THE LABOUR WAR IN THE UNITED STATES.
DISMAY and shame, mingled with utter astonishment, have been the prevailing feeling among Americans in England, during the present week. It was not only that the news of the Railway Strike and its results came on them as something altogether unexpected, but it was one of the things which they had been in the habit of repudiating as impossible and inconceivable. No doubt the United States have been troubled with their own form of the labour question for many a day, and Americans are very far from underrating the gravity of the economical difficulties through which their country is now passing. But that the law should be defied, the institution of property assailed, and the forces of the Federal Government resisted, were extremes of frenzy that seemed wholly beyond belief. All this, and more than this, has happened, and the Americans themselves are scarcely able to offer a complete explanation of the astounding facts. The strike in the goods department of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway, which broke out early last week, was not a trifling affair, but it possessed no national significance. Even if it had. been followed up, as it was doubtless intended that it should be, by similar strikes on the other main lines—the Pennsylvania, Eric, and New York Central Roads—the conflict, though pro- ductive of some public inconvenience, need not have occasioned any anxiety. The railroad corporations in the United States are quite strong enough to cope with the Trades Unions among their men, and upon any question in dispute, in the opinion of most Americans, the Unions were at least as likely to be in the right as the railway dictators. But what the country was not prepared for was the attempt to enforce the strike by open war upon the Railways, the State Governments, and the Federal Power. The seizure of the rolling stock and the de- struction of the permanent way gave evidence of a spirit to which no Government could submit, and the State and Federal Governments were not only justified in using force to protect and rescue the property of the corporations, but were bound to do so by every moral and political obligation. The inter- vention of the authorities, however, only gave a wider scope and a more passionate spirit to the enterprises of the insurgent Unionists. The Militia called out by the State Governments showed either a timorous caution or a dangerous sympathy -with the lawless. In the towns of Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri, popular feeling was unmistakably on the side of the disturbers of order ; that is to say, the masses were eager to see the Strike triumphant and the Railway " monopolists " defeated. The attempts of the State Governments, aided after a while by Federal troops, to compel the rioters to yield were not as successful as might have been expected, in a community which is proud of its law- abiding temper. Almost everywhere the troops were withstood or insulted. The interference of the Federal Power was encoun- tered by an extension of the strike over the railways of ten States, from the Hudson to the Mississippi, and from the Great Lakes to the Potomac. But this was not the worst. The rising soon ceased to have an exclusively Trades-Unionist character. In the cities the men on strike were joined by hundreds and sometimes thousands of the ordinary populace, and when violent collisions resulted the rough element rose to the sur- face. In Pittsburg the victory of the rioters led to scenes so scandalous, that the recital of them has nerved the citizens of other endangered towns to take instant and vigorous defensive measures. But the alliance which gave over Pittsburg to rapine and conflagration a week ago had been formed also in other cities—in Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and even New York— and might have shown itself on even a greater Beale, if the public spirit of the majority had not been aroused in time. It is not difficult to understand why there should be a gathering feeling of anger against the Railway Corporations in the United States ; their enormous power and their dicta- torial methods provoke irritation not only among their servants, but among the public ; and though the Granger movement was discredited by many follies, the feelings to which it gave expression are permanent and strong. Nor is it surprising that the working-classes in the States should be soured by their recent reverses, by the. stagnation of business, the fall in the rate of wages, and the timidity of capital. But giving the fullest credit to these influences, we do not get any nearer to the motive power which turned a dispute about wages into a civil war. There must be other causes at work, and of course, it has been suggested that the history of these riots reveals the existence of a menacing Communistic propaganda. In New York and Chicago, indeed, a handful of Socialist fanatics have endeavoured to turn the prevailing excitement to the profit of their peculiar views, but they have produced hardly any perceptible effect. The real originating cause in the recent disturbances was not at all Communistic,—that is, it was not intelligently hostile to property as an institution, nor to society as constituted in the United States upon the basis of individualism. It was mad, blind anger at the pressure of the "hard times," directed against the classes who have been held up to popular execration by political agitators, and intensified by a knowledge of the rascally swindles per- petrated by some of the American Railroad Rings. The per- sistence with which those agitators have declaimed against the Government, the public Debt, the resumption policy, and the monopolist power of the Railways has had its natural influ- ence upon the ignorant and discontented maeses now gathered in all the great cities of the Union. The Democratic assail- ants of the Federal authority, the Greenback party, the Grangers, the Republican enemies of President Hayes, have one and all been telling the working-man in America that under some new system—this, that, or the other—" hard times" must disappear, and everybody be happy. " Mese God, we'll have good, aisy times when Tilden's elected 1" said a poor Irishman who sought relief in the workhouse on Blackwell's Island last winter. The alluring hopes dangled before the eyes of labourers out of work, or dissatisfied with a reduction of wages, have been left vague and shadowy ; they do not look directly to any Communistic reconstruction of society, and they are not infected with any malignant feelings against classes, such as those brought to light in revolutionary troubles on the Euro- pean continent. But there are such hopes, mingled with anger against politicians, railway magnates, and conspicuous capitalists, who have been charged with every variety of corruption by the professional demagogues, and arraigned as the irreconcilable enemies of the poor. And in the imagina- tion of the excited masses, it is these enemies, controlling the machinery of Government and its physical force, who send soldiers from the monopolists. Indignation, Overmastering prudence, sets in motion the violence that raged in Pittsburg on Sunday, though the tide was soon swollen by the rapacity of the criminal and the destructive fury of the drunken. The same raging hatred. was at work in Chicago on Thursday, and had to be subdued by the Federal troops with horse, foot, and artillery, and at the cost of many lives.
It must be remembered that the classes actuated by the feelings we have described are a minority oven in the towns, but they are a daring and reckless minority, with little to lose,. and with a natural love of the excitement of strife. Few of them, probably, arc native Americans. But why, then, did the majority, the American people, who respect law and are as bitter against attacks upon property as English aristocrats or French peasants, allow this blind fury to gather strength, and threaten whole cities with ruin ? We suspect that at first most people in the United States were rather pleased to see the Railways in trouble, and when it became clear that the attack upon the Railways was endangering other property and the general peace, the means of restoring order were not at once accessible. The State Militia, which was at once called out in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, and which showed an alarming sympathy with the rioters, was recruited, we imagine, chiefly in the towns and among the very classes who Were engaged in resisting the railway. A conviction was felt in the United States that in good time the President would, be able to call out a fresh levy of Militia, in whom perfect confidence would be reposed, and who, it may be assumed, would be drawn from the "territorial democracy." But no such forces were at first available, and of the regular Army, occupied with the Indian War in the Far West, only some five thousand men were within reach, and these were scattered over all the Atlantic and Mississippi States. It is clear that the recent policy of reducing the numbers of the Regular Army must be regarded as unsafe, even if the exigencies of national police. have only to be considered. But it is a healthy sign that when once the mass of the citizens have awakened to a sense of the public danger, they have been able to paralyse the insurrection, without looking for further aid from Militia or Federal troops.
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