The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1877-07-25
The War Against Society.


The war against the railroads has become
war upon society. The ranks of the
strikers have been reinforced by the most
depraved classes of our great cities. The
men who break one law have called to their
aid the men who break all laws. The in
surrection is no longer an uprising in the
interest of labor. II is led by those who
look forward to that millennium of the
thieves and idlers, the day when no man
shall work. The scourings of society, the
outpourings of the slums of New York and
Philadelphia, whose only work has been to
avoided doing work, and who collect the
wages of idleness with the knife, the bludgeon,
and the jimmy, have struck hands with the
discontented employees of the railroad cor
porations. They dare to call themselves, in
the catch phrase of the day, the horny
handed sons of toll, these men upon whose
hands the only stain is the stain of vice, and
who are foundlings from the nurseries of
crime.
The movement has assumed portentous
proportions. The grievance of the rioters is
no longer with the railroads alone but with
society. The mass of them are the idlers
and roughs who never work, and who wait
the chance of any popular discomfort in
order that they may plunder. That the
workman has been betrayed into this un-
natural alliance with the thief-an alliance in
which the man who earns money fraternizes
with the man who robs him OF his earnings
lis evident without argument. The work
man knows, if he is intelligent, that he of all
men in the land is most seriously harmed b y
an insurrection like this. He knows that his
prosperity depends upon the general pros
perity, that any disturbance of society
destroys all chances of industry, and that the
violence which impedes business and des-
troys property weakens and in time wipes
away that great accumulated fund from
which his wages and his livelihood must
come. Every warehouse burned, every
bridge destroyed reduces by so much his
opportunities for employment. All decrease
of the property of the capitalist cripples the
capacity of the capitalist to employ labor.
Every injury to great industry necessitates
a reduction in the number to which it gives
bread.
In his calm moments the workman knows
this. But now he is maddened by real or
ancied grievance, and for years he has been
mistaught and misled by men who have
made it their business to go up and down
through the land preaching the lie about the
inevitable conflict between labor and capital.
To the workman, impoverished and untaught,
all will be forgiven. But for the dema-
gogues who have lived on the wages of the
workingmen, who never did stroke of
honest labor in their lives, whose only
business has been to regularly draw the
salaries which misguided trade-unions have
voted them,-salaries wrung from the scanty
earnings of the laborers,-for them there
will be no forgiveness. In the near future,
seeing the ruin wrought the betrayed work
ingmen themselves will turn upon and rend
these Eccles of Society.
For the present the insurrection must be
put down at all hazards. The speediest way
is the best and most merciful. A little blood
shed now will save much bloodshed here
after The contest has become one between
chartered rights and the absolute tyranny of
the mob, and the safety of society requires
that it shall be at once brought to an end.