The Birmingham age-herald., 1924-08-15
Cause Of Humanity
By DE. FRAfK CRANE


 It ought to be clearly understood that those who employ violence are the worst enemies of labor. The men who shoot policemen, smash factories, wreck freight cars, and blow up houses are the men who are doing most toward retarding the movement of the labor ing people toward their full rights.
 It ought also be understood why this is SO. It is so because the cause of labor is not a class war. It. is the cause of humanity itself. The cause of the masses is the cause of justice. The case is not one where two dogs are quarreling over bones Capital and labor are not enemies in an eternal feud. What one gets is not necessarily robbed from another. Their interests are mutual.
 What the sensible, honest workingman wants is not something that belongs to some body else; he wants what belongs to him.
 He does not desire to beat anybody, whip anybody, nor be avenged upon anybody. All he wants is square deal.
 Now, violence and riot never wrought a square deal for any man or class since the foundation of the world. They invariably have ended in conditions of anarchy, and anarchy is the mother of tyranny. When there is no law the people welcome despot. For better is the rottenest ruler of absolutism, with law and order, than the most vociferous democracy where life is insecure and property unstable. s
 We are of English blood. The English ge- nius stands for reform by law. Look at the progress in England during the nineteenth century. There was no revolution, no de- struction, yet the gains are considerable.
 Note Catholic emancipation in 1927,
 the reform in suffrage in 1882, by which
 the political power was practically trans
 ferred from the upper to the middle
 classes; the abolition of slavery in 1884,
 by which no English soil might hold a slave; the reform of the poor laws in the
 same year; the factory act of 1883 pro-
 tecting children from constructive labor
 the act of 1868, which threw contested
 elections into the civil courts to be
 quietly adjudicated; the acts of 1872
 and 1883 concerning the ballot, which
 have rooted bribery out of English cleo
 tions, transforming them from being the
 most corrupt to being the purest in the
 world; the universal suffrage acts of
 1884 and 1885, adding 5000 900, votes to the polling lists the municipal reform
 acts of 1885, in which the rubbish which
 city charters had gathered for ages was
 swept away; the repeal of the corn laws
 in 1646, and civil service reform of 1870.
 These and other changes in England con stitute a change as profound as the French revolution. They were brought to pass by a people not only determined to have their lib- eEtAcS put AiSO sQuntty ueteInLueu nOI 10 pull the house down over their ears in the process. Law is the mutual compact under which it is possible for human beings So live to- gether. Without respect for law from all classes there can be no civilization, but we lapse into that wretched b0rbarism where the strong prey upon the weak in unrestricted license.
 Most of us recognize this. It seems trite. And yet there are many, warm-heartsd in their struggle for q better social system, who need to be reminded that there~is no real or permanent advancement of justice except by law. a
 And don't forget that to make the labor cause a class war is to cheapen and degrade the issue; to the normal American any kind of q class war ranks as Q species of dog fight, but when you make the labor move mept to be the cause of humanity you put behind t the conzcienee of tho trace, and. yon are sure to win.