Untitled article by W. H. M.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · August 25, 1892

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 7, No. 33

The Trial by Battle

By W. H. M.

It is the first impulse of the natural man to assert his rights, either real or assumed, by a resort to personal combat. No longer ago than the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries this method of determining disputes was a part of the English code, acknowledged and practiced in due form as an accepted judicial procedure. As late as 1817 Lord Ellenborough declared that “the general law of the land is that there shall be a trial by battle in cases of appeal unless the party brings himself within some of the exceptions.” In 1818 the law was abolished. But neither the theory nor the practice of trial by battle seems to have been done away with. It continues to this day. Appeal to the court of violence is now more common than ever. The organized iron workers of Homestead have taken the issue of battle “on a writ of right,” against their unorganized fellow workmen. The miners of Cœur d’Alene have put their claims to the same test, as against the same opponents. The railroad switchmen of Buffalo have left their switches and are burning cars by the hundred, while the military must be called out to protect their fellow switchmen who wish to work. The excuse of the coal miners of Tennessee for violence presents itself in another form, but its results, while more indirect, are still the same, in throwing hundreds of men out of employment who were dependent upon the output of the mines for coal to run the machinery which gave them work. But beyond this is the grave fact that thousands of men are in armed rebellion against the authority of the State. The State is for the time being in subjection to an unlawful, armed assembly. They have proved the State powerless to protect others, they may yet find it powerless to protect them.

No greater travesty ever was enacted in all the world than these scenes of violence which purport to be for the betterment of the laboring man, and really are but the battles of one set of laboring men against another, and the result nothing but loss of time, loss of money, physical injury, to whom?—The laboring man. They certainly prove it true that he who takes the sword shall perish by the sword.

But the labor world is not alone in organization to gain its ends by force and violence. The religious world is doing the same thing. As strange and contradictory a thing as it seems, it is nevertheless true. They quote the Master as saying, “My kingdom is of this world, and therefore will my servants fight.” According to this reading of the Master’s words they are organizing the church militant on every possible line of civil, political, and legal aggression; and, even beyond that, conspiring to boycott, and in public meetings urging that their purposes be carried out even if to do it should require the bullet and the bayonet. What a burlesque it all is? In the name of fellowship and mutual protection the laboring men turn and rend each other! In the name of Christ, who brought peace on earth and good-will to men, these great religious organizations turn his gospel of peace into a gospel of force, his good-will to all men into ill-will to all who dissent. Oh, the burlesque of it! Where is the voice that will sound the truth so loud that it will ring in the ears of every man?

W. H. M.