shall not be unlawful for persons, firms or corporations, doing business in this state, to enter into joint arrangements of any sort, the principal object, or effect, of which is to maintain or increase wages. >> But the United States Circuit Court in the North Division of Texas in 1897 decided the Texas anti-trust law of 1889 unconstitutional, as class legislation, because, among other things, it excepted from its provisions, restrictions of competition in "agricultural products or live stock while in the hands of the producer or raiser," which provision, or substantially the same provision, is also found in the laws of Arkansas, Georgia and Indiana. The decision last referred to we believe in certain particulars to be somewhat erroneous and we do not consider it conclusive, but the court seems to support that portion of the decision mentioned above by good argument. The court emphasizes the fact that "One of the most sacred rights of liberty is the right of contract," which these anti-trust laws seek to abridge. The court says, "The merchant, the manufacturer, the agriculturist, three great classes of the world, each dependant upon the other, each entitled to the same protection before the law, each justly claims alike, under the Constitution, the right of life, liberty and property." The Texas law was declared to be class legislation, because it allowed the agriculturist to make a contract restricting competition but did not allow the merchant or manufacturer to do so. If this is good law, might not the court by analogous reasoning divide industry into two classes, the laborer and the capitalist, and say that a law that allowed the laboring man to make contracts restricting competition, but punished the capitalist for doing the same is class legislation and unconstitutional?

We have discussed certain phases of the law governing all agreements and combinations that seek to prevent freedom of individual action in order to show in a general way the legal status of labor organizations, and also to prove that labor and capital in this particular occupy the same position before the law. It is true certain expressions, very comforting to the laboring man, appear in some of the decisions emphasizing his privilege to combine against the oppression of employing capital, which might indicate that the policy of the law outside of statute law is changing so as to allow labor organizations more rights than combinations of capital to control the individual actions of their members; but such dicta lose most of their force when it is noticed that they occur in decisions that really find against the labor organizations on the vital issues in the case, and appear to be included in the de

cisions largely for the purpose of making the actual findings in these cases less disappointing. We have not noticed anything in the law that indicates any important distinction in public policy so far as it relates to such organizations and combinations between labor and capital.

I. D. CHAMBERLAIN.

Executive Committee Order Knights of Labor.

We read that a certain man on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho fell among thieves (Christ used that word instead of kleptomaniacs). The priest and the Levite, representing the prosperity, aristocracy, religion and legal ability, passed by on the other side, too holy and so far above the common herd that it was profane, vulgar and irreligious to soil their clothes and fingers and spotless reputations by mixing with common people who work, and who should have brains enough to take care of themselves. But there passed a stranger, that hated Samaritan, who saw the man-brother was robbed, wounded and half dead; and he bound up the wounds, took him on the Samaritan horse to the inn, and paid the bills. What a fool! The modern man would ask: What office is he running for? Christ hit the evasionist with his interrogative: "Who was neighbor to him who fell among thieves?" In imitation of the organized labor leader of Nazareth, the Carpenter's Son, who was crucified between two thieves, because he "went about doing good," the order of the Knights of Labor builded upon the maxim: "That is the most perfect government, in which an injury to one is the concern of all," and have gone out teaching the rights of man, the republic of our fathers; and that a government of the people, for the people and by the people should not perish from the face of the earth. It is the only prominent organization on earth that has fearlessly taught opposition to all forms of violence; and labored to promote an intelligent and independent use of the ballot, instead of the strike and the gun. This is why it has been the target for the trust, and becomes the enemy of legal robbers. These little bands are organized throughout the country. They meet in the school houses of Kansas, in the vacant corn cribs of Nebraska, in the miners' cabins of the Rockies, and in the lodge rooms of the East.

The handful of speculators and absorbers of labor products are not the people to rescue labor, or correct economic ills. The four million wage-workers have been so long on the treadmill,

and in the clash of greed against greed, that they are losing sight of the Goddess of Liberty, and their eye fails, except where the labor union holds the light of hope. But the thirty millions of farmers have remained closer to the foundation principles of the republic, and are the last to forget the landmarks of human liberty. They are the great producing element of society, and, therefore, the chief feeding grounds of the trusts. When their hogs, cotton and wheat must go on the market, "the market is off." When the corn is all in the hands of wealth, the market and rates are "fixed," and the speculator makes more than the farmer got for his crop. He sells his corn as "rejected corn," too low to be even graded, and it turns up in the next state as a prime quality of seed. I spent two days in a Nebraska county seat watching a battle to prevent a car load of flax being shipped to a customer outside the elevator pool, and followed for months the crushing out of an independent grain buyer, because he gave honest weights. No cars and an effort to assassinate came into the contest, and he was helpless in the courts. Milltown, near New Brunswick, N. J., with 2,000 people, workers in a rubber shoe factory-closed by the trusts, and the homes were only worth farm values. The 2,000 were homeless, but the wealth was transferred to the trust. Overton, Col., had one of the finest oil refineries, until the Standard harvested it, and they are now tearing down the brick buildings and the thriving young city is deserted. The farmer saw a large corn crop on top of a surplus, and ten million bushels in sight, and it went on the Chicago market for 70 to 75 cents. Ten years later with a crop failure, and a foreign demand, and only a half million in sight, corn sold in Chicago for 40 to 45 cents. When he asked the reason, he got soup, flavored with over-production, and charged it to religion, saloons, the agitators, high and low tariff, or anything that would be a soothing syrup, so he could be worked for another crop; and after a few such games got a mortgage on his farm. Few people seem to understand that one of the secrets of the fight on silver, including the shut-down of the western smelters, is to bear the mines, so the great syndicate can buy them in. The farmer sees the practice of law going to a few corporation lawyers, the practice of medicine rapidly concentrating to the company doctor; they see what the average merchant does not see, until too late, the department store to become the distributer, and the old merchant driving a mule team. He sees this meeting to-day talking of "palliatives" and "control" instead of an open war on a giant evil. The genius who influenced the county board to build a bridge with public money and license him to collect toll,

and keep up repairs, got the other bridges condemned by dividing the profits with the chief spirit on the board. But for the guns of the citizens he would have had a fat job, and when he suddenly quit, a valuable financier had left the country, who might have adorned the halls of Congress.

Attorneys for these combinations simply ridicule or deny the general facts. They appeal to your patriotism; they ask us toworship the flag, even though we are hungry, and they look at us as cranks, and our proofs as merely isolated cases, that have no bearing in discussing the question. We, therefore, call up a single witness, divesting it of all possible personality and in great brevity.

Think of a business man going to New Mexico and Texas to hire fifty men on this agreement: "We will pay you $5 a day, pay all expenses, furnish transportation, food, guns, dynamite, and to each one an insurance on his life. Here is a list of fortytwo men, in Wyoming, that we want killed, because they have taken homesteads and planted their cabins where we want to feed our cattle. For each and every one of these men you kill, each of you shall have $50. We will go along and defend you in the courts." They went, and the wires were down, until the sheriff and three hundred deputies cornered the gang, and then the wires worked all right. The president ordered the regular army to rescue the invading army from the sheriff. The two witnesses who saw the murder of two peaceable citizens were paid $1.500 and $1,700 to fly to British possessions, with the trust attorneys, who furnished horses. But a snow storm turned them to Nebraska, where they were arrested on a trumped-up charge of selling whiskey to Indians and the government sent a special train to rush them east, where the courts could not find them. One of the prominent counsel for the defense said to me, "The whole power of the government will be used to clear these men," and they went clear. But the trust papers and trust politicians never refer to it. I give it as it has been told on many a platform, and oft repeated in the press, but never challenged. Silence is the safest policy. Many of the farmers and miners of the Rockies are witnesses with myself. A generation ago the Senate Commission warned us of a deliberate attempt to make the governing power a function of commerce, and we notice this case as evidence that the trust has clandestinely entered the citadel of the nation, and seized the reins of government. The government must, therefore, take possession of the trust and use it or die.

In this conference we discuss "at" trusts, and daintily talk

all around them, of classifying and placing them under control; and philosophize on molecules, and evolution of trade, and the benefits we can derive from stealing and murder, and the plunder of a people, all of which is as ineffectual as a penal statute in governing a cyclone. The trusts are all related, and fully understand that an injury to one is the concern of all-see Vanderbilt's holdings. This family of trusts owns the nation. It has control of nearly every line of industry, manufactures, the higher courts, carrying trade, the channels of thought, and pockets the products of the soil. It has made money the god, and labor the slave. While somebody, on this floor, favoring one of these engines of modern commerce, may deny my statements, and call it rot, the proprietors will laugh at the man who is hired to defend them. As a whole, labor, the foundation of all national wealth and greatness, is sinking into decay, while the political doctors seem to imagine that transferring wheat from the Armour elevators to the Leiter transports is a process of producing more breadstuff, and that the collection of labor products is a process of creating wealth. The wise men of the East assume not to see that the homes are fast becoming unproductive, and drifting into syndicate farms, like English estates, to be operated by menials. All our so-called industrials are in the trust family, now registering at the New Jersey Hotel, and there seems to be a trust on patriotism. You notice we are closing out our stock of man's inalienable rights, and we will soon be prohibited from speaking of our inheritance a right by contract under the Constitution.

What is the quality of American manhood, politics and morality when our physicians of economics must call a thief some softer name, and when the home is going, and independent thought on these lines is strangled in the back yard, to prevent alarm? You may call it a dark picture that should be concealed. When your neighbor's house is on fire, don't tell him, for fear he calls you an alarmist or a pessimist. We do not yet accept as the only remedy Senator John M. Thurston's solution: "No great reform comes but by the sword."

The trust embodies all the evils that make a nation the pesthouse of humanity, and is rapidly changing the republic to a monarchy. It was generated in greed and special privileges, defended by falsehood, animated by robbery, sanctioned by deception and fattens on the sweat and toil of honest industry. It is fed and prospers on the blood of humanity, and its natural food is the wreckage of decent government. It was conceived in a desire to defraud. It was born of illegitimate parentage. Its existence, in the broad sense, is in defiance of the genius of the