The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1900-09-25
BRYANISM AND CRIME.
Direct Indictment to Violence in the
Hard Coal Region.
New York Press.

New York Press
Violence has already marked the prog
ress of the strike in the anthracite coal
region. Marching" which is an effective
form of mob intimidation, has begun.
Workmen remaining at their posts have
been stoned and beaten. When we recall
the character of the region this eventuation
cut of three days hostilitics presages i'll
of conditions possibly existent at the end
OF three weeks.
We do not note this conduct of the
strikers in even a critical spirit. There
are chances that the strike may be set
tied without serious breach of the peace.
There are possibilities, TO be realized, we
hope, that the behavior of the vast army
of nearly a hundred thousand men may
be such as on the whole to make un-
favorable comment on that of small por-
ton of their number merely captious.
Again, there are other possibilities that
the sum total of murder, mayhem and
arson in the region may be such as TO
make this first installment of assault and
battery unnoticeable. But these first small
outbreaks should be noted none the less.
They are noteworthy, because that
ever else is caused in the way Of dis
order. These men are being directly in
cited to violence by political agents for
political purposes. They are being set on
to stone and cudgel in order that they
may be shot in return, so that their bodies
may be used as bait for votes for William
j. Bryan, the workingmans friend, the
man of the people. That is the plain Eng
lish of the frantic Democratic attempt to
make another Homestead
They are being melted in speech and print
to riot by the employees OF the largest
Eastern contributor to the Bryan campaign
fund, the owner and editor of the Bryan
Eastern organ, the president Of the Bryan
Association of Clubs; This man and his
men are looking in cold blood, through SIM
ulated frenzy. for the bodies Of dead miners
over whom TO preach funeral sermons, with
the Republican Tariff and the Republican
Trusts" for a text, despite the fact that
anthracite coal has no protection in the
tariff, that the anthracite coal trade is cut
up among a score OF individual and COR
porate operators instead of being managed
by a trust" and that the great anthracite
coal operators, like the Packer and Coke
families, have almost invariably been DEM
ocrats. This is the sort of appeal to pas
sion circulated in thousands among these
miners before they began to stone and beat
their felow-workmen:
THE officials of the coal trust are dam
gerous criminals. They are reckless pro-
moters of anarchy and revolution. .
The coal fields, the men who work them
and every human being heated by the coal,
exist at the mercy of a few lawbreaking
financial gamblers who should be breaking
stones in state prison. One hundred
and fifty thousand human beings, workers
In coal mines, are out on strike because the
owners of the mines will not let them
earn enough to live on
Incidentally, the miners are informed
with great airing of the sort of learning
that is found in science primers" that
their employers more own the property
for which they have paid than the ''five-
toed salamander of the carboniferous era"
They are told so by what we OF New York
gutter snipe sheet" and what not, but
which, nevertheless, is the principal and
most authoritative Eastern organ of the
Democratic candidate. Daily they are
thus indoctrinated with the belief that
their employers have no valid title to the
mines, which consequently they are free
10 destroy without mourning the usual
penalties for damage 10 property, and that
the operators and necessarily their agents
and servants, are, moreover, set OF felons
who have no right to life outside of jail,
and TO deprive whom of existence is no
crlme-or at least Will be none when Bry-
an is elected" For every one OF these in
cendiary TRADES ends with an appeal for
votes for the Democratic candidate who
Of course. is bound upon his inaugurati ton
them and put them in jail, where they be-
long. When men have been piled with this
sort of stuff for three days-plied more
than semi-offically from Democratic head
quarters-is It wonder that they fall upon
and beat their fellow-men? And is II
necessary TO do more to place these causes
of incitation side by side with these ef-
fects of violence to establish the connection
in the anthracite coal region between Bry-
anism and crime?
Six Anarchists were hanged in Chica GO
on no better evidence of completely in
murderouS assault than was found in their
proven authorship of such printed general
appeals to the eight-hour strikers of 1856
as these now being made by the Eastern
organ of Organism, the journal of the pres
.dent of the Association of Democratic
Clubs, to the anthracite coal strikers of
1900. II the coal region has its Haymarket
square or has again its Lattimer road the
American people will put the blame where
an American jury put 1t before. And they
will brand 1t with motive beside which
that of the Chicago Anarchists seems no.
ble-the motive of cold-booded poiti-
clans desperate need for votes.