The record-union., 1894-08-22
OUGHT NOT TO BE SO.

Statement comes over the wires that a
number of men skilled in railroad en-
ployments, but who were engaged in the
recent sympathetic strike in favor of the
Pullman employees are proposing to leave
the United States in a body on the
ground that they cannot find employ
ment in this country. This is said to
mean that they not only cannot find em-
ployment with the companies hereto
fore employing them, bur that being
blacklisted they cannot find employment
with any other company; even beyond
this, that manufacturers, other than rail-
roads, will not employ them. An in
stance is given where railroad en-
ploye engaged in the strike made appli-
cation to an iron mill for employment,
and was informed that if the application
had been made earlier employment
would have been afforded but that in
formation had recently come into the
possession of the managers of the iron
mill to the effect that the applicant had
been engaged in the recent strike. which
disqualified him for employment in that
mill.
We sincerely hope that these relations
are not true. at least they ought not to
be true. If men have committed crimes,
laws have been enacted for their punish
ment. This is a very tTite saying.
Everybody has been saying this lately,
but it is no less true because it is trite.
The essential difference between civiliza-
ton and barbarism is comprised in the
statement: mo man has the right to
take the remedy for his wrongs into his
own hands," It is exactly this right that
men give up to society when they enter
the social compact. Society permits
very cautiously a degree of defense
against irreparable injury. as for in
stance, man may take life in defense of
his own life, or that of his wife, his
children, or servants, because the law
could not afford a remedy. notwithstand-
ing it had provided punishment for
murder. Hence man may resist that
species of wrong which would be ir-
remedial, but no other.
An individual may have an absolute
right to refuse employment to another in
diyidual-that is, he may give what en-
ployment he has control of to those who
may be personally agreeable to him; but
there his right of interference with the
right of another to make a living ends.
This is by no means a small matter. It
is great matter indeed. The great cor
poretions and great aggregations of
wealth, and those who are employing
labor on large scale, will find it greatly
to their advantage to keep strictly within
the highest and best conceptions of social
order and obedience to law. The great
corporations have much to fear from the
disposition of men to take the remedy for
their wrongs into their own hands; to de-
termine for themselves outside of the law
the measure of redress for grievances; to
sitin judgment upon their own grievances
and exaggerate those grievances by brood
ing over them.
Corporations and large employers of
labor complain of violent uprisings of
labor in the form of strikes, and are wont
TO characterize these movements as revo-
lutionary and denounce them as anarch-
ical Anarchy proceeds from that state
or condition of society where individuals
or classes have taken the remedy for their
wrongs into their own hands, and who
have declared that they win seek the re-
dress of grievances outside of the courts.
The logic of attempting to punish men
except through court proceedings has a
single tendency; whether it is INDUCED
in by corporations or by individual work
men, it is exactly the same. When the
boundary line which society has set up
in the form of courts and legal formalities
is passed, and remedies for wrongs or
punishments for grievances are taken
into tie hands of individuals or corpora
tions, then social order is defied and the
position taken is revolutionary or sedi-
tious or anarchical, as we may have pref
erence Of terms.
To simplify this, when men leave a
state of nature and enter into the social
eempaot, thev abandon tte riVht to seek