Pine Bluff daily graphic. (Pine Bluff, Ark.) 1893-1942, 1919-10-12
POWER WITHOUT RESPON-
SIBILITY.

The total cost of the British rail-
way strike is estimated at $3.50, 000,
600. Everybody is pleased with the
terms of the settlement-the govern
ment, the railway employees and the
general public-yet there is nothing
in this settlement that might not as
we'll have been agreed to without the
stopping of single wheel, says the
Post-Dispatch.
If wages were to be established
until Sept. 20, 1920; if the minimum
pay of any adult worker was to be
fixed at 81 shillings week, and if
negotiations were to be resumed for
general agreement as to hours and
wages, why was it necessary to have
a strike, to subject millions of people
to mos serious privation and to in
flict damages upon the general public
aggregating quarter of million
dollars? The government could as
readily have surrendered first as
last
A strike that was heralded as a
direct conflict between government
and class interest, involving the very
stability of the British constitution it.
self, was finally terminated by a
Downing street conference at which
the essential demands of the men
were granted and everybody con-
graduated everybody else upon the
honorable compromise that had been
arrived at.
In the circumstances the average
person must be more and more mysti-
fled in trying to find out what it was
all about.
Secretary Wilson said in his speech
at the opening of the industrial con-
ference in Washington that
"we have found ways of regu-
lating all the other relations of
mankind. Surely human intelligence
can devise some more acceptable
method of adjusting the relationship
between employer and employee"
1t might, but it does not, and it
never will until government under
the pressure of public sentiment takes
the initiative and asserts some of the
power that is inherent to it.
There are three parties to every
strike, not two. The third party is
the general public, whose rights and
welfare are trampled under foot,
which pays the ultimate cost Of the
conflict and in addition is saddled
with the expense of maintaining
some semblance of law and order be-
tween the belligerents. That third
party is never consulted in any strike,
and it has no rights that anybody is
bound to respect.
When the government happens to be
the employer, as it was in the British
railway strike, the same conditions
prevailed. The government refused
to grant the demands of the employees,
the employees refused to work, and in
the end millions of people who were
not consulted in the controversy and
had only the most fragmentary know
ledge of the issues were forced to pay
the bill, including arrears of wages
to the men who subjected them to all
the hardships and losses.
Organized labor insists that the
right to strike is vital, and that
without it all wage workers are in
danger of being enslaved. There may
be an elemtn of truth in this con-
tention, but this does not imply that
the strike must be first resort and
that labor which vociferously de-
mands the right of organization, is
privileged to use that power in any
way it sees fit.
Capital was once under that delus-
ion, but it has been cured, and labor
Will eventually have to submit to the
same kind of treatment.
Organization implies responsible
ties as well as power, and organized
labor as now led recognizes no re-
sponsibilities. Even its signed con-
tracts are unenforceable. If the
| Washington conference fails to estab-
lish the fact that the right to or
ganize carries with it the right of
public regulation, whether labor or
capital is concerned, it will make lit.
tie Roadway toward establishing a
basis for industrial peace,