THE despatches for a number of days have been telling that the Federal Grand Jury in Indianapolis had a large number of indictments prepared and would soon proceed to arrest many persons connected with the “dynamiting cases” that have attracted so much attention during recent months. On the 14th, the machinery for arrests was started, and fifty-four persons were put under indictment, and it was said that many others would likely be dragged into it.
Leaders in the labor movement constituted the majority of those placed under arrest. The president of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers, who was among the number arrested, immediately sent out word to the laboring men everywhere, calling upon them to believe in his innocence and also in the innocence of his co-defendants.
We offered the suggestion some time ago that there will be an immense amount of trouble over this matter before the country is through with it. It is well for thinking men to stop to consider what is confronting us. Here is a wholesale arrest of labor leaders. If these men are guilty as charged, what does it speak of the condition of things in the country? And on the other hand, if they succeed in proving themselves innocent, what can be said of the spirit that would be back of the movement to bind labor in slavery, no matter what the cost, and no matter what the means used? If an individual is a partisan on either side of this controversy, and will stop to think seriously, he will at once recognize that the country is in a desperate struggle between organized capital on the one hand and organized labor on the other, each one charging the other with the basest crimes.
We have no part in the controversy on either side. We declared our neutrality on this subject years ago. We believe it can be clearly shown that the whole matter is set forth in the prophecies which indicate that we are living in the last days. The fifth chapter of the book of James, as well as many other prophecies, shows that the heaping together of treasures would constitute one of the marked characteristics of the very last days. And in consequence of this heaping together of treasure, there would be cries from the laborers, and the struggle will become an intensely bitter one.
This conflict is on in every part of the world. “Our London Letter,” found in other columns of this issue, shows how things are in Great Britain; and the conditions there and in this country are similar to what are found in Spain, in France, in Germany, in Russia, and everywhere else. The very foundations of society are being broken up by the lawlessness and violence of the time, and we are only at the beginning of it. God’s Word assures us that these conditions will get worse and worse. Our only hope for relief is in the second coming of Christ, and that coming can not be long delayed. If we are prepared for His coming, the whole future is radiant with brightness and joy. But if we do not know Him and the joy of His soon coming, the outlook before us in this turbulent world is anything but reassuring.
A troop of cavalry preventing a demonstration at the funeral of a woman who was killed in a strike riot in Lawrence, Massachusetts, recently. This is merely illustrative of the war that is coming on all over the world between capital and labor.
