Chapter II (2)

He went down to crawl under one of the wagons into the open, but remained on his knees under it. Klein Piet, on all fours at his side, shivered and gulped. Their eyes wrestled with the baffling dark, and their pulses checked and raced; for something was moving out yonder. They could see but the loom of a great bulk, a blackness blacker than the night, something vast and tall--and it moved. As their eyes grew familiar with the darkness, they could see plainly that it moved; it seemed to slide slowly. Then, delicate but quite clear, some voice called and others answered. The sliding bulk took on an outline; it made a vague tracery against the faint sky as it neared them; each instant it was plainer to see. Piet, intent, every faculty set like a cocked pistol, noted a long flank, a tall, window-pierced structure that sloped. Old pictures and forgotten names fermented in his memory.

"_Allemachtig!_ It's a ship," he cried.

Superbly she passed them, that lost galleon of the young world, slipped from her age-long anchorage. Her high sides were a-bristle with her guns; her sails were sheeted and her head was to the east. There was a great company of men on board of her; on her high poop, rising like a citadel, a little group of them was black and busy. As she passed down the beach, she dipped and lifted like a burdened ship in a seaway. It was then Klein Piet had his moment of madness. Suddenly he screamed like a girl and began to scramble forward. "Wait for me!" he cried. "I will go with you. I am a sailor too."

He would have run down towards her, but Piet grasped him and held on. He struggled and they rolled together on the grass, fighting with one another. Then Klein Piet ceased as suddenly as he had begun.

"I am better now," he gasped, and Piet let him rise. They stood up together and gazed seaward. A squall was blowing in from the east, thick and black, with a gleam of white water under it. Was it a sail they saw, a ship that heeled to the brisk wind and was screened from sight by the rain? They crawled back under the wagon as the first wetness lit on their faces, and sat there together.

"If you tell me you saw a ship," said Piet suddenly, "I will call you a liar."

"Yes," said Klein Piet. "I must be a liar, for I saw one."

When Oom Piet finished this tale, he was wont to knock out his pipe on the heel of his boot.

"But in the morning, when we went back to our work," he always added, "there was the chain--cut through!"

A FOOTPATH MORALITY

BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

Along the Hills, height after height
Tosses the dappled light;
Waters unhindered flow;
The cuckoo calls beyond the third hedgerow;
And young winds nothing can quell
Scale the wild-chestnut citadel,
Again to make
Its thousand faery white pagodas shake.
Up many a lane,
The blue vervain
A coverlid hath featly spread
For the bees' bed,
That those tired sylvan thieves
May lie most soft on the sweet and scalloped leaves.
To-morrow morn,
Bright agrimony in the thickets born
Will high uphold
Each cinquefoil of plain gold;
Dogwood in white will hood herself apace,
And betony flaunt a varied gypsy mace,
And copper pimpernel, true as a clock,
On the waste common by some rock
Her lone dark-centred wheel draw in
Long, long ere dusk begin.

This day
Of infinite May
Is far more fitly yours than ours,
O spirit-bodied flowers!
What heart disordered sore
Comes through the greenwood door,
Shall for your sake
Find sap and soil and dew, and shall not break:
And hearts beneath no ban
Will in your sight some penance do for man,
Poor lagging man, content to be
Sick with the impact of eternity,
Who might keep step with you in the low grass,
Best part of one strange pageant made in joy to pass!
Not ye, not ye, the privilege disown
To flourish fair, and fall fair, and be strewn
Deep in that Will of God, where blend
The origin of beauty and the end.

TAFT AND LABOR

BY

GEORGE W. ALGER

A labor record considered solely in its utilitarian aspect as a vote-getting device is not especially important to the general public. The attitude of a presidential candidate, however, towards the industrial and social problems of the working people is another matter. Does he know what they are? Does he see the great economic questions of labor and capital with eyes blinded by class prejudice or does he see them with the clear vision of a statesman? Does he intend to play a man's part in helping to solve them? The answer to these inquiries is of interest not merely to the capitalists and the workers but to all of us.

In his judicial career Mr. Taft has rendered some decisions in matters brought before him as a judge, which are bound to be a subject of discussion in the coming campaign. One group of these decisions deals with what may be described as rules of industrial warfare.

International agreement has done much toward civilizing international war. Capital and labor have no Hague Court. The limitations upon the scope and method of their warfare must come from the courts and the legislatures. The Treaty of Paris provided for the rights of neutrals, for the freedom of peaceful ships of commerce from plunder and destruction in war. The rights of neutrals in industrial war are less protected but are no less important. In that warfare the neutral party--the public--stands much as Mr. Pickwick did between the rival editors, receiving the fire-tongs on one side of the head and the carpet-bag on the other. The labor question in its militant phase is a public question largely because the public has no desire to occupy Mr. Pickwick's unhappy position.

It happens that all the so-called labor decisions which Judge Taft made when on the bench involve directly and primarily the rights of the general public and of outsiders having no direct part in any industrial quarrel, who against their will have been drawn into the warfare between capital and labor. In deciding these cases it has been necessary not only to consider the rights of labor in industrial disputes, but to pass upon the right of the general public and of disinterested outsiders to be let alone.

_A Veto to Economic Excommunication_

The first of these cases was one decided by Judge Taft in 1890 when he was a judge of the Superior Court of Cincinnati. A Bricklayers' Union in Cincinnati, having about four hundred members, had a dispute with the firm of Parker Brothers, contracting bricklayers. The Union wanted Parker Brothers to pay a fine it had imposed upon one of their employees who was a member of the Union, to reinstate an apprentice who had left them, and to discharge another apprentice. Parker Brothers refused to do so. A strike was accordingly called. The Union also declared a boycott against Parker Brothers, and its business agent issued a circular to material men, contractors, and owners, which concluded with this announcement: "Any firm dealing in building materials who ignores this request, is hereby notified that we will not work his material upon any building nor for any contractor by whom we are employed. (Signed) Bricklayers' Union No. 1." One of the contractors to whom this notice was sent was the Moore Lime Company, engaged in selling lime in Cincinnati. Parker Brothers were customers of the Moores, and the Moores continued selling lime to them, notwithstanding the notice. Another circular was then sent out by the Union to its members, which read as follows: "Bricklayers' Union No. 1, Ohio. We, the members of the Bricklayers' Union, will not use material supplied by the following dealers until further notice": and in the list they put Moore & Company. The effect of the circular was to interfere with Moore & Company's business and to cause loss to their customers, who feared a similar fate. On these facts the Moores sued the Union for damage which they claimed had been done to their business by a wrongful and malicious conspiracy. The case was tried by a jury, which gave the Moores $2,250 damages. An appeal was taken by the Union to the Superior Court of Cincinnati, where Judge Taft presided.

The facts just related show the issue involved. The Moores' employees had no grievance against them. The only grievance which the Bricklayers had against them was that they refused to permit themselves to be used as a battering-ram in an assault on Parker Brothers. The Union insisted on the right to boycott Moore's Lime Company because Moore's Lime Company would not assist them in injuring the Parkers. Judge Taft decided, as other judges have decided in many cases, that such a combination to injure the Moores was without just cause or legal excuse and was illegal. This, so far as the Moores were concerned, was not a strike case, but a boycott, and in his decision Taft was very careful to draw the distinction and so express himself that the legal rights of labor in a lawful strike should not be impaired. He says:

If the workmen of an employer refuse to work for him except on
better terms at a time when their withdrawal will cause great
loss to him, and they intentionally inflict such loss to coerce
him to come to their terms, they are bona fide exercising their
lawful right to dispose of their labor for the purpose of lawful
gain. But the dealings between Parker Brothers and their material
men, or between such material men and their customers had not
the remotest natural connection either with defendants' wages
or their other terms of employment. There was no competition
or possible contractual relation between the plaintiffs and
defendants, where their interests were naturally opposed. The
right of the plaintiffs (Moore & Company) to sell their material
was not one which, in its exercise, brought them into legitimate
conflict with the rights of defendants' Union and its members to
dispose of their labor as they chose. The conflict was brought
about by the efforts of defendants to use plaintiffs' right of
trade to injure Parker Brothers, and, upon failure of this, to use
plaintiffs' customers' right of trade to injure plaintiffs. Such
effort cannot be in the bona fide exercise of trade, is without
just cause, and is, therefore, malicious. The immediate motive of
defendants here was to show to the building world what punishment
and disaster necessarily followed a defiance of their demands. The
remote motive of wishing to better their condition by the power
so acquired, will not, as we think we have shown, make any legal
justification for defendants' acts.

The doctrine of excommunication, the great engine of the Church in the Middle Ages, has not been revived and transferred from the Pope to the labor unions.

_End of the Engineers' Famous "Rule 12"_

The next decision of Taft's in a labor dispute came after his elevation to the Federal Bench, and again involved the same principle--the extent to which the rights of a third party, against whom neither labor nor capital has any grievance, can be impaired by involving him against his will in labor disputes. This case arose out of a strike of locomotive engineers on the Toledo-Ann Arbor Railroad in 1893. The strike had been called after numerous conferences between the railroad officials and Mr. Arthur, the representative of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. It was a legitimate strike, as against the Toledo-Ann Arbor Railroad, for higher wages. The phase of the controversy which came into court for Judge Taft's consideration, however, was not the strike itself, but grew out of an attempt by the Union to compel other railroads to refuse to receive freight from the Toledo Road and thereby paralyze that road and coerce it into granting the demands of the engineers.

On March 7, 1893, Mr. Arthur sent to the chairman of the General Adjustment Committees of the Brotherhood on eleven railroad systems in Ohio and neighboring States the following telegram: "There is a legal strike in force upon the Toledo-Ann Arbor & North Michigan Railroad. See that the men on your road comply with the laws of the Brotherhood. Notify your general manager." A "legal" strike, as the term was used, meant one to which the Grand Chief of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers had consented, and meant the promulgation of Rule 12 of the organization, which provided in substance that after a strike had been declared against a railroad, it should, while the strike continued, be "a violation of obligation for a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers who may be employed _on a railroad running in connection with or adjacent to said road_, to handle the property belonging to said road or system in any way that may benefit said company with which the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers is at issue."

In obedience to Mr. Arthur's telegram, representatives of the Brotherhood on various railroads notified the general managers of these railroads that after a certain date the engineers would refuse to haul cars or freight forwarded by the Toledo Road. Some of these railroads thereafter notified the management of the Toledo Railroad that in view of the threatened actions of their own engineers, they would be obliged to discontinue receiving or forwarding freight for the road. The Toledo thereupon obtained from Judge Taft in the United States Circuit Court an injunction against the Pennsylvania Railroad and other railroad companies, enjoining them from refusing to handle its freight and commanding them to perform their railroad functions as required by the Interstate Commerce Act, which made it a criminal offense for connecting railroads to refuse to receive or transport freight from one another's lines. Mr. Arthur was made a party, and the injunction, issued, and sustained after hearing, directed him to rescind his order putting into effect Rule 12 of his organization. The decree did not require the employees of these other railroads to continue to work for the railroads if they saw fit to strike, but it did require them, as long as they were in the employ of those railroads, to handle the freight of the Toledo Road as they would the freight of any other road.

The opinion which Judge Taft wrote in this case is a long one. He quotes the provisions of the Interstate Commerce Act, which clearly made it a criminal offense for the officers, agents, or employees of any of these connecting roads wilfully to refuse to receive and transmit the freight of the Toledo Road, and declares that the attempt of the Locomotive Engineers to compel the railroads to commit this criminal offense through this Rule 12 was unlawful. As to the rule itself, he says, after an exhaustive examination of it in connection with the provisions of the Interstate Commerce Law:

We have thus considered with some care the criminal character of
Rule 12 and its enforcement, not only, as will presently be seen,
because it assists in determining the civil liabilities which
grow out of them, but also because we wish to make it plain, if
we can, to the intelligent and generally law-abiding men who
compose the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, as well as to
their usually conservative chief officer, what we cannot believe
they appreciate, that notwithstanding their perfect organization
and their charitable, temperance and other elevated and useful
purposes, the existence of Rule 12 under their organic law makes
the Brotherhood a criminal conspiracy against the laws of their
country.

The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers acquiesced in the criticism of this section of their laws and removed it. The fact that this organization is in existence to-day, unimpaired in power and authority throughout the American railroad world, is an indication of its willingness to recognize and obey the law of the land. Its conduct in subsequently withdrawing the rule shows that Judge Taft was justified in setting forth with such painstaking clearness the illegality of the rule, with the expectation that its illegality would be recognized and the rule abolished--a confidence which was justified by its results.

_Phelan Sentence in the Pullman Strike_

The next labor decision made by Judge Taft was in the well-known Phelan case in the great Pullman strike of 1894. The organization with which he was then called upon to deal was of a totally different character from that of the Locomotive Engineers. It was one managed in entire disregard of the law, the courts, and the public. Eugene V. Debs, the chief agent of that organization, the American Railway Union, is to-day the Socialist candidate for the presidency. In the Pullman strike of 1894 Judge Taft sent one of Debs' chief assistants--Phelan--to jail for six months. If his judicial conduct in this matter merits criticism, here are the facts on which that criticism must be based:

Some of us have fairly hazy notions to-day as to the Pullman strike and what it was all about. It began in May, 1894. The employees of the Pullman Company, engaged in making cars at Pullman, Illinois, went on a strike because of the refusal of the Company to restore wages which had been reduced in the preceding year. The American Railway Union, which then comprised some two hundred and fifty thousand railway employees which Debs had organized and over which he was master in control, later endorsed this strike and started in actively to make it a success. The principal means by which that success was sought was by declaring a boycott on Pullman cars. In Judge Taft's opinion in the Phelan case (Thomas _vs_. Cincinnati, N. O. & T. P. Rd. Co.), he gives the plan and scope of this boycott as follows:

Pullman cars are used on a large majority of the railways of the
country. The members of the American Railway Union, whose duty
it was to handle Pullman cars on such railways, were to refuse
to do so, with the hope that the railway companies, fearing a
strike, would decline further to haul them in their trains and
inflict a great pecuniary injury upon the Pullman Company. In case
these railroads failed to yield to the demand, every effort was
to be made to tie them up and cripple the doing of any business
whatever by them, and particular attention was to be directed to
the freight traffic, which it was known was the chief source of
revenue. As the lodges of the American Railway Union extended from
the Alleghany Mountains to the Pacific Coast, it will be seen
that it was contemplated by those engaged in carrying out their
plans, that in case of a refusal of the railway companies to join
the Union in its attack upon the Pullman Company, there would be
a paralysis of all railroad traffic of every kind throughout the
vast territory traversed by the lines using Pullman cars.

Phelan came to Cincinnati to carry on this warfare against the Pullman Company by paralyzing, if he could, all the railroads centering there. He did not stop even with the railroads using Pullman cars, but ordered a strike against the Big Four, which used none of these cars. On the day Phelan called the strike in Cincinnati, Debs telegraphed to him to let the Big Four alone if it was not using Pullman cars, to which Phelan answered: "I cannot keep others out if Big Four is excepted. The rest are emphatic on all together or none. The tie-up is successful." Debs replied "About twenty-five lines are paralyzed. More following. Tremendous blockade." A few days later Debs telegraphed: "Advices from all points show our position strengthened. Baltimore & Ohio, Pan Handle, Big Four, Lake Shore, Erie, Grand Trunk, and Michigan Central are now in the fight. _Take measures to paralyze all those which enter Cincinnati._ Not a wheel turning between here and the Canadian line."

_"Starvation of a Nation" Illegal_

On the day that Debs telegraphed Phelan to take measures to paralyze all those lines which entered Cincinnati--work which was already well under way--at the very crisis of the strike, on the application of the receiver of the Cincinnati, New Orleans & Texas Pacific Railway Company, and on a petition which alleged a malicious conspiracy to prevent the receiver from operating that road, Phelan was arrested by an order of Judge Taft for inciting the employees of the receiver to quit their employment and for urging them to prevent others from taking their places, by persuasion if possible, by clubbing if necessary. The receiver asked for the commitment of Phelan for contempt, alleging that the whole boycott was an unlawful and criminal conspiracy, and that, for his acts in maliciously inciting the employees of the receiver, who was operating the railroad under order of the United States Court, to leave his employ in pursuance of that unlawful combination, Phelan was in contempt of court.

Was the combination of Debs and his associates illegal? Judge Taft said that it was, not only because boycotts are illegal under the law of every State in the Union where the question has arisen, with one possible exception, but because this combination of men, in their efforts to gain their own personal ends, had trampled upon the rights of the public. He said:

The railroads have become as necessary to the life and health and
comfort of the people of the country as are the arteries in the
human body, and yet Debs and Phelan and their associates propose,
by inciting the employees of all the railways in the country to
suddenly quit their service without any dissatisfaction with the
terms of their employment, to paralyze utterly all the traffic
by which the public live, and in this way to compel Pullman, for
whose acts neither the public nor the railway companies are in the
slightest degree responsible and over whose acts they can lawfully
exercise no control, to pay more wages to his employees. Certainly
_the starvation of a nation cannot be a lawful purpose of a
combination_, and it is utterly immaterial whether the purpose is
effected by means usually lawful or otherwise.

The "starvation of a nation," for such purposes, by such means, stopped, so far as Phelan was concerned, on the day these words were read by Judge Taft--the 13th day of July, 1894. It stopped because after a protracted and exciting trial, in which many witnesses were called and Phelan was fully heard in his own defense, Taft sent Phelan to jail for six months. Those who believe that the starvation of a nation is within the rights of labor engaged in a private quarrel, must tell us wherein this Judge did wrong.

These three cases are legal landmarks showing the limitations of industrial warfare. They are what the lawyers call "leading cases." They lay down clearly and dispassionately the law which marks the rights of the public to remain unmolested by the conflict of labor and capital at war. Such decisions are in American law what the Treaty of Paris is in the Law of Nations--a declaration of the rights of neutrals.

If, as a candidate for the presidency, Mr. Taft is to suffer from unpopularity created in any quarter by these decisions which he made as judge, he must endure it, for the search for popularity is not a part of the functions of a judge.

_The Courage of Great Judges_

The picture of Taft in the Phelan case, reading in a court-room crowded with angry and hostile men a decision which was to send their leader to jail; a decision which was to play a large part in determining one of the most distressing industrial wars of our day;--this picture recalls another court, another great occasion long ago.

In 1768 John Wilkes, who had been prosecuted relentlessly by the British Crown, and who had been outlawed and driven to France, returned to England, appeared before Lord Mansfield in the Court of Kings Bench, and demanded that the judgment of outlawry be reversed. The nation was frenzied by faction. Abuse and threats of personal violence were heaped upon the Chief Justice. In a court-room crowded with the enemies of Wilkes, the greatest of English judges reversed and annulled the decree of outlawry. In doing it, he gave what seemed a death blow to his own favor with the King, who had placed the judicial ermine on his shoulders. After he had rendered this judgment, facing the angry sycophants of the Crown, he spoke these words:

If during the King's reign I have ever supported his government
and assisted his measures, I have done it without any other
reward than the consciousness of doing what I thought right. If
I have ever opposed, I have done it upon the points themselves,
without mixing in party or faction, and without any collateral
views. I honor the King and respect the people; but many things
required by the favor of either are, in my account, objects not
worth ambition. I wish popularity, but it is that popularity which
follows, not that which is run after. It is that popularity
which, sooner or later, never fails to do justice to the pursuit
of noble ends by noble means. I will not do that which my
conscience tells me is wrong, upon this occasion, to gain the
huzzas of thousands, or the daily praise of all the papers which
come from the press. I will not avoid doing what I think is right,
though it should draw on me the whole artillery of libels; all
that falsehood and malice can invent or that the credulity of a
deluded populace can swallow.

The two qualities which make a great judge are wisdom and moral courage. No great judge ever lived who did not possess them both. When the Phelan case was on trial before Judge Taft, it was a time of tremendous excitement. It was the very crisis of a great strike. The friends of the Judge feared for his life and asked him not to read his decision from the bench. He read it. The last sentence of that decision directed the marshal safely to convey Phelan to the Warren County Jail. When he read that final sentence he turned to the packed court-room and looking squarely into the angry faces before him said: "If there is any power in the army of the United States to run those trains, the trains will be run." To those who honor judicial courage no less than judicial wisdom, such occasions deserve to be recalled and remembered, for they are part of the great traditions of the bench.

But these decisions are not solely declarations of public rights. They contain statements of the legal rights of labor organizations in strikes, stated so clearly that the decisions have been cited time and again in subsequent litigation by labor organizations themselves as precedents in their favor. They affirm unequivocally the right of labor organizations to strike to better the condition of their members, and the right to use peaceable persuasion to prevent other employees from taking the place of strikers, a right which in some jurisdictions, particularly Pennsylvania, has been denied.

_The Right to Strike_

Quite apart from his judicial decisions, Taft's position on the strike question is clearly stated in public addresses. Last January, at Cooper Institute, he said to an audience of workingmen: "Now what is the right of the labor unions with respect to the strike? I know that there has been at times a suggestion in the law that no strike can be legal. I deny this. Men have the right to leave the employ of their employer in a body in order to impose on him as great an inconvenience as possible to induce him to come to their terms. They have the right in their labor unions to delegate to a leader power to say when to strike. They have the right in advance to accumulate by contributions of all members of the labor union a fund which shall enable them to live during the strike. They have the right to use persuasion with all other employees who are invited to take their places in order to convince them of the advantage to labor of united action. It is the business of the courts and the police to respect these rights with the same degree of care that they respect the owners of capital in the protection of their property and business."

No public man has placed himself more clearly on record on the so-called injunction question. The plank of the Republican platform which advocates a modification of the present federal court practice, under which injunctions are issued without notice to organizations sought to be enjoined, is a plank adopted at Mr. Taft's request and suggestion. The jurist who, in a decision in the coal mine cases of 1902 in West Virginia, described an organization which has done more for the coal miners than any other social force, the United Mine Workers, as a band of walking delegates fattening on the poor and ignorant, declared in the same decision that no injunction had ever been issued in strike cases which was not entirely justified by the facts. Judge Taft says this is not true; that such injunctions have been issued unjustly; and in his Cooper Union address he said:

But it is said that the writ of injunction has been abused in
this country in labor disputes and that a number of injunctions
have been issued which ought never to have been issued. I agree
that there has been abuse in this regard. President Roosevelt
referred to it in his last message. I think it has grown largely
from the practice of issuing injunctions _ex parte_, that is,
without giving notice or hearing to the defendants.... Under the
original Federal judiciary act it was not permissible for the
Federal courts to issue an injunction without notice. There had to
be notice, and, of course, a hearing. I think it would be entirely
right in this class of cases to amend the law and provide that no
temporary restraining order should issue until after notice and a
hearing.

He at the same time expressed himself in favor of having contempt proceedings for violations of injunctions heard by a judge other than the one who issued the injunction. But to the proposal that in such cases the ancient power of the courts to protect their own dignity and authority be taken from them and turned over to juries of laymen selected by interested parties and subject to all the passions and prejudices inevitable in such trials--to this he is opposed.

_The Laborer's Right to Protection_

One decision of Judge Taft's on a highly important labor question has been generally overlooked and deserves mention. The interests of labor in the law are not confined to strike questions. Its rights in peace are no less important than in war. The working people are deeply interested in the enforcement of laws which protect them against unnecessary dangers in employment. The position of Judge Taft on this important question is best shown by the contrast made by one of his decisions (Narramore vs. C., C., C. & St. Louis Railroad Co.) with the leading case in New York on the same subject. Both of these cases involve statutes directing employers to furnish certain specific protection for the safety of employees. In both cases the employer failed to obey the law which required the furnishing of that protection. The New York Court of Appeals decided that notwithstanding the statute, if the employee _stayed at work_ knowing that the employer had not obeyed the law, and knowing the danger created by the employer's failure to obey the law, by the mere fact of his remaining at work, the employee assumed as a matter of law the risks of being injured and could have no claims against the employer for injuries so sustained. This construction obviously makes the protective statute a dead letter and absolutely worthless.

Judge Taft, in a case in which this same reasoning was advanced, and in which the decision of this New York Court of Appeals was cited as an authority, refused to follow it and rendered a decision which leaves full vitality to protective legislation. The case was one in which a railroad company had failed to obey the law which required it to fill or block frogs and furnish guard rails on their tracks. The plaintiff, a railway employee, kept at work, knowing that the frogs were not blocked, and was hurt through the absence of the protection which the statute required the railroad to furnish him. He had a verdict from the jury, the railroad appealed, and its lawyer, Judson Harmon, argued that the verdict should be set aside because the man had kept at work knowing the railroad's violation of the law, and had therefore by legal implication contracted with the railroad to take all the chances of being hurt. Judge Taft refused to follow the New York case, declaring:

The only ground for passing such a statute is found in the
inequality of terms upon which the railroad company and its
servants deal in regard to the dangers of their employment.
The manifest legislative purpose was to protect the servant by
positive law, because he had not previously shown himself capable
of protecting himself by contract, and it would entirely defeat
its purpose thus to permit the servant to contract the master out
of the statute.

This case has been cited all over the United States by counsel for workmen injured through the failure of their employers to furnish the protection required by statute for their safety. Perhaps a majority of the State courts follow the New York case, and say that protective legislation intended for the benefit of working men at work is of no legal value to them if they stay at work. The legal theory on which the workman assumes the risks of personal injury need not here be discussed. Judge Taft, however, decided that when a law is made applying to a dangerous business, in which four thousand men are killed and sixty-five thousand are injured every year, the intention was that the railroads should obey that law, and it should not be nullified "by construction." In this conclusion he does not lack judicial support of high character.

This, in substance, is Taft's labor record so far as his judicial career is concerned. Its consideration by the general public can be useful but for one purpose, which is this: A country like ours cannot afford to elect a class president. It cannot afford to elect a president in whose mind the distinction between lawlessness and personal rights is not clear and distinct; who to please one class will weaken the foundations of the liberty and peace of a whole nation. It can still less afford to elect a president to whom the working people are but pawns on the chess-board, and to whom prosperity means peace at any price by the sacrifice of the rights of the working people, so long as the mills are at work and property is secure in the possessions which it has somehow acquired. The enemies of our democracy are at both extremes.

The Socialists attacked Roosevelt with greater bitterness than any president who had preceded him, because he had not been a class president, and because he had not ignored the interests and rights of the working people and thereby helped still further to increase the constantly growing "class-conscious" body of dissatisfied men marching under the Socialists' banner. That section of the press which supports lawless property has attacked him because he has disturbed "values" and "vested interests." There is no sure protection for property but justice. Suppression of the labor organizations will not insure it; they should not and cannot be suppressed. Nor is there on the other hand any protection for the public if at the demands of a class, no matter how large its voting strength, the peace of the whole country is to be jeopardized by weakening the foundations of law which impose just limitations on industrial warfare. We need for president a man who will recognize and protect the just rights of both rich and poor and thereby protect American democracy against its class enemies. By these standards Mr. Taft must be judged.

Footnotes.

[1] Documents throwing light upon the action of Admiral Alexeieff will be found at the end of General Kuropatkin's historical narrative, although they are not a part thereof. These documents will also explain the important part that State Councillor Bezobrazoff played in the Far East, and indicate the source of his extraordinary power.

[2] A town on the road from Mukden and Liao-yang to the mouth of the Yalu River in northern Korea.

[3] Mounted Manchurian bandits.

[4] The Russian minister in China.

[5] The Russian minister in Korea.

[6] The documents at the end of General Kuropatkin's narrative will explain why an officer as powerful even as the Minister of War might be supposed to fear Bezobrazoff--a retired official of the civil service who, personally, had no importance whatever.

[7] In June, 1903, there was a good deal of friction between the employees of the Bezobrazoff company and those of a Japanese-Chinese syndicate which had obtained from the Korean Government, in March, a timber concession in this same region. Two Chinese were shot by the Russians, and the rafts of the syndicate were seized. Balasheff's dispatch probably referred to this or some similar incident, and the Captain Bodisco to whom it was addressed was probably an officer in the service of the Bezobrazoff company on the Yalu.--G. K.

[8] "Osvobozhdenie," No. 75, Stuttgart, August 19, N. S., 1905. No question has ever been raised, I think, with regard to the authenticity of these letters and telegrams; but if there were any doubt of it, such doubt would be removed by a comparison of them with General Kuropatkin's history.--G. K.

[9] Asakawa, who seems to have investigated this matter carefully, says that the original contract for this concession dated as far back as August 26, 1896, when the Korean king was living in the Russian legation at Seoul as a refugee.--"The Russo-Japanese Conflict," by K. Asakawa, London, 1905, p. 289.

[10] The italics are my own.--G. K.

[11] Since I wrote this, a friend has supplied the quotation, but as I know no Latin, less Greek, and the least possible amount of bad French, I cannot answer for its correctness! "Quamquam ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?"

[12] The Ford of Weeping.

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Transcriber's Notes.

1. Obvious punctuation errors corrected.

2. Multiple spellings of same word changed to majority spelling. Consistent misspelling retained.