Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1888-04-07
THE RAILRoAn STEAK.

The immediate issue between the loco
n tive engineers at the West and the rail-
road against whose system of grading serv-
ice they struck, it is not necessary TO now
consider But it is important in the high
est degree to form a perfectly true concep-
ton of the strike when ii extended beyond
the road upon which it originated. The
right, pure and simple, of one man to
cease laboring for another is precisely as
undeniable as the right of an employer to
decline to give labor to any particular
persons But it becomes very different
matter when the strike and the lockout
expand into the boycott that takes into
its embrace wholly innocent parties. The
workers of the country are learning very
rapidly that the effort to involve those in
strikes who have no natural relation to
them is not only indefensible but de-
structive of the best interests of
labor, because it alienates from it
human sympathy. The right to
associate itself is undeniable to labor as it
is to capital and intelligence. But the
right is not only questioned, it is to-day
by the American public denied, to visit
punishment upon anyone for the sins
charged against another. When the ba-
kers, who disagreed with their employers
in San Francisco, visited the strike upon
employers of cooks and walters also, in
order to make sp" employers unwilling
agents in their i.,erest. they lost public
sympathy, and, as a result, public condem-
nation was visited upon them. So, when
the engineers proposed to inconvenience
the whole general public, to stop the
wheels of all commerce at all related to
the road originally assailed, and visit pecu-
mary loss upon innocent persons, in order
to coerce the offending road to yield, they
found that public judgment turned upon
those who invoked the strike. That is to
say, the public refused to recognize the
justice of the engineers method, so far as
it passed beyond the limit of the right to
cease to labor for the company with which
it had issue. The result has been that the
boycott phase of the strike has been aban-
doned, and that, too, in response to the
demand and advice of large bodies of the
colleagues of the strikers. 1t was
unquestionably the result of conviction on
the part of the engineers, who are body
of especially intelligent men, that the
public sympathy they wished for would be
lost to them under the boycott demand
and it was due also to the conviction of
those engineers who had no grievance
against their roads, that to attempt to die
tate to them in the matter of their bust
would be not only cruelty unjust, but
would end in disastrous failure.
There is no reason, however at first APP
parently strong and worthy of respect,
that will bear the test of analysis when
advanced in defense of an attempt to pre-
vent an unoffending person from fulfilling
his Obligations TO one against whom a
strike is aimed. The American people
are lovers of fair play at all times ard I'M
der all circumstances. Nowhere or the
globe IS there society that more gives and
demands fair play than in the United
States nowhere else is there o 'erulaiion
quicker to resent attempts y TO
doing that which its iudgni,...
Any effort by B to compel A, ~- "a
whom he makes no complaint, 10
in forcing c to surrender in am issne be-
tween and only, will be resented in
this country to the very last moment. 1t
is for that reason that the strikes have
uniformly failed where resort has been
had to the methods indicated. The Amer
lean public never has submitted to such
methods, and it is perfectly safe to say it
never will.