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GOVERNMENT INVESTIGATION OF RAILWAY DISPUTES.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 6, 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 Robinson, Cummins, Poindexter, Brandegee, Townsend, Thompson, and Lippitt.

The CHAIRMAN. The committee will come to order. We will first hear from Dr. Crafts.

STATEMENT OF DR. WILBUR F. CRAFTS, SUPERINTENDENT AND TREASURER OF THE INTERNATIONAL REFORM BUREAU, WASHINGTON, D. C.

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Dr. CRAFTS. Mr. Chairman, the International Reform Bureau for 22 years has had in its platform as one of its many purposes "to substitute arbitration for both international and industrial war, which we think have some very strong resemblances. I appear not in the interest of the railroad employers, nor yet of the employees. I think it is a supreme mistake to think this is "a conflict of capital and labor "; it is a three-cornered conflict, in which the largest interest is the interest of the public. Ninety-five per cent of the people involved, 95 per cent of the suffering, and 95 per cent of the interest in every way are the interests of the public-of those who are neither capitalists nor organized laborers. I have suggested sometimes that a cartoon would represent the case a giant with a pigmy named "Labor" on one shoulder and another pigmy named "Capital" on the other. They are fighting around his neck and choking him, and through his gasps he says, "I see-there is a conflict-of Capital and Labor." The idea that the public has no interest in the matter, but simply to look on and suffer, is one of the curious cases of unconscious humor.

Senator BRANDEGEE. The public is both capital and labor, is it not?

Dr. CRAFTS. Well, there are a great number that are not either capitalists or laborers in the usual sense of those words-that are neither connected with organized labor nor employers of it. I am one of them. I have done a great deal of labor; I cut wood and did all sorts of work to get money to pay my way through college and have been through all sorts of hardships. I have often spoken at labor conventions. But I speak in this case as a humble representative of those people who are neither employers nor employees, end in the interests of the larger public.

Speaking of this matter of resemblance between strikes and war, now when we are forming all over the world an opinion that we must have a league of compulsory peace, we ought to be thinking in Congress of a league of compulsory industrial peace. The war that we call a "strike" is a war without any Hague rules to mitigate it--without even Queensbury rules. I would rather see a prize fight in the streets than a strike, because we would have some rules. I should rather see a real domestic war because we should have some Hague rules to go by. But when have have a strike all the violent elements of the community, all the criminal elements, rally around the strik ers, and we have no rules whatever. The injury to property comes closer to us in a strike ordinarily than it does in a larger war.

I desire to give three facts that seem to bear on the proposed legislation for restraint of strikes. The first is something I saw in Australia, where they settle industrial troubles usually in a civilized fashion. I was in Sydney, Australia, one day when a court, after a long, elaborate, and thorough study of the question, awarded $5,000,000 to the employees of the sheep shearers, the principal industry of that country-$2 a week additional, $100 a year apiece. They would have lost it in a week in a strike, but without any interruption of industry, referring the matter to the court, the people being heard on both sides, the facts of the increased profits of the industry being fully exposed, this award was made without any more excitement than an ordinary award in a civil court would arouseemployers and employees and the public accepting it as the civilized method of settling the disputes.

While there is no compulsory arbitration in Australia-there is in New Zealand-these questions are commonly settled in Australia also by referring them to a court. I am very much in favor of compulsory arbitration. That is more than this bill contemplates, but we should certainly go as far as the President recommends and say by law there shall be no railroad strike without compulsory delay for consideration, that the public may know something of the merits of the case-as they did not in the recent instance.

As we have followed Australia in the Australian secret ballot; as we have followed Australia in the eight-hour law; as we are following Australia in woman suffrage, we should ultimately-and that soon-follow the best part of Australasia, New Zealand, and become, through compulsory arbitration, "a land without strikes."

I have no objection to piano makers striking. I do not advocate any legislation with reference to strikes on luxuries; but I believe we need very stringent legislation to prevent strikes when they would interfere with necessities of life; and the regular operation of the railroads is as much a necessity of life as the regular circulation of the blood in the body. The body politic has for its veins and arteries the railroads, and to stop the railroads is just as certainly a case of murder at wholesale as to stop the circulation of the blood would be a case of murder at retail. I wonder that the people have not all seen that.

Coming back from Australia I was detained by strikes in British Columbia. I was beset by strikes when I got into the State of Washington. I was again unable to phone when I got to Butte. I felt as if I had come back from civilization into savagery; that I had gotten back beyond the Middle Ages into the days of chronic

violence in the streets when every man must carry his club or sword or gun. I have never gotten over the impression that we are a century behind Australasia in this matter of strikes. A strike takes us back beyond modern rules of war; behind the accepted judicial scheme of civilization, in allowing violence in the streets in connection with the settlement of an industrial dispute that usually involves only about 5 per cent of the population, whether it be a city strike or a national strike.

And now for my second fact. I was recalling with Gen. Miles recently as to what President Cleveland did in a case like this. It is very pertinent and ought to be in the record. I have marveled that it has not been published far and wide in connection with the discussion of the postponed railroad strike that still threatens the whole Nation. I was a pastor in Chicago at the time when railroads entering Chicago were tied up by a strike-not so general as is now proposed. This is what happened. To the strikers were drawn all the violent elements, the disorderly, criminal elements in the community. They swarmed in the streets-young men also out for a lark-and we looked out on streets where paraded every element of violence-probably twice as many criminals and wild boys as there were strikers. The city was absolutely helpless until Gen. Miles came in with a few Federal troops. Before that we had gotten out with our guns and defended our own homes. It was an aberration from civilization; it was a relapse into a state of barbarism. The mayor, afraid of the labor vote, was not doing his duty in keeping order. Gen. Miles called at his office and called his attention to the situation; that the subtreasury and national banks were threatened; that mails were being delayed; and the channels of interstate commerce were congested; and asked what he was going to do about it. The mayor hemmed and hawed: did not want to interfere; was evidently afraid of the political effect of vigorous law enforcement by police and militia. Gen. Miles said to him, " You make this a Baltimore, and we will make it an Appomattox. You must keep open the channels of interstate commerce. You must not allow the mails of the United States to be stopped here. You must not allow the United States subtreasury to be robbed. The intimation was that in the name of the President of the United States he would take charge of the city of Chicago unless the mayor was able to handle the situation. It was not simply the case of a State keeping order in a city when the city authorities failed to do it. Had not the mayor heeded the warning we should have learned the power of the Federal Government to interfere in the interests of the country when the mails and interstate commerce are involved. The term "keep open the channels of interstate commerce" was used. The circulation of the blood must be protected.

And now for the third instructive fact. I was in New York in the blizzard of 1895 when the whole city was put back into a state of nature, as if we had no streets; as if we had no railroads; as if we had no telegraphs; as if we had no fire department. We could not get to our grocers, and they could not get their supplies; and we found that on the second day we were getting near to starvation. There is no city in the country that has supplies for three days. The body politic is like the human body. The circulation of supplies for

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.)

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