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Show WHO WILL FIND THE WAY? A commission made up of strong and true men is sitting in the East trying to probe to the bottom the differences between a mighty syndicate syndi-cate of employers 'and a host of employees so great that they form an immense factor in the army of workers in this country. The hope of tills commission, which hope is shared by the country, is to sound the depths of these differences differ-ences and to formulate a plan to settle them. This is good; it is directly on the lines of pro-t pro-t gress; it is putting aside physical force and making ma-king an appeal to enlightened brain force; it is an attempt, in a measure at least, to bring about a triumph of mind over matter. We hope it will succeed, for it would be a beginning. At the mouth of the Columbia river twenty-five twenty-five years ago the river spread out over a wide bar and the only channel through which ships could find their way ou. to the sea or in from the sea was more torturous than the trail of a serpent and when from the outside a storm heaped up the waters of the deep sea to meet in fury the rivers volume there was a roar as terri-hle terri-hle as that of an earthquake and such a chaos of tumbling waters, that the mariner who sought to cross the abyss took his life in 'his hand with hardly an even chance of saving it. Indeed his safest guides were the half exposed skeletons of ships that had missed the channel and gone to destruction. de-struction. But an engineer was sent for and after two or three years work the great river was compelled com-pelled to confine itself to a single straight channel chan-nel and made with its own waters to hew out that channel deep and broad and now the largest ships cross that bar without difficulty. Well, all that this engineer did was to make mattresses of willow wands, to place them in line along one border of what he intended should he the new channel and then sink them by heaping heap-ing great blocks of stone upon them. He kept extending these mattresses and building them higher and higher until they arose above the water and extended out across the bar some two or three miles. This obstruction turned the stream and became at length a sea wall, on the one side the river, on the other a mighty waste of sand dunes. It was a great triumph of mind over rebellious matter, and of such material significance sig-nificance was the work that it amounted to a notice no-tice to the world that a new central station for commerce had been created. Now if this commission which is investigating the cause of the graet anthracite strike succeeds and adjusts the matter on a basis which will sat isfy employer and employee alike, still it will be but as it was in the old days when a ship successfully suc-cessfully crossed the Columbia bai That one ship succeeded, but nothing was changed. The crooked and shifting channel remained, the war of waters' upon the bar continually raged, the dread of mariners, the menace to ships and all the lives on board of them. Where is the engineer who can turn those forces into peaceful channels and stop the unrest and danger? Our thought is that the tactics of the engineer engi-neer in the Northwest will have to be adopted. The plan will have to be yielding and elastic. The code will have to be broad enough to include the rights of all men high and low, it will have to be woven In justice and yet in mercy, but when completed it must be weighted down with such blocks of law as will hold it in place until such a channel shall be cut out as will leave ample room for labor and capital to move their respective argosies In safety. No matter how successful this Eastern commission com-mission may be, if in performing It they are not inspired enough to make clear a plan through which similar troubles may be satisfactorily settled, set-tled, they will but half meet the hopes and expectations expec-tations of the country. If with the light, which the investigation will turn upon them, they cannot can-not outline a plan which can later be formulated Into a satisfactory code for the settlement of like differences, the country will be disappointed. But if they fail, still that code must be framed. Progress Pro-gress comes through mind exerting itself through the two great factors capital and labor. When they clash progress stops and chaos begins, and we have no right to advertise our country as great and free when all our statesmen stand baffled baf-fled over a problem on the solving of which so much of the future peace, prosperity and progress of our country depends. |