THE RIOTS IN PENNSYLVANIA. T HE world has once more been
horrified by the brutality with which law and order are maintained in the United States. Once more we have seen an armed party of Sheriff's deputies fire at close quarters into the thick of an unarmed crowd, and continue the slaughter even when the mob was dispersing in panic. It seems almost incredible to Englishmen that some twenty working men should be killed outright on a public highway, not because they were attempting to storm or fire a mine, to attack non-Unionists or to overcome the police, but merely because they were marching along a public high- way in a strike-procession, and did not disperse when they were ordered to do so. To Americans, however, the incident, though no doubt most sincerely regretted, appears the very natural outcome of the unrest and popular commotion caused by a great strike. How comes it that Americans seem so callous and so arbitrary about such occurrences, and allow them to take place with such terrible frequency ? It is absurd to say that the Americans are not a humane people. That they are humane, and that they love liberty, will be admitted by all whose minds are not hope- lessly prejudiced. In their hearts Americans no more like such massacres of men who are trying to sell their labour as dearly as they can than do our own people. Custom has possibly made them a little more indifferent about the taking of human life, and their invincible optimism doubtless allows all classes—those injured as well as those uninjured—to forget more easily than do Englishmen ; but in spite of that the American nation does, in reality, feel very deeply the terrible character of these shootings and harryings. But Americans, besides being extremely optimistic by nature, are also extremely fatalistic. If a typical American were asked what he was going to do about the scandals connected with the suppression of riot in America, he would, if he spoke freely, probably say :— Nothing can be done. It is very painful, no doubt, to have to shoot people ; but we have to deal with a very rough and difficult population, and the only way is to be severe with them. Unless our respectable citizens occa- sionally turned out and gave thesejoreign strikers a lesson, we should have the whole country reduced to anarchy. Shooting, and shooting to kill, is the only way to maintain a decent respect for the law.'
With all due deference to American opinion, which we want to influence if we can, not to misrepresent, this is a wholly inadequate view of the situation. We entirely agree with the declaration that law and order must be maintained at all costs, and that if people commit outrages and break the peace they must, if necessary, be shot down, and shot down ruthlessly. What the Americans do not see is that they adopt a most in- effective machinery for putting down disorder, and one which is certain to produce the scandals which were witnessed in Pennsylvania a week ago. To put matters plainly, what the States want in their populous country districts is a well-trained, well-disciplined, well-paid, and well-led police. If they would only afford themselves that luxury there would not only be no sort of need for massacres like that at Hazleton, but a far better preserva- tion of law and order. It is not the ferocity of the foreign emigrant, or the callousness of the Americans, or the terrible jeopardy of great interests, or, again, the greed of the capitalists, or the wiles of the demagogue, but simply and solely the absence of a trained police, which necessi- tates shooting men down as they are so often shot down in America. We do not hesitate to say that if Luzerne County had been in the charge of an experienced Chief Constable from an English or Scotch county, supported by a body of English police, he would have prevented disorder without recourse to the methods which the American Sheriff considered absolutely necessary. When an Eng- lishman expresses this opinion he is not speaking in the air, because exactly the same methods of preserving order were attempted here as those tried in America, and with exactly similar results. During the twenties and thirties of the present century strike riots and mobs were dealt with almost exactly as they are dealt with now in America. There was no organised and expert police force, and those who wished to riot were given a perfectly free hand up to a certain point,—that is, up to the point where they got on the nerves of the peaceful inhabitants and appeared to be threatening the foundations of public order. Then, as in America now, special constables were sworn in and armed, and the Yeomanry—answering to the Amerisan Militia— were called out. These amateur defenders of law and order invariably attempted to check disorder by what they called giving the scoundrels a lesson. When once they were sworn in or called out, their object was to give as sharp and quick a lesson as possible. They were grimly eager to get at the mob, the men whose vagaries had called them from their comfortable homes and put their lives very possibly in jeopardy ; and they cared very little whether the mob was actually committing any illegal act when they encountered it. If they were not doing so then, they soon would be, and therefore the best thing was to act quickly and stop matters before they went too far. This is in shorthand the history of Peterloo, and of the other incidents of the kind that disgraced England at the beginning of the century. It was not till we got a really well organised police force, and maintained law and order thoroughly and consistently, and not merely spasmodically, that we were able to put an end to a state of things under which every strike carried with it the probability of bloodshed. If the States want, like us, to put down the scandal of bloodshed in peace time, they must follow our path. Their Deputy-Sheriffs and Militia, as used ours, fire so readily and with such deadly effect because they are in a panic. To begin with, they are summoned from their homes at great personal inconveni- ence. Next, they belong to a class which is extremely antagonistic to the strikers—the middle class, as we should say—farmers, small landowners, tradesmen, and the smaller capitalists. In a word, they are, as a rule, afraid of the mob. In the Eastern States, too, many of them are very little accustomed to the use of firearms. They see a howling mob in front of them ; they have heard all sorts of stories of the atrocities committed by strikers, of blacklegs pounded to a jelly, of dynamite thrown down mines, and of other outrages, and they believe that if they fall into the hands of the mob they will suffer the most dread- ful of deaths. They are ready, then, to adopt any excuse for giving the mob a lesson, for cowing them, that is. When once the notion, • If I don't kill them they will kill me,' takes possession of a man's mind nothing but the most severe discipline will prevent him taking the earliest possible opportunity of using his rifle. But when undis- ciplined men influenced by such conditions as these are under the orders, not of an important and highly trained official, but of "a popularly elected officer,' who very often is acting in the interest of the capitalists, or who at any rate shares their views in regard to a struggle with Labour, one can understand that there is little chance of reasoning with or persuading a mob to disperse. The only idea of the panic-stricken Sheriff's deputies, for panic- stricken they are, even though they may be individually brave men, is to disperse the mob as quickly as possible. A body of well-trained soldiers or police would handle matters in a perfectly different manner. To begin with, police do not get wild with a mixture of rage and fear if they are stoned and hooted at by a mob for an hour or two. They know they are paid highly to receive such treatment, and they receive it as part of the day's work. It is their business to stand things which the civilian amateur will say he would rather die than submit to. Again, a body of professional police are not intimidated by shoutings and threatenings and the waving of bludgeons. Discipline and the habit of relying on each other's support have taught them that, though they are only one to ten or twenty, they will be able to hold their own as long as they stand firm. The Sheriff's deputy has no such feeling. He sees the mob getting angrier and more defiant, notes that they already greatly outnumber his own force and that more men are pouring in every moment, and concludes that unless he acts at once he will be swallowed up and destroyed. Again, the policeman is not eager to get the thing over and go home. He does not, of course, like a riot, but there is no special hurry in his case. His work will go on, whatever happens. Hence he and his leaders can, and do, show an infinity of patience, and patience, when it is real patience and not mere indecision, has a most depressing effect on a mob. Lastly, and this is of the utmost im- portance, the police and their officers are trained to con- sider that their duty is not to favour either side in a row, but merely to prevent breaches of the peace. Therefore they are not open to the argument that a little firmness at this point will stop the whole thing and discourage the men completely. They will not oblige by showing the little firmness asked for unless the strikers have actually com- mitted breaches of the peace or lawless acts. The police fully expect to be abused by both sides for showing partiality, and, indeed, hardly feel satisfied unless they have earned a double reprobation. Certainly the capitalists here have no " pull " on the police. When the London Dock strike took place, though we had a Conservative Minister at the Home Office, the chief complaints made were from the employers, who declared that the police favoured the strikers and did not preserve order. What, in reality, the police did, and what they ought to do, was to act on Burke's principle, "We must bear with inconveniences till they fester into crimes." They did not make any and every excuse for interfering, but only acted when there was a serious disturbance. Then, too, a trained police force gets to know the nature and character of mobs, to distinguish a dangerous from a harmless mob, and to recognise that while one mob needs a baton charge, another can only be tamed by calling in the aid of the soldier. But it is useless to labour the point. It is as clear as daylight that what a State like Pennyslvania wants is not a mere crowd of Deputy-Sheriffs, a set of irresponsible Pinkerton detectives hired by the capitalists, or a permanent private police force in their pay, but an impartial and. well-organised body of constabulary, who can be depended upon to act not only with promptitude and energy, but also with discretion, and, above all, without panic. That in time the people of the American States will realise this we do not doubt. Meantime they have, we fear,a considerable crop of social difficulties to deal with, —difficulties which demand, above all things, an efficient police. There is another matter to which they must attend, the plan of suppressing strikes by injunction. To grant injunctions to prevent trespass and other acts which are illegal in any case may be sound enough. To grant, as one of the Courts has, an injunction so general that it amounts almost to a sentence of outlawry on men who merely try to get their fellow-workers to join in a strike is surely a great oppression. We are all for keeping up the powers of the Courts, but if injunctions such as those quoted in the Times of Monday are to be given freely by the American Courts, the right of combined action by the workmen will be in most serious peril.
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