, and must be obeyed without
murmur. The simple miner who foolishly
voted to put his liberty into its hands, may
see his wife and children starve and go naked,
the fire die out on his hearth, his own sturdy
frame waste away to skeleton, and his poor
heart be ready to break with despair, but he
must not shoulder his pick and dig out lump
of coal for less than union prices. For this
surrender of the privilege which other tyrants
never touch-the privilege of honest work for
any wages-he was promised to be cared for
by this pseudo benevolent union. And so he
is for few short weeks, but the pinched
dolipgs of aid soon cease, and he must then
beg from door to door, or fly the country,
but must not work, and above all must not
rebel or complain against the decrees of the
Grand Council, under penalty of swift and
sudden punishment. Fortunate it is for
him if, before he has spent the last dollar
of his accumulated savings, he leaves the
coal regions. His radiance is always well
come to his associates of the Union, and a
matter of congratulation with the Grand
Council; for his departure gives those
who stay behind greater monopoly
of labor, and the delusive promise of higher
wages when work is resumed at the mines.
We read that during the strike which has
recently been 'on, and rigidly enforced by
the Grand Council, large number of miners
have prudently got away, and come to New
York, and, when able to pay their steerage
passage, have gone to Europe to escape
the terrible DEGREES of the thirty-one
men whom their own enormous folly con-
jured up like SO many Frankensteins, to
3he road hither they must have seen the de-
piorable evidences of the widespread injury
which the Union was doing to persons not
belonging to it-as, for example, to cite a sin
gle case, at Elizabethport, where three hun
dred laborers customarily employed at the
coal docks are out of work-and Heaven
pity the man who in this hard winter, with
no reserved means of subsistence, is thrown
ont of employment! And il they strolled
about the streets of this city, and looked
into the tenements of the poor, and
marked how many went without coal because
the strike had put it up so high, or
shivered over scanty fires built from Gin
ders fshed out of ash barrels or bits of wood
picked up in the streets, they would have
had q realizing sense of what a coal strike
means to others besides the fanatics who are
directly engaged in it, These miners, flying
In dismay from the scene of desolation which
they have created in Pennsylvania, are, we
may suppose, cured of their union perverse-
ness by this time. And we are happy to hear,
that majority of the miners are. For it is
announced that they have now starved them
selves down to the point of
resuming work on almost any
terms that the companies may fix. At
Wyoming Basin, it is said that they accept a
reduction of thirty per cent. from the wages
paid when they stopped. Thus has coms to
pass precisely what We predicted, what has
happened in all previous strikes, what will
happen to the end of time. The great coal
companies, relying on the sure allies of
poverty and hunger, will always have il ia
their power to beat any combination which
the miners make among themselves, and no
oligarchy of thirty-one, or any other number
unless they are as rich as the companies (iu
which case thew would be operators them