Year: 1877

| scarce, ana that unless the rallrobu uA'-
turbances cease very soon large bodies oi
people, thousands of families, will suffer
/ FROM famine. At Cumberland, i'll Mary
land, they have already found it necessary
10 form relief committee to gather sup
plies for women and children who are
actually suffering starvation. In one part
of Allegheny county, having population
of twenty thousand, there are not twenty
barrels of -four left in store. In Frostburg,
district with six thousand people, there
are only six barrels in the hands of mcr-
chants.


Now, who is it that is threatened with
famine in these and other districts? The
families of miners and workingmen.


The mining population along the Balti-
moro and Ohio and Pennsylvania railroads
very generally and deeply sym pathized with
the strikers. 1t was natural that they should
do so; it wns not surprising even that
they encouraged the strikers in stopping
the transportation of freight. When men
lose their tempers they are short
sighted If the miners had been
prudent, if they had thought ahead,
they would have seen that to encourage
or even to allow the train men or anybody
else to stop the passage of freight was to
condemn themselves and their wives and
children to certain and almost immediate
want No miner who is not fool would
have done that knowingly; no man on pur-
pose brings famine to his own door. Yet
this is precisely what these miners did.
Great numbers of them in all that region
let their sympathy with the strikers carry
them so far that they permitted and
encouraged these to stop the transportation
of freight They could easily have pre-
vented this it needed but frown and
word from the miners to check the unlawful
work Of the strikers


Would we have the workingmen, then.
refuse to sympathize with their fellow work
men? Not at all. So far from this the
HERALD, which is true friend Of the work
ingmen everywhere, did not hesitate to give
its sympathy to the men who thought them
selves wronged, in an honest effort to pro-
cure remedy for their grievances. They
had right to strike--to stop work namely !;
but they had no right to interfere
with the running of trains or to prevent
other men poorer than themselves from
taking their places, if any such men could
be found. The miners, however, thought
differently they thought striker had the
right on his side when he blockaded freight
trains and prevented willing hands from
working on them. And see what happens.
It was easy to curse the road, but it is not
easy to see their families suddenly famine
stricken because of their own blunder.


Nor is it only in this way that this mis-
take of the miners causes them suffering and
loss. The blockade of the roads which they
in the simplicity of their hearts allowed
made the shipment of coal impossible; hence
the work at the mines is brought to a stop,
and wages cease at the moment when pro-
visions grow scarce-a double calamity
which these workingmen have brought upon
themselves. Could they have foreseen what
has happened certainly they would never
have been absurd enough to allow railroad
to be blockaded. They would, as matter
of self-preservation, have turned out at the
very first offer of the strikers to stop the
trans, and would have demanded that let
who strike that would, the trains must run
so long as the companies could hire men at
any price to run them.


But what is thus true of these unfortunate
miners is true of all the workingmen every
where. Every interest of theirs required,
urgently, that they should resist with all
their might any stoppage of the trains. In
Baltimore, for instance the sympathy was
so strong with the strikers that the troops
going to relieve the blockade of trains were
attacked by mob. That happened only
last Friday night, and by Tuesday the whole
commerce of Baltimore, foreign and domes-
tic, was brought to standstill; laborers
stood idle and without wages at all the
wharves ships could not be loaded; goods
could not be distributed; there were no
trains crowding down to the piers to deposit
and take away merchandise F.; mills and
workshops were closed because the supply
of coal and iron no longer came to them |;
and the workingmen who had sympathized
with the lawlessness of the strikers but
few days before now stood with their hands
in their pockets and without wages or the
means to earn any, simply because they had
not on Friday the wit to see that they
were cutting their own throats.


1t would be well if the workingmen Of
Baltimore and the coal mining regions were
the only ones who suffer. But the same
thing goes on all over the country. Thou
/ sands of operatives have abandoned their
shops East and West out of sympathy with
the strikers, and everywhere workmen have
encouraged the blockade of the railroads
Everywhere tho evil effects Of this grave
error have fallen at once upon them
and their families. They find that
it is no joke to dcrango and sum-
marily stop tho great business of
transportation. They may be selfishly
| careless of the losses inflicted by this