Education in Lawlessness
By L. A. S.
THE present epidemic of strikes with which this country is afflicted affords food for serious thought. There can be no doubt that these disturbances are sowing seed for a future harvest, which will be of the same nature as the seed sown, and much more abundant. The immediate inconvenience, financial loss, and paralysis of trade due to the strikes, great as these are, do not constitute the gravest feature of the situation. The country is now in the midst of a period of prosperity, of which the strikes, strange to say, are one of the foremost evidences. We have reached a time in the country's history when prosperity itself brings strife and confusion, riot and distress. Business men are afraid to engage in new enterprises or to enlarge those already begun. A late telegram from Chicago states that “business interests of the city have become alarmed at the constant strikes and labor controversies that have marked the last three months, and are refusing to enlarge their local plants, as many of them planned to do a year ago.” A one-million-dollar improvement which was intended for the Frazer-Chalmers plant in that city has been definitely abandoned for this cause. If this is prosperity, what will adversity be? What fruit will be borne then by the present education in lawlessness which the strikers and their sympathizers are receiving? It is here that the worst feature of the situation lies. For it is true that members of the labor unions are being educated in lawlessness, in the idea that their own will is paramount to the law, and the interests of their unions are paramount to all other interests. In the great Pennsylvania coal strike the law, both in that State and in the national government, was set aside as a thing of no power in the adjustment of proper relations between employers and the working men. In effect that was to teach the labor unions the dangerous doctrine that they can raise issues which can not be settled by an appeal to law; and the point is one which they will not be likely to lose sight of. The whole tendency of strikes, great and small, is toward lawlessness; and the more numerous they become, and the more familiar men become with their accompanying scenes of riot and crime, the more are they educated to hold the law in light esteem. The strength of the labor unions enables their members to foster the spirit of lawlessness without being subject to the risk taken by the individual criminal. As an example of this it may be mentioned that a member of the Pennsylvania militia was prosecuted as a criminal for having performed his duty at one scene of riot during the strike, and only a decision of the supreme court saved him from being sentenced to prison for manslaughter. The influence of the labor unions against this guardian of the law carried everything before it up to the court of last resort. There is prosperity now; but the day of adversity is coming. When hard times come again, when multitudes are out of work, when the struggle for existence becomes more fierce, and men are thrown into trying conditions which test the soul, will the country then see an exhibition of self-restraint on the part of the working classes? or will it see an outburst of the spirit of lawlessness which will darken the land with scenes of strife and crime? Is it not for the latter result that the working men are to-day being educated? Time will answer the question, and a most unwelcome answer it will be, if we may judge from appearances.