Striking Against the Dead.
The people of Chicago should have the sympathy of the world. Many manufacturers have left Chicago because of the increased rule of the strike. That unfeeling and arbitrary rule was never more strikingly illustrated than in the recent strike of the livery-men, especially against conveying the dead to the cemetery. It would seem that if there was any act that should be free from violent molestation it is the act of performing the last services for the dead; but it has not been so in Chicago during the present strike. Pickets have even been posted in front of residences where the dead were lying, waiting for burial, and those who would have conveyed them to the cemetery were either driven away by threats of violence or mobbed and beaten. Thus the people are compelled to keep their dead in their houses, or to bury them secretly at night. Persons whose relatives have died have found it necessary to refrain from publishing the usual death announcement in order to escape the ghoulish picketing of these strikers. In one case an ambulance driver who was hurrying a dying man to the hospital was mobbed and himself and his team pelted with frozen snowballs. It was with difficulty that the team was prevented from running away. The strike still continues, and the health officers are compelled to tolerate a condition which they can not remedy, and which is a dangerous menace to the health of the inhabitants of the city.