RAILWAY STRIKE IN THE UNITED STATES.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5179, 27 October 1877, Page 1 (Supplement)

RAILWAY STRIKE IN THE UNITED STATES.

(From the New York Tribune.) A great strike is always a great public calamity. It is not creditable to American civilisation that, having made wonderful progress in all manner of devices for increasing lie efficiency and improving the condition of abor, we have as yet no bettor remedy for differences between employer and employed than the old, crude, brutal and expensive system of strokes, But it is a waste of time to repeat the trite saying that the employer has an absolute right to say whether he will pay higher or lower wages, and the employed have an absolute right to stop work, if they please, at the wages offered. No intelligent man in this country questions the right of the employed to decline work whenever they are dissatisfied with the terras proposed, and only persons of very inferior intelligence question the corresponding right of the employer to determine at what wages and on what terms he will employ the services of others. Labor is free ; therefore it may decide for itself whether to work or not. Employers are also free ; therefore they may decide for themselves on what terras they wish the labor of others. The difficulty is not in a formal denial of either of these rights. It is an attempt to control by force or fear the action of those who do not wish to refuse the terms offered. That attempt, wherever made, under whatever color or pretext, is an act of war against the freedom of labor, and against the peace of society, and ought to be put down with stem, uncompromising and unsparing vigor. A strike on great railway Hues, however, involves something more. Not only the freedom of the individual is assailed by every attempt to drive workmen from their voluntary choice—the entire business of the community is interrupted, property is arrested in transportation, merchants are exposed to loss and possibly to ruin, through the inability of a transporter to perform his contracts, workmen in places far distant from the scene of conflict are subjected to serious and irreparable loss, because their iudustry is interrupted by the failure of necessary supplies or materials. For instance, a coal train on the Baltimore and Ohio is stopped. It may be that, in consequence, more than one factory is com•pelled to stop work. A freight train, with material for an establishment in a Western City, is forcibly detained. It may be that hundreds of workmen, who have no part in the controversy between the Baltimore and Ohio and its men, are compelled to lose one or more days of time. In a thousand ways the loss falls upon men in all occupations and in distant localities, and if the struggle is prolonged the interruption of transportation becomes a great nublic nuisance, which ought to be abated as quickly as possible for the harm that it does to the entire community, and particularly to thousands of persons who have no responsibility whatever for the conduct of the company, and no means of protecting themselves against injury by its interruption. The man who wantonly lights an incendiary fire in a crowded city, or bears the seeds of pestilence into a crowded hall, is not guilty of a more clearly defined crime against society than he who blocks up the channels of transportation upon which all commerce and industry depend. The striker who interrupts, by force or intimidation, the labor of others upon a public highway, is guilty, therefore, of-a double crime a crime against the laborers whose freedom is assailed, and a crime against society in the arrest of its free and regular interchange of ■goods. For the prevention and punishment of this crime the most stringent provisions ought to be made, nor should the enforcement of them be left to depend upon the courage, independence, or fidelity of a local official. The people of distant States are exposed to loss by this crime. It is an offence against the whole country, and if not rigorously punished by local authorities, ought to be dealt with by the General Government. In some States laws already prohibit unlawful combinations of this nature ; but they do not reach ail forms of the offence, nor have they been so enforced by local authorities os to prevent the resort to violence in nearly every instance where a sharp struggle between railways and their employes occurs. Every person participating in or encouraging such violence or intimidation ought to be punished with severity. No gang of counterfeiters, by the imitation of notes of the Government, can do as much harm to the country as may be done by a few riotous strikers forcibly arresting transportation upon a great highway. If local authorities prove inadequate to suppress and punish this fre-quently-recurring offence, United States laws for its suppression and punishment should be enacted and enforced. '.■■■-

(From the Standard, July 24.) , The news from America must hare startled our - readers. It is the gravest yet received since the final close of the civil war. The railway strike lias spread suddenly, with the, rapidity, of 1 -a conflagration, and in, a maimer whioli indicates careful previous organisation, throughout; the entire region between the Lakes and the Ohio, from the, Atlantic coast

on the one side to the Mississippi on the other. It has assumed the character and more than the proportions of an insurrection. On Sunday afternoon the Cabinet were actually deliberating on a proposal to declare three States in open insurrection, and to call out 75,000 volunteers to put down the insurgents. The latter figure recalls ominously tho first outbreak of the Confederate war, when President Lincoln summoned the same number of volunteers to put down the insurrection which that summons forthwith converted into the greatest civil war on record. The public danger at that time was no doubt greater, but appearances were hardly more grave, and as-nredly the state of the country, the ordinary business of life, the communications of commerce, and the affairs of the country, were less disturbed than at present. At this moment all through railway traffic north of the Ohio and Potomac, excepting in New England, appears to be stopped. The railway workmen have been joined by great numbers of other operatives out of employ, and of idle and discontented persons generally. They have intercepted at several points the communication along all the chief lines of through traffic, and have taken absolute possession of more than one important town, and of several principal stations. They have encountered and defeated both State and Federal troops, denying to the flag of the Union that respect which since the civil war it has hitherto invariably received. Order is at an end. Trade is paralysed. Travel is impossible,; nor do we understand how, if the present state of things should continue, the great cities whese communications have been cut off are to be supplied with food. It is noteworthy that the strike is confined entirely to the North. At no single point within tho territory of the late Confederacy has riot or disorder occurred. The States whose Governments now find themselves face to face, not with sectional but with local rebellion, were, with the exception of Maryland, unanimously and passionately Unionists. New York has hitherto suffered comparatively little by the railway war ; but Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia are in a state of anarchy, and Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana have already felt the outbreak, and may at any moment be reduced to a eimiliar condition. Such a state of things has not prevailed in any civilised country since the repression of tho formidable but anarchical revolutions of 1848. Political disorder so serious arising simply from an industrial squabble has never been known before. The scandal and calamity have taken the United States by surprise, and those who had least confidence in the strength and security of American institutions were certainly unprepared to find the entire legal and physical force of the richest and strongest section of the Union paralysed, though but for a few days, by the lawlessness ot workmen discontented with their employers.