The new dominion. [volume] (Morgantown, W. Va.) 1876-1904, 1894-05-05
The Great Coal Strike As a Tariff
Lesson.

LeSSODs
The strike of the bituminous coal
miners, like all great strikes that in
terrupt the employment of large
numbers of men and suspend the reg
ular operations of business that
affects the supply of an article of
common consumption, is public
misfortune. 1t matters not which
side of the contest energies victorious
in the end, the general loss cannot
be avoided and must DE great.
Bituminous coal mining is one of
the protected industries. The prop
osition to put soft coal on the free
list has aroused one of the severest
storms OF opposition to the Wilson
bill as it left the House 1t would,
we have been told, cripple a great
Southern industry, and, above all, it
would make it impossible to pay the
men employed in the soft-coal mines
those superb american wages" so
enormously higher than the wages
paid to the ''pauper labor" of Can
ada, which, under the Mckinley mil
lennium, they have been enjoying.
And yet, with the soft-eoal miners
still in the Paradise of protection,
with duty of Is cents ton posted
at its gates as flaming sword
against foreign competition, they
are actually so unconscious of their
happy estate as to go out on strike
What for2
President Mcbride, of the United
Mine w orkers' answers this ques-
tion by saying, Low wages, starva-
ton wages" He asserts that the
cutting of wages began last summer,
six months at least before the Will
son bill was even drafted, So that it
is quite idle to say that it was due to
the proposed democratic tariff legis-
lation. The conservative" Senators
who have, since the Wilson bill left
the House, restored coal to the dutia-
BILE list and given it protective
duty equal to the whole amount paid
for wages to the soft-co miners
40 cents per ton-have, in the mean
time, given the coal monopoly ample
assurance that their garroter's grip
on sixty five millions of American
consumers is not to be relaxed Yet
it appears that for year past, with
Mckinley's matches tariff in full
force and no near prospect of its be-
ing destroyed, so far as coal is con
cerned, the wages of the men work
ing in the mines have been all the
time going down, down, down. I'VE
strike now simply to restore the
wage scale of one year ago, says Mr..
Mcbride.
To an interviewer who asked him
If he did not anticipate that Cana
dian soft coal would be poured into
this country to supply the market
left unprovided by reason of the
strike, the head of the United Min
ers replied that, as shown by Sorg's
Standard Coal Trade Statistics, "all
the Canadian coal mines combined
did not produce as much coal as the
mines of Perry county, Ohio" He
went further and ridiculed the whole
cutlery of the protected coal combine
against free coal, which is in reality
made by league of coal barons and
railroad kings to dead beat both the
seaboards, the Atlantic and the Pa
cific, by compelling them to pay not
high wages to miners, but black mail
transportation rates to railroad pools.
SIT is nothing but nonsense" says
President Mcbride, referring to this
selfish clamor Of monopoly, hypocrit-
ically pretending to plead for labor
and its wages, which it is cutting
down all the time TO the lowest pos
sible point. 'If," he asks, 1--WE furn-
ish now more than half the coal Can
ada uses and pay the 60 cents tariff,
need we be afraid to let in Canadian
coal free?"
These sensible remarks from the
president of the striking miners or
ganization are significant. They in
dictate that the fraud so long practic-
ed upon workingmen by the protec-
tionlsts is at last seen through by
its dupes. High-tariff taxes are
clearly proven not to be the raw ma
terials out of which high wages are
manufactured Nor will the new
brand of republican quackery, which
represents that the Mckinley medi-
cine was working finely if the demo
cratic tariff-reform bill had not inter
fered with it, have any permanent
popularity. History will not be
rewritten to accommodate pro-
tectionist mountebanks, and the re-
cords of 1891 and 1892, long before
Mr.. Cleveland was elected, and as
full of the woes of labor, the distress
of business, the misery of wage re-
ductions and the calamities ofstrikes
and lockouts as are the records of
1864, and for the same reason, to
wit, because in 1894 we are living
still, as in 1892 and 1891, under the
commercial restrictions and afflic-
tions of McKinley's trade killing
| tariff.
Who ever heard of colossal strikes,
embracing hundreds of thousands of
wage earners, under the democratic
common sense tariff of 1916? There
were no such strikes. They were
unknown IN any period Of American
history that antedates the so-called
protective tariffs hegun by Morrill,