Fort Worth daily gazette. (Fort Worth, Tex.) 1882-1891, 1889-07-31
.omplaint iEto outright antagonism

complaint iEto outright autagonism If
the railroads desire to swell the ranks OF
those who clamor for commission they
have only to encourage their advocates
and organs in wholesale charges of COM
munism against those who believe the
liberties of the people to be in as great
peril from the commorant as from the
commune, and who believe the law is all
powerful to protect the people from both.
The deduction of the News is in logical
keeping with its slandeFous assumptions:
The constantly sharpening desire for COM
muniziRg legislation with strategic instinct has
assailed the enemy, so to speak, at the weakest
point 1t found the railroads under a cloud and
pressure of sentimental unpopularity, and thus
politically exceedingly weak. Therefore it is
momentariiy concentrated against them. If it
succeeds in crushing and despoiling them,
strengthened for further aggression, it is bound
to proceed with accelerated momentum to the
general subversien of what is left of a system of
liberty and law for rights of person and prop
erty. And after that, what? Perhaps the del
uge.
The Dallas paper will brighten no man
with its searecrow of communism, but it
will disgust many with its desperate de-
Tense of the roads whose cause will not
be strengthened thereby The demand
in Texas to-day for such regulation of
railroads as will prevent discrimination
and extortion does not proceed from So
cialists and communists, but it Is the cry
of helplessness in the people, and it is not
to be smothered by the charge of COM
munIsm.
For whatever of ''battIe'' there may
be con- in Texas between people and
roads the latter are largely responsible.
The roads have been managed as if they
had little, if anything, in common with
the people of Texas; whether justly or
unjustly, they have impressed the people
with the conviction that they were here
for what they could carry out of the state
and not for what they could bring into
it; imperious hirelings of the roads have
disdained arbitration of claims for dam
ages and thus encouraged recourse to the
law and jury verdicts that are travesties
on Justice; friendly demand for freight
reduction is met by the advocates
and organs of the roads with
a chorus cry: "The commune has
arisen;" when one railr, "a wishes to
whip another road into line by playing
with schedules no thought is given to the
delay in travel or to the vexation of the
traveller. The people recognize no dis
tinctions, the roads are an organized
class, and the sin of one is the sin of all;
and what with the railroad wrecker here,
the arbitrary railroad hireling there, and
the "damn the public'' railroad official
somewhere else, the people are turning
in their heIplessness to the only alterna-
tive left them-a commission.
And with the public mind in this state,
instead of pouring oil on the troubled
waters, instead of seeking to draw the
roads and the people into closer rela-
tions, instead Of conceding the supreme
power of the people and contrasting the
necessity tor its exercise, the advocates
and organs of the roads insult the public
intelligence and outrage the public con-
science by cries of communism.
Well may friends of the roads at times
despair of averting a conflict, the result
of which no sane man can doubt.