Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1890-05-01

people would have moved on to prosperity
as certainly, if not as speedily, as they
have done under the ten hour system.
Whether the workers would have inn
proved the greater time accorded for adj
yancement and helpful economies must
remain conjectural. There are those who
hold that to give the workers the addi-
tional two hours or one hour now will not
result in any improvement in his social
conditions, since the greater number will
misapply the leisure gained. But this
also must be and can only be determined
by experience, and to say the least it is
not fair argument to advance against the
claims of the workers. The arguments in
favor of the movement of the hour on the
one side and against it on the other are
too familiar to call for review at this time.
There is to be heard from yet in this
debate great mass of the people, how
ever, who have not yet spoken, and it
may be that they will have the deciding
voice. They stand between employing
capital on the one hand and the federated
trade unions on the other-the workers
who are their own employers, the hard
working clerical laborers, the intellectual
and the business workers, the producers
from the soil, the vast body of unprotected
workers, all those who occupy position
between the protected manufacturers and
organized labor demanding protection, and
which great class contributes to both the
others.
While the question is now projected
actively into the forum of public debate
upon the lines indicated, there are fears
enterta;ned that violence, intimidation
and the assault of the boycott with force,
may be employed on the one side, and ex-
cite retaliatory measures on the other. If
such conditions develop, the laboring man
will be the chief sufferer; it has always
been so and will continue to be so. When
a great strike or labor agitation disturbs
and unsettles the business conditions of
the country the mass of the people who
may be quiescent so long as their pros
perity is not assailed, emphatically and
irresistibly manifest not only their dis
pleasure, but their determination not to
suffer under it. The friends of labor, of
prosperity and the common good, should
therefore, direct the present agitation up
on peaceful and moral lines only. What
ever adjustment is reached, we repeat.
should be peacefully attained, for if force
or ho. blood enters in, history leave us not
at all in doubt as to what the results will
be.
No workers are so well conditioned as
those of America. Nowhere else do they
receive such high wages; nowhere else
have they such broad opportunities for
independence, comfortable living, and the
fulfillment of ambitious desires. If these
enviable conditions are imperiled it will
be because Of the unwisdom of the con-
testants in the immediate foreground.
The workers of the country have the
right to agitate for theoretical reforms,
and to make them practicable if they can,
and, as we have said, if they can secure
the betterment of the condition of the
workers engaged in manual labor and
skilled vacations, the people of the nation
will approve and applaud. Whenever
they can improve the intelligence, the
material conditions and physical we'll
being of the wage-earners without doing
injury to the people at large, the senti-
ment of humanity will be with them; but
whatever they seek to accomplish must be
done by employment of moral not by en-
listment of physical force.