A HEARTLESS MOVE | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 17, 1878

A HEARTLESS MOVE.

A more notable instance of men seeking to enrich themselves at the expense and suffering of others, rarely occurs, than the one described in the following paragraph. Fifty thousand men at this season and in these times thrown out of employment, means want, suffering, starvation, or crime. Yet this is coolly and deliberately done by a few moneyed monopolists, that they may fill their coffers with gold. From Lock Haven, Pa., Jan. 8, the following announcement is telegraphed:—

“Fifty thousand men thrown out of work, that the price of coal may be raised. In accordance with arrangements made at the meeting at Philadelphia, last week, an order was issued yesterday by Gowan, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron company, to all colliery superintendents in the Schuylkill coal regions to suspend operations. This movement has thrown between 25,000 and 30,000 miners and laborers out of employment. As the individual operators have also announced their intention of shutting down to-day to curtail production, between 15,000 and 20,000 more colliery operatives will be added to the number already idle. The operators in the Shamokin region likewise intend to stop running, and from present indications it is not in the least improbable that every mine in the region will be closed by this evening.”

When the love of money will transform men into such fiends, it is not without reason that Paul says that the love of money is the root of all evil, and that they who “will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, . . . which drown men in destruction and perdition.” 1 Tim. 6:9, 10. From the testimony of James it appears that in the last days especially men will seek to grow rich through oppression of the poor. Their possession of capital gives them an advantage which they are not slow to use to grind down others in their necessity and poverty, and enrich themselves. Besides the fifty thousand men thrown out of employment, hundreds of thousands all over the country will be thrown into suffering by the contemplated advance in the price of fuel. And while they are so heartless in regard to this, it accords with all our instincts of justice when we read from the apostle that such persons are to enjoy their ill-gotten gains but a little while; for they are heaping up treasures for the last days; and that the cries of those whose wages are kept back by fraud are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth. James 5:1-4. They are preparing for a time when they will find too much coal on their hands for their own comfort.

In the Detroit Evening News, of Jan. 10, we find this further allusion to the subject.

“The Pennsylvania coal kings, whom a benign country has, during twenty years, protected into opulence, are not satisfied with the interference with the natural laws of trade through the tariff, but propose to raise the price of fuel still more, by the arbitrary suspension of its production. They have, through the monopoly the tariff gave them, filled Pennsylvania with pauper labor, which they have ground down to starvation wages and reduced almost to savagery by long years of brutal tyranny and oppression. They have now added to the infamy of their system the sudden discharge of 50,000 men, for no other purpose than to reduce the supply of coal and raise the price. In other words, they will starve 50,000 poor families in Pennsylvania for the purpose of robbing all the poor families of the country who are compelled to use their fuel. These men are public enemies, and the people should insist that the government at Washington be no longer a partner in their crimes against the people. Let the duty on coal be abolished once for all, or reduced to a strictly revenue basis, and we shall no longer be compelled to pay tribute to them. The coal industries of the country would then adjust themselves to natural conditions, and there would be no complaints of overproduction.”