merchandising and for factories is a matter of coming in and going out all the while. The United States could not, without starvation of its babies, without the death of its people wholesale, stand a three days' strike on the railroads. It would be as impossible to live as to have the circulation of the blood stopped in our bodies for three days.

Of course, an individual may give up his job if he has no contract to the contrary, but the conspiracy of a group of men to stop the channels of interstate commerce is nothing less than a conspiracy to murder at wholesale. Bobies would be dying within 24 hours in great numbers and mothers would soon be without bread. The fathers could not work in the shops when the shops were not supplied with the raw materials. The result would be, of course, that within three days, and in many cases within two days, we would have a condition that would make us forget the Lusitania; that would make us think of Belgium as matched again. The very slaughter of the Armenians is not more terrible than what would happen in this country in case of a general railroad strike lasting a week.

This committee of the Senate and the corresponding committee of the House has the tremendous responsibility of finding some way by which such a peril as threatened us a few months ago of such a holdup, such wholesale murder, shall not threaten us again.

The public is entitled to protection against all strikes that cut off necessities of life. No strikes should be allowed in coal mines. There ought to be no strikes in the matter of the supply of bread and meat. And railroad trains are as necessary as the bread and meat and coal, which we can not get without them.

. You remember when in France they started a strike in the mail service. France put her soldiers in the strikers' places and kept the mails going. Would we tolerate a strike in the mail service? Does any one suppose is there any labor leader who supposes that a strike in the mail service would be tolerated? But a strike on the railroads involves that. And so I stand for a deliberate preparation for these future difficulties, of which the most important is to prevent a railroad strike.

I was kept out of Sweden by what was intended to be "a general strike," and I want to put on record here what happened then because of the reserve powers which were discovered when it was proposed that the demands of labor must be granted, right or wrong, and instantly, on peril of a general strike that would prostrate everybody. What happened was this: The merchants and ministers and lawyers and students, and others of the great public, who are neither capitalists or organized laborers drove the hacks and did whatever other work was necessary to keep business going. We ought not to allow the criminal conspiracy to kill what is involved in such a general strike. Let us at once provide that there shall be a compulsory pause before every railway strike for the examination of the case, and I hope we shall ere long get to the point of compulsory industrial peace by compulsory arbitration.

The CHAIRMAN. If no one else desires to be heard, the committee will now adjourn.

(Thereupon at 11.50 o'clock, a. m., the committee adjourned to meet Monday, January 8, 1917, at 10 o'clock a. m.)

GOVERNMENT INVESTIGATION OF RAILWAY DISPUTES.

MONDAY, JANUARY 8, 1917.

UNITED STATES SENATE,

COMMITTEE ON INTERSTATE COMMERCE,
Washington, D. C.

The committee met at 10 o'clock a. m., at room 326, Senate Office Building, Senator Francis G. Newlands (chairman), presiding. Present: Senators Underwood, Thompson, Robinson, Cummins, Brandegee, Lippitt, and Poindexter.

The CHAIRMAN. The committee will come to order. Mr. Furuseth, are you ready to proceed?

Mr. FURUSETH. Yes, sir.

STATEMENT OF MR. ANDREW FURUSETH, PRESIDENT INTERNATIONAL SEAMEN'S UNION OF AMERICA, SAN FRANCISCO, CAL.

The CHAIRMAN. Will you state your full name and address for the record, Mr. Furuseth?

Mr. FURUSETH. My name is Andrew Furuseth; president of the International Seamen's Union of America; address, San Francisco. Address here, National Hotel.

Mr. Chairman, I come here on behalf of the seamen to protest against any legislation that will in any way prevent either an individual or a combination of individuals from quitting work at any time for any reason or for no reason. Whenever it has been the endeavor of society to compel either individuals or classes of individuals to continue to work against their will it has ended in disaster; first, to those who were so compelled; secondly, to society itself.

Whenever, from a fear of what really is imaginary, any such legislation as this which is proposed here-industrial courts, compulsory labor-when any such legislation has been enacted it has resulted, if it was on a very large scale, in depopulating the country in which it existed. This was the situation in Rome after the promulgation of the anticombination decree of Caesar. When in the later feudal ages the people had been tied to the soil in such a way that they could not live population became stationary and then began to decline. There are some European countries which have, for certain people at least, this kind of legislation. Hungary has legislation under which the farm laborer who begins working for a farmer in the spring is compelled to continue to work for him until the harvest is garnered, and the result is that the Hungarians are drifting out over the Hungarian borders in every direction, trying to get away. If they are unable to get away, if they are unable to overcome the

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law, then there is first insurrection and, when that is broken, decimination of the population by the people refusing to breed.

Here in the United States you have had no such law, except upon seamen, since the abolition of slavery, and the result upon the seamen was so terrible that Congress wiped it out. The American quit going to sea. Modern education and the status under which the seamen lived-and it is the status which is contemplated to be placed upon the railroad men-can not exist together. The feeling that expresses itself through a strike will express itself in other ways, and when it can not obtain any redress of grievances the men engaged in such calling quit their labor and seek other labor, or no labor, as the case may be. The number of native Americans going to sea is negligible. The law of freedom has been in operation too short a time yet to have overcome the old condition. The fact that there is freedom amongst the seamen has not penetrated sufficiently through the population to really bring the boy and the man to sea again. But with freedom left to operate the time will not be very distant when in place of the merchant vessels of the United States being manned by foreigners, who are under no obligation to the United States, they will be manned by natives or naturalized men-naturalized men, I presume, to some slight extent, but in substance by natives and you will not then have any serious question as to how to man the Navy either in peace or war.

The condition imposed upon the seamen through this legislation was such that they refused to marry; in fact they could not. Their wages were stationary, and while the prices of everything rose around them their wages did not follow the upward trend, and it became impossible for them to assume family relations. And so you went to Scandinavia, to Germany, to the Mediterranean Basin, to China, and Japan, and the Malay Peninsula, and to the Kroomen, on the Mosquito coast, for men to man your vessels. It was because of this kind of law that the American boy refused to enter into it; the American man refused to remain in it.

It may be said, perhaps, that this is not the same. The principle is absolutely the same. The ship is a common carrier on the water, the railroad a common carrier on land. The public demand certain things from the common carrier, and the contention is that in return legislation should give to the common carrier a certain control over his workmen, in order that he may be able to fulfill the obligations to the public. Of course, the reasoning seems right, but it does not take into consideration that the man is an entity by himself; that under the religious teachings which have at least partly penetrated the civilized world, he is made in the image of God, and therefore can not be made the bondsman of the product of his brain or hand. Under the solemn promise that the United States of America made to itself in entering the sisterhood of States, it can not be done properly here in the United States, because America promised to itself that it would see to it that the principle that all men were born equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights should be the guiding principle of this Republic. It violated it with reference to the African race, and suffered. It violated it with reference to the seamen, and it ceased to have a seaman or any sea power. If it violates it with reference to the railroad men or other workers it is inevitable, gentlemen, that the men who serve in that capacity to

day, the best of them, will quit their work, and there will be a constant deterioration in the skill, and a constant increase in disasters, until, as in the seamen's case, Congress will be compelled to change the law again so as to bring the right kind of men back into the service of the railroads.

Is there any danger of this strike? A general strike that will tie up everything? Why, the assumption is that the working people are spiritually, morally, and intellectually superior to all the rest of the people in the country. They would have to be if they all could get together in such combination. What have the working people got? Nothing but their labor power. What is it that belongs to the people who come here asking for this kind of legislation? All the means of production-the forests, the mines, the oil wells, the manufacturing establishments, the railroads, and the ships. They are of no value to them, however, unless they can get the labor power that they need, and in proportion as they can get. it cheap, it becomes more valuable; and so their self-interest necessarily leads them to come here asking for shackles to put upon the working people, and asking for opportunities to strip the working people of the only defense that they have to-day.

It was thus that in the early feudal ages the people who owned the lands came to the kings and to the parliaments and asked that the people be shackled to the soil. Now, in the new industrial civilization they come and ask that the workingmen be shackled to the means of transportation upon which they work. They say they are running the railroads in the interest of the public. Yes; in a sense they are, but they are not running the railroads for their health. They are running the railroads to make money, primarily. Their service to the public is incidental, as has been proven over and over again when Congress was compelled to regulate so that they would not take all of the products of men's toil.

They say you must have this kind of legislation, because a general strike would starve the people. If it were conceivable that there could be a general combination which would stop all traffic, of course that would be partially true; but that is inconceivable— 400,000 men on the railroads threatening to quit work unless some grievances are redressed. Railroad employees, perhaps a million and a half of people, and some of the railroad managers themselves say: "Let them strike; we will run the railroads; we will run the trains." A strike that will absolutely tie up the railroads is not conceivable because of the number of men throughout the country who would be willing to go and take the places of those men if, in the general opinon of the public and the general opinion especially of the working people, those men were asking more than they have any reasonable right to ask.

These things automatically adjust themselves. The wages of these men will not rise any higher than the level of the community.

Senator UNDERWOOD. Mr. Furuseth, let me ask you a question. right there.

Mr. FURUSETH. Go ahead.

Senator UNDERWOOD. I can understand how you could get a great many men who could be conductors and probably a great many men who could be firemen, but how can you get enough men who could be engineers, who not only must know how to manipulate the engine

and run it but must know the track and the roadbed and the road and the crossings and the red lights before they can carry a train over it in anything approximating schedule time? How could you do it?

Mr. FURUSETH. There is no question but there would be some difficulty in obtaining those men in very large numbers, but that they could be obtained in a sufficient number to keep the business going to some extent there can be no doubt. A strike on the railroads, after all, will not tie up the railroads altogether. It will tie up a certain part of the traffic; it will make traffic difficult. In its essence it is simply a means to compel the railroad managers to grant some redress of grievances, and that is on an absolute parallel with the right of the British House of Commons to stop the wheels of government, theoretically speaking, by refusing supplies. Out of that power of the English Parliament has grown all political democracy, such as we know it. Out of the power of the working people to withhold collectively their labor power until grievances are redressed, or at least so partially redressed that they are willing to go back to work-out of that must come the kind of society that the best in the world have been looking for for ages. It can come in no other way except through the dispute, the haggling, between the interested parties. You say the public. Why, in some instances the public is entirely and absolutely with the strikers. You find it in street car strikes, where for months the people refuse to travel on the cars, at the greatest kind of inconvenience to themselves.

Speak of babies being deprived of milk, why, it is a serious question, Senators, whether there are more babies dying because of the milk they are fed than because of the lack of milk. Interurban cars, automobiles, automobile trucks, conveyances of all kinds are ready at hand to be used in case of a tie-up of the railroads that is very serious; and there is no danger of any very serious need arising, because, when a strike once is on and both sides realize that neither is bluffing, they will be willing to sit down and talk the matter over and come to an agreement, as the Parliament and the King in England came to an agreement over and over again and saved such a condition as arose in the French Revolution.

What is a strike, anyway? Some years ago a committee made up of Volney Foster, of Chicago, the bishop of Peoria, and a coal operator of West Virginia came to Congress with an arbitration bill known as the Volney Foster arbitration bill. It was voluntary in all its phases, and yet it was the most dangerous piece of legislation that ever came into Congress, because it assumed to and would have used the public opinion in such a way as to shackle and destroy all freedom amongst the workers. When this was understood, it was laid aside. It reappeared in the shape of the Townsend bill in the House. It came up on the floor of the House and was defeated, because the membership of the House realized that the strongest force in all the world is public opinion. And now it is coming here in a new shape. Back of all of it there is the deliberate purpose to stop strikes. Why, to stop strikes would be good if you could stop them without taking away human liberty; but the most important of all things, gentlemen, in the world is liberty, freedom. Everything grows in freedom; everything dies in bondage. That is the history of the world-as I have read it, at any rate-and I belong to a class