By SAMUEL GOMPERS, President, American Federation of Labor. Free Press and Free Speech Invaded by Injunction Against the DEVOTED TO THE INTERESTS AND VOICING THE DEMANDS OF THE TRADE UNION MOVEMENT FEBRUARY, 1908. Vol. XV. No. 2 SOME EQUIVOCAL RIGHTS OF Labor. T By GEORGE W. ALGER.* HE American workingman is a pretty good citizen on the whole, and except on rare occasions is lawabiding enough to suit any but the over-fastidious devotee of law and order. Even the best of us-from the trust magnates down-find at times some law or decision which we try to steer around in some peaceable way, and the real difference between the rest of us and the workingman in his occasional ebullitions against government by injunction is a matter of manners rather than morals. It is a difference of method rather than purpose. While we adjust our course to avoid, by a safer and more circuitous route, the big rock of statutory prohibition to get at what we want in the forbidden waters beyond, the workingman sometimes tries to push over the rock itself, and comes to grief in so doing. This is what constitutes in the public mind the greater part of the so-called "lawlessness of labor." whole grievance of Labor, spelled with a capital, is that the law forbids the heaving of bricks at scabs. This legal prohibition seems to us the most comfortable of doctrines. The law of brick-throwing bas bad so much discussion, and so many able efforts have been made, not only by the judges, but by distinguished writers and public men, to show the laborer wherein he is wrong in so doing, that any extended discussion here of that subject would be superfluous. What the writer hopes to do is to cover some matters which far more vitally affect the laborer's attitude toward the law and the courts, and which, more than the "government by injunction" fetich, constitute those industrial problems of labor which must find some time an ultimate solution in law. They are matters of which the general public has little knowledge, and which, if better known, would insure perhaps a more sympathetic attitude toward the workingman's point of view. To the large public of the well-fed who live by their wits and not by the direct Stated as concretely as possible, the prinapplication of physical labor, the grumbling cipal difference between the working peoof the laborer against the law seems de- ple and the courts lies in the marked lightfully simple. To this public the tendency of the courts to guarantee to the *From "Moral Overstrain" by George W. Alger, printed here by special permission of the publishers, Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. |
