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Would not employers be equally unscrupulous. They would not. They could not afford the disturbance, the stoppage of the business, the risk of unfair decisions in a country where it is “popular” to favor and encourage, not the just, but the poor. The labor leaders have nothing to lose, not even their jobs, for their work is labor leading. Their dupes, by the way, would be dupes no longer, for with enforced arbitration the game of “follow my leader” would pay until there should be nothing to follow him to but empty treasuries of dead industries in an extinct civilization. If there must be enforced arbitration it should at least not apply to that sum of all impudent rascalities, the “sympathetic strike.”

As to the men who have set up the monstrous claim asserted by the “sympathetic strike,” I shall refer to the affair of 1904. If it was creditable in them to feel so much concern about a few hundred aliens in Illinois, how about the grievances of the whole body of their countrymen in California? When their employers, who they confess were good to them, were plundering the Californians, they did not strike, sympathetically nor otherwise. Year after year the railway companies picked the pockets of the Californians; corrupted their courts and legislatures; laid its Briarean hands in exaction upon every industry and interest; filled the land with lies and false reasoning; threw honest men into prisons and locked the gates of them against thieves and assassins; by open defiance of the tax collector denied to children of the poor the advantages of education–did all this and more, and these honest working men stood loyally by it, sharing in wages its dishonest gains, receivers, in one sense, of stolen goods. The groans of their neighbors were nothing to them; even the wrongs of themselves, their wives and their children did not stir them to revolt. On every breeze that blew, this great chorus of cries and curses was borne past their ears unheeded. Why did they not strike then? Where then were their fiery altruists and storm-petrels of industrial disorder? No!–the ingenious gods who have invented the Debses and Gomperses, and humorously branded them with names that would make a cat laugh, have never put it into their cold selfish hearts to order out their misguided followers to redress a public wrong, but only to inflict one–to avenge a personal humiliation, gratify an appetite for notoriety, slake a thirst for the intoxicating cup of power, or punish the crime of prosperity.

It is a practical, an illogical, a turbulent time, yes; it always is. The age of Jesus Christ was a practical age, yet Jesus Christ was sweetly impractical. In an illogical period Socrates reasoned clearly, and logically died for it. Nero’s time was a time of turbulence, yet Seneca’s mind was not disturbed, nor his conscience perverted. Compare their fame with the everlasting infamy that time has fixed upon the names of the Jack Cades, the Robespierres, the Tomaso Nielos–guides and gods of the “fierce democracies” which rise with a sickening periodicity to defile the page of history with a quickly fading mark of blood and fire, their own awful example their sole contribution to the good of mankind. To be a child of your time, imbued with its spirit and endowed with its aims–that is to petition Posterity for a niche in the Temple of Shame.

No strike of any prominence ever takes place in this country without the concomitants of violence and destruction of property, and usually murder. These cheerful incidents one who does not personally suffer them can endure with considerable fortitude, but the sniveling, hypocritical condemnation of them by the press that has instigated them and the strikers who have planned and executed them, and who invariably ascribe them to those whom they most injure; the solemn offers of the leaders to assist in protecting the imperiled property and avenging the dead, while openly employing counsel for every incendiary and assassin arrested in spite of them–these are pretty hard to bear. A strike means (for it includes as its main method) violence, lawlessness, destruction of the property of others than the strikers, riot and if necessary bloodshed. Even when the strikers themselves have no hand in these crimes they are morally liable for the foreknown consequences of their act. Nay, they are morally liable for all the consequences–all the inconveniences and losses to the community, all the sufferings of the poor entailed by interruptions of trade, all the privations of other workingmen whom a selfish attention to their own supposed advantage throws out of the closed industries. They are liable in morals and should be made so in law–only that strikes are needless. It is not worth while to create a multitude of complex criminal responsibilities for acts which can easily be prevented by a single and simple one. How?