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think they have a vested right to do wrong. To stop them then requires ten times the effort which would have controlled them at the beginning.

So with Germany. After allowing her for a year to pursue an acknowledged course of wrongdoing, it required a practical declaration of war to recover our rights. So with England. After two years of our tolerance of her illegal blockades, mail seizures, blacklists, she is as much outraged at our prospective retaliation as she would be at an attack on some acknowledged property right. Four years of shiftless handling of the Mexican situation find us in complete confusion of purpose, conferring with an impotent bandit chief as to the right of our soldiers to patrol his territory and the right of his soldiers to go marauding in

ours.

It is just so with a great domestic issue that presented itself last month and has been met by the same evasion, which does not settle but merely postpones. The railroad brotherhoods and their employers had a difference. The men wanted a wage increase, to be borne by the public. The railroads did not want to grant the wage increase out of fear they could not raise their rates and pass it on to the public, for the wage increase would cost $50,000,000. Every consideration of justice to the public, every regard for industrial peace in the future, required that the matter should be investigated before the burden was laid on us. The President had in his own hands the power to direct the course of events. and managers appeared before him. He could have thrown his influence toward granting the men's demands, toward refusing them or toward

Men

holding up the matter for investigation as the basis of action.

The country will not soon forget what the President did. He yielded to the brotherhoods' threat of force and then, because the railroads would not accept the solution of surrender that he proposed, he went to Congress, infused it with his own terror and rushed through a bill forcing the wage increase on the railroads and so-in the end-on the public. Congress in effect passed a revenue bill levying a tax of $50,000,000 on shippers of the country, to be paid into the brotherhoods' treasury.

The men's demands may be right. But this hold-up method of enforcing them is utterly and unspeakably wrong. Arbitration, or at least investigation before the use of force, is the solution of the strife between capital and labor. If we are not to have orderly co-operation between these parties, the alternative is industrial, then civil, war. The weight which Mr. Wilson thus cast into the wrong scale is the greatest of all the injuries he has done his country. Some day the principle of law and order must be championed and upheld over the law of force. The present surrender of the President to the law of force makes infinitely more difficult the final triumph of the right.-Sept. 11, 1916.

THE BARGAIN

A straw shows how the wind blows. The railroad brotherhoods have set up a large-sized weather

vane.

When the President forced Congress to surrender $50,000,000 of the country's money to the four

railroad brotherhoods, he suggested that, for the future, the legislators should provide for arbitration to supplant force. The brotherhoods would have none of this. The matter was dropped by Washington.

The President now thinks that the next session of Congress should take up the problem and legislate compulsory investigation if not compulsory arbitration. The brotherhoods are ready for the fray.

They have sent their members each a copy of the hearings on the eight-hour bill, the congressional debates upon it and the recorded vote of representatives and senators. Also the following exhortation:

We believe the time has arrived when labor should know who is friendly to its interests and who is not. Important legislation will take place in the next session of Congress. It is important to you that men be elected who are friendly to you.

A Democratic Congress performed its share of a bargain. The brotherhoods are now to perform their share. In the meantime the country will ponder the wisdom of reelecting congressmen who, for the sake of 400,000 pledged votes, deserted the nation and surrendered the principle of orderly judicial process to the principle of force.Sept. 19, 1916.

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