A GLIMPSE BEYOND by Uriah Smith

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 2, 1877

A GLIMPSE BEYOND.

By Uriah Smith

Last week we announced the outbreak of railroad riots in Pennsylvania. Before that paper reached its readers, the whole country lay paralyzed as under the incubus of a terrible nightmare. Lawlessness and riot, plunder, arson and murder, held high carnival. Travel was interrupted, business suspended, mills closed, and all the best interests in the country trampled beneath the feet of a wild, delirious mob. The railroad strikers little realized at first the nature of the movement they were inaugurating; and some of them were as much surprised and startled as the country at large, at the fearful element in society that stood ready to leap into action at the first opportunity, and give the freest play to the worst passions of the human heart.

But perhaps the strangest feature of the whole matter, and the one certainly the most alarming was the suddenness with which it spread from one end of the land to the other, appearing almost simultaneously from the center to the extremest boundaries of the country. It shows the spirit of communism pervading all the lower classes of society. It shows their readiness for concerted action at a moment’s opportunity in the worst of causes. Who, five days before the whole country was stricken dumb, as the papers expressed it, before the face of “the great terror,” expected any such thing, or believed that such a state of things could be brought about?

There are those who are pacifying their fears in regard to the declarations of prophecy which speak of the revolutions, overturnings, outbreaks and troubles of the last days, with the thought that there is no particular danger; for such things cannot be brought about for a long time. The events of the past few days are calculated to enlighten such, if they are susceptible of instruction. This outbreak gives us a glimpse of what lies beyond. It shows us a little of the volcano over which even this country is slumbering, and that sudden destruction may come, even when men are in the very act of saying “Peace and safety.”

It has a significant revelation also for the rich. It must suggest to their minds the inquiry what advantage their riches will be, and what their gold will be worth, when the poor men and the laboring men release themselves from business obligations and the restraints of law, and with a spirit of exaction for real or imaginary wrongs, plunder or destroy as their interest or passions may suggest.

We are forcibly reminded of the language in which James describes the condition of the rich at the time when the Judge standeth before the door, and the coming of the Lord draweth nigh. Jas. 5:1-4: “Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth; and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.”

We enter in no respect here into the present conflict between labor and capital. It is undoubtedly true that many of the rich, as here represented, have enriched themselves at the expense of the poor. They have wrung means from the necessities of the needy, that they might gratify and gorge and pet and pamper themselves. But the poor, goaded at length to desperation, spring upon their oppressors with the fury of a wild beast unchained. And their long unbalanced accounts will be adjusted, that being paid in blood which they refused in gold.

The strike is so far ended that all outward manifestations of violence are suppressed, and those roads the property of which is in a condition for them to do so have resumed business. But the results of this movement are to be felt for some time to come. The Detroit Evening News of July 27, 1877, says:—

“The worst part of the present troubles has not come. The bitterest fruit of the mad folly of the working people will be starvation. The gaunt hand of famine has been thrust from the social chaos already in the mining districts of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and the ugly spectre will soon appear in all parts of the country. In our country, where the population is so widely scattered, it requires a never ceasing energy of the work of transportation to keep the cities and centers of manufacturing industry supplied with food. A day’s suspension of freight trains throughout the country would be attended with appreciable suffering. In the present case the suspension has already lasted from nine to ten days, and may last as much longer. A population of twenty thousand in West Virginia are reduced to fifty barrels of flour. Pittsburgh, like a beleaguered city, has eight days’ rations. This loss cannot be made up.

“These causes alone would make the prospect appalling, but other causes, still more potent for evil, have been operating, and will continue to operate, how long no one knows. That whole portion of the population of the United States which depends on daily wages to keep away the actual pangs of hunger are now idle; for the industries not suspended by force and violence have been compelled to close by lack of supplies and the irresistible workings of the laws of commerce which make its operations so delicately interdependent. They will remain idle for many weeks. They were on the brink of starvation before the enforced idleness came. They will now know its reality. Add to these causes that millions of dollars’ worth of food has been destroyed, and that the price of what remains will inevitably rise, and the outlook for the poor is something fearful to contemplate.

“We cannot see how these strikes, viewed with all their direct and indirect consequences, moral and physical, can be regarded otherwise than as the greatest calamity next to the civil war that ever befell this country.” U. S.