OCR Text |
Show THE MEANEST, OF ALL TRUSTS. Thirteen cases of suicide were reported in New York. City on Monday. For twenty-four hours the medical examiners were kept busy holding postmortems, post-mortems, and then the Coroner's inquests wound up the day of tragedies. And ten of the thirteen verdicts returned by Coroner's juries constitute an indictment written in blood against the retail coal barons. Investigation developed the fact that in three cases starving mothers committed suicide when threatened with death by freezing; they could not get even a small lump of coal. Seven husbands and sons, upon whom the support of families depended, de-pended, gave up their struggles to obtain fuel and food, and reported to self-destruction. The verdicts of the ten Coroner's juries recorded these facts. And yet in the face of this soul-terrifying indict-, indict-, , ment against the little coal trust, New Yorkers are not perturbed. They know that a combination of unscrupulous retail coal dealers has increased the price of fuel until it is beyond the reach of the poor; that these men are responsible for the greatest winter win-ter of human miserv in the common people's world that Gotham has ever known. But although these heart-racking facts have, been brought to the public's pub-lic's attention, nothing is being done in the metropolis metrop-olis to curb the New York retail dealers' coal trust. True, a fight is being made on the big coal trust, but the little fuel combine, which is as active and as cool-blooded as an angry hornet, is being over-, looked in the search for large game." The retail dealers' trust works the greatest harm upon the poor man. It is responsible for the epidemic of suicide sui-cide in New York. It makes the home of povprty-stricken povprty-stricken families the stamping ground of misery. It is to be regretted that there is no legal way in which to reach these calni-pulsed, icy-minded men of business who prey upon the poverty-stricken. ' New Yorkers may be intensely practical, but when they permit the retail dealer to victimize the consumer con-sumer while public attention is directed to the big coal trusts, they play into the hands of the very set of men they seek to punish, and they increase, instead in-stead of alleviate the suffering of the poor. |