Show I JKIGHTS I If there is one thing in labor problems better settled than another it zs that men have the right to quit work and that employers have the right to fill their places without interference I Neither the law nor public sentiment will support an individual or a uiiicn in saying to those who have taken the places of strikers that they shall not work In the great strike on the Gould railways in 1886 the sympathies of the public were with the strikers as to their demand but when the latter undertook un-dertook by force to prevent the companies exercising their right to employ other laborers and to prevent these other laborers working the popular sentiment at once turned against the strikers and demanded their suppression So was in the late big strike on the Philadelphia k Reading Read-ing railway Nobody complained of the men going out it was their right to withdraw from the service of the company com-pany and to employ argument and moral suasion to keep others from entering the railways employment but when the strikers undertook to use f ores to drive nonunion men away people and press said the strikers must be suppressed if it required the entire military mil-itary force of the State to do it Even Chief Arthur the head of the Brotherhood Brother-hood of Locomotive Engineers now engaged in a contest with tho Burlington Burling-ton road is on record as approving this principle He has asserted it mary times In 1S8G addressing the officials of the Brotherhood at Hartford Conn having in mind the Gould and other strikes in which men who wanted to work were assaulted and driven away and the property of the railroads interfered inter-fered with and destroyed Arthur said No man has a right to say to another thou shalt or thou sha t not and in the I violation of this principle is where the trouble lies among the workingmeu today We hav no business to say that an employer em-ployer shall employ or shall not employ this man A man has a right to belong to any organization provided it is not contrary to the law We say no man has the right to say to another man that he must not belong to an organization And too we have uo right to go to the companies and say You must not employ that man We oppose this way of doing things on principle When the Burlington strike was ordered or-dered Chief Arthur and others declared that there would be no interference I with the property of the road if the I latter hired engineers to take the places of the strikers that if the Brotherhood could not bring the company to terms by striking they would retire and permit per-mit others to take their places The railroad is fast hiring the nonunion and Knights of Labor engineers and it is evident that the strikers will bs defeated when along come rumblings of discontent on the part of the Brotherhood and threats of probable violence against the new men and the company For his own reputation and for the good or the order over which he presides it will te well for Mr Arthur to reassert his belief be-lief in the right of all men to work on such terms as they can make with employers em-ployers and of employers to hire whom they can One outbreak on the part of the engineers one demonstration of violence will lose for that organization I the respect of the great public which it now enjoys and reduce it to the level of those blatherskite unions which seem to have been organized for no other purpose pur-pose than to strike |