The Vermont watchman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1883-1911, 1883-07-25


it is trihing in comparison with what
similar interruption at almost any other
season would have occasioned.
Popular sympathy is decidedly on the
side of the operators. Their wages are
believed to be insufficient, the service I'M
mercifully exacting and their demands
for redress are regarded as just and rea-
sonable. The companies, judged by their
financial exhibits are abundantly able to
pay their employees wages that should en-
able them to support their families like
human beings. The Western Union is
paying large dividends on capital
thinned down by water till its present
enormous bulk, $S0,000,0OO, represents
between four and five times the actual
capital invested. It seems to have treated
its employees more like serfs than like free,
intelligent beings. 1t has never squan.
dered money in efforts to ameliorate their
condition or to attach them to its fortunes.
These things may be true, the grievances
of the operators may be all that they are
represented to be, and public sympathy
may be strongly enlisted in behalf of the
strikers, and yet the policy of strike, of
coercion, to extort from soulless corpora
tions concessions which they will not
willingly make, may be questioned. A
body of men more accustomed to deity
manipulate the key of Geographic in
strument than to plan and conduct
a campaign or organize corner in
telegraphic labor, arrays itself against
great, rich, compact, thoroughly organized
corporation whose business for genera
ton has been the destruction of rival
companies, kind of brigandage against
its neighbors and of piracy upon the pub
lie. 1t is thoroughly skilled in precisely
those arts in which the leaders of the
brotherhood are the veriest tyros. This,
however, does not affect the justice of the
demands of the weaker party to the con-
fict 1t may bear upon its discretion and
judgment and discount its chances to sue
COOd, Duu ~ COhoutuuuCo nv SOOu lOdbOu
why the underpaid and overworked opera
tors should not assert their rights. If
they were to resist the companies at all, a
united resistance only could be effective.
Their right to organize for their own de-
fence against the greed of capital is as
broad and certainly as justifable as the
right of capital to combine for lowering the
wages of employees and bleeding the pub
lie by extortionate charges. The operators
in their methods have simply taken their
cue from the companies, and the super
cilious ignoring by the latter of the COM
mittee of the brotherhood on the ground
that they will not be dictated to by la
Dor organization, is simply an exhibition
of sublime cheek. That draught the COM
panies have often pressed to the public
lips, and it has been drunk to the dregs.
1t is conflict between very short and a
very long purse. Its success seems very
doubtful. The season of business quiet
and dullness favors the companies, and
every day of the prolongation of the strike,
it would seem, must inure to the benefit
of the longer purse and the stronger
party. The substitute operators will in
crease in numbers and acquire skill.
Want and empty purses will begin to
work their disintegrating effects upon the
now solid ranks of the strikers. The
prospects of their final success are not as
good as they deserve to be.
LATEsT.-The strike of the telegraph
ers is virtually unchanged. The officers
of the Western Union admit that they
are seriously crippled in New York, and
that they are not able to take care of the
ordinary business of the day. They esti-
mate their losses in that city alone at
$4,000 per day. The women operators
were expected to strike Monday. The stu
alton in Washington is more serious than
it has been since the strike began. Great
delay is occasioned in the transmission of
messages, and there is but one wire open
to Cincinnati, and all the wires to Chicago
are interrupted. Conflicting reports of the
situation are received from the south and
west; neither side, however, appears in.
clined to yield. The substitute operators
do not seem to be efficient. There does
not appear to be an open market for tele-
graphers from which efficient operators
can be supplied, like carpenters or other
craftsmen. This fact and their losses and
embarrassment may bring the belligerent
companies to consider the proposals of the
operators.