Willmar tribune. [volume] (Willmar, Minn.) 1895-1931, 1903-03-14
a QUESTION OF MASTERY

. a QUESTION OF MASTERY.
Mr.. Darr0v's Arrangement Of the
Anthracite Coal Barons. a.
The following is an extract from the
closing speech of Mr.. barrow, COUNSEL
for the United Mine Workers of Amer
lea, before the strike commission:
1'want to say that this strike, from
first to last, was due to the blind, auto
cratic, stupid spirit Of these operators,
that their men should not organize
nothing else. It was not because they,
thought they should have no more
money, for I am inclined to think that;
these gentlemen would have raised the;
wages by this time, strike or no strike.
At least they came into this court one;
after the other and practically con-
coded that they should have raised
them and should now raise them. They
were not willing to do it then. But /
cannot understand how Mr.. Baer, as
president of the Reading railroad, can
raise his wages, and how the president
of the Pennsylvania railroad can raise
his when they are dealing with the
railroads and still say that these men,
infinitely poorer paid, in an employ
ment generally more dangerous, in an
and onerous, should have no share in
the increased prosperity which has
come to them and which has come to
the common country.
It was not, then, the question of
wages. These gentlemen precipitated
the greatest conflict between capital
md labor which the world has ever
seen, the most gigantic strike in histo-
ry, because in their minds it was
question of mastery-nothing else; be-
cause they felt and they believed that
upon this contest depended the ques-
ton of whether they should be the
masters or whether the men should be
the masters.
Neither should be the result of this
contest. They, with their feudal ideas
that the men who in some mysterious
way have been placed in the ownership
and the possession Of industry are the
masters, that they have the right to
make the rules and the regulations and
set the wages-set them, as will show
they did in this case, by mailing their
schedule on door-they, who believe
that for one moment to accede to the
demands and requests of these men
would mean that they We're no longer
the masters, thought they had better
let the water come into their mines and
drown them out and destroy their prop
erty rather than submit.
Neither can I believe that this was
entirely due to the mine owners when
l consider that they were willing to
take these fearful chances, to let the
country face this coal famine, to let
their mines be destroyed. l see in this
stubborn, cruel fight, where the weap-
on used by the operators was starva-
ton, where they depended not upon
starving men alone, but expected that
the men would listen to the starving
cries of wives and children to give up
this struggle. I believe the operators
were induced and urged by the rail-
road companies to believe that here in
the coal region was the final struggle
to determine who were the masters in
this country, whether the men were
chattels or whether they were men ell
dOWed with the same right to look the
other contracting party squarely in the
face, the same right to make their own
terms as to the hours of labor, the
days of labor, the price of labor when
they are selling their lives, as the mas
ter does when he is buying the labor
er's life
This was the struggle, and this was
the cause, and l wish to prove this
matter to this commission, not from our
testimony, but from that of these gen.
tlemen alone. I prove it from their
own mouths and place the responsible
ity where it belongs, upon these men,
who cannot understand that the human
race through it's long, sore and bitter
travail has been moving onward and
upward and forward toward the final
democracy Of man, to the time when
each human being shall be a man
clothed with the right to contract, with
the right to live his life, and not to be
governed and ruled by such rules as
the masters have ever imposed upon
him.