The daily Nome industrial worker., 1916-11-23

that. US eHOrt may nave been weak, but at any rate it tended to avert tremendous industrial strug gle which would have paralyzed the nation.
 The railroads wanted without a doubt to fight this matter out. They were only too willing to break a lance against the powerful brother hoods, whose power they deem is more apparent than real. As the brotherhoods were determined to have the eight hour day, there was nothing certain then but that d strike would result.
 The legislators got busy. They passed the Adamson law and left the brotherhoods like a fish between two cats: the latter being the legis- lative and the judicial functions.
 Now the final upshot of this is that Labor is left without any hope of getting it's demands through le- gislative means. The legislators may be willing enough but the High Priests of the law are not the mem bers of Congress but the Judges on the Bench They are the infallible ones, and their announcements ex- cathedra are those which say what is and what is not an article of le- gal faith What is there left Labor then, with this condition but an ab- solute dependence upon it's own re- sources and it's own weapons to ob- tain it's own demands? If the legisla- tors are unwilling, if the judges are unwilling and if the employers stand pat holding all the winning cards. Labor is left no option but to quit the political game cold where il, runs up against stacked cards or a cold deck.
 If the jurists, functioning as the bulwarks of privilege, deem that they thereby strengthen the position of privilege, they have yet to learn something that has already been de- monstrated under less favorable and less humane circumstances. The inn movable bodies that stood in the path of progress were ultimately pulverized and new land marks established to show where their pull verization was identical with such human progress. And it is a fact ominous enough and menacing be- yond peradventure, that employers, and those who are acting to main tain employers in their privileges, are hastening the very destruction of that which they try to maintain and uphold.
 The brotherhoods will not submit to the ten hour day even if the | Adamson law is declared unconsti- tutional. The country knows that. The country knows instinctively that the battle will not be confined to the brotherhoods but will involve prac. tically every labor organization. This will take place even though the brotherhoods were to say nay and the leaders of the American Fedora tion of Labor were to say the same Undisguised of the usual frills which are used to express the pur- pose of the labor organization, the primary instinct of self protection at the bottom of them all, will drive to such solidarity of action. Hence the railroads will plunge the coun- try into an industrial struggle will be quite as epochal and far reaching in its social consequences as the Great war in Europe.
 That there is any industrial, com- mcrcial or financial power in the United States can afford to look forward to such condition with calmness and indifference would be clearly impossible were it not that those powers have always been hypnotized by their own conception of their own invulnerability. In point Gf fact. it has been this insane confidence of those in power in the final outcome of social struggles that have so deeply embittered them all. and have always resulted in such tragic consequences to both sides.
 The judges with their legal meta physics, based upon no rational in. depreciation of modern conditions Of