Knoxville weekly chronicle. [volume] (Knoxville, Tenn.) 1870-1875, 1874-01-07
woRKINGMEr.

|
strikers among the locomotive engineers il
Ohio shows. That railroad companies
| like all other branches of business, have
felt the depressing influences of the panic
! is certain. Like all other business men
their officers suppose they have the right
TO regulate their expenditures by their re-
ceipts. They gave notice of reduction
of wages, and in due time carried il into
effect. 1t affected officers and men all
alike. The engineers thought the pro-
posed wages too small and struck for more.
This they had right to do. But some of
them went beyond this and did what
was great wrong-resorted to vio-
lence to accomplish their ends.
We can not understand the reasoning
that justifies a workingman to imperil
the lives of unoffending and innocent pas
sengers on railroad because he thinks its
officers do not offer him enough pay for
his labor. We can not understand how
any engineer can justify such conduct as
opening switches and obstructing tracks,
as means of forcing railroad officials to
pay him higher wages. We know that
the engineers in the strike now in progress
in the West, deny all responsibility for
violence; and yet it continues, and the
lives of the travelling public are in jeopar-
dy over every road on which the strike is
in progress.
Such conduct does not help the cause of the
workingmen. Strikes seldom accomplish
good. Take, for example, the one now in
progress. 1t does not require any great sa-
gacity to see that it must fail. In this sea-
son, when labor is scarce, and good men
can always be found to take work at fair
prices, such strike can not be sustained.
1t is hard to say what is the relief for
workingmen against unfair wages. There
are often harsh and cruel employers, who
grind down their employees to the verge of
starvation. But in this enlightened coun-
try public sentiment, aided by the ease for
really worthy workingmen getting work
from fair employers, makes il not impossi-
BILE to remedy such wrongs. Hard work
and sometimes unfair reward for it, is the
fate of the poor the world over.
We have never known of an age or a
country where men did not have to work
for money. Most all processes or short
cut arrangements to make money, by hon
est means, without labor, are frauds. 1t
is great mistake, too, for men to suppose
that only those who perform manual la
Dor are aCorkingn1en. We profess to be-
long to that class ourselves, and to work
more hours than some who go about claim
ing to be horny-handed workingmen. Our
| observation and experience teaches US that
| those workingmen who labor faithfully at
the best wages they can get and live saving
~, put themselves sooner beyond the reach
of cruel, grasping employers, than those
who combine by strikes and violence tc
| ! shten their labor or increase their wages
| I he position of the man who depends up.
on his.daily labor for, living is of neces-
sity hard one-it always has been anG
| probably always will be, but the surest anC
speediest way out of it, is toiwork honestly
and live economically and by these mean:
reach the more fortunate class who have
saved enough to enable them to live with
out laboring by the day for unreasoninl
employers. Those who are fortunate
enough to reach that position and hold it
are those who have worked for it, and still
work to maintain it. There is no position
or condition in this world, without it
trials and anxieties, andlsbor in some form
or other, is the common lot of all men.
!