29 JULY 1899, Page 2

We wish somebody would explain clearly the causes of the

unreasoning violence so often displayed by strikers in the United States. In a quarrel, for instance, which has been going on all this week in Cleveland, Ohio, between the tram- car men and the companies which employ them, the men have resorted to dynamite, have fought the Militia ordered to repress them, and have actually blown up a car with passengers in it because the cars were driven by " black- legs,"—an atrocity which we venture to believe could not have happened in. Great Britain. Are the men driven mad by oppression, or are they Neapolitans, or is it their fear of the use of force against them which induces them to resort to such methods, which never, we may add, succeed, the rural Militia in the end restoring order with the rifle ? Such contests in a Republic where there are no inequalities before the law ought, or the theory, to be conducted like civil snits ; but instead of that, both in France and the Union, they are conducted like civil wars. We suspect industrial discipline in the States of being sometimes too military, and, in the view of the workers, insulting; but even that will not account for the dreadful fury occasionally manifested. Is the true root of it the deep cleavage between the Republican ideal and the actual facts of industrial life ?