Show t THE BANK BURGLARS UNION I Honent Hardworking Men Who Arc Suffering Under Heavy Competition I The last meeting of the Bank Burglars Amalgamated Benevolent and Protective Union says the New York Times was an excessively gloomy one although attended at-tended by all the more eminent members of the profession who were not engaged upon government contracts and unable to tear themselves away The pervading spirit of the gathering seemed to be a feeling of bitterness engendered by the present dullness of trade aggravated by the total lack of sympathy with which their misfortunes were regarded by the public As the president remarked in his opening address the fact that a few beggarly unskilled laborers were being I thrown out of work by the closing of mills and factories was considered worthy of expressions of regret and condolence from the public and the press while the extremity ex-tremity of a body of the most expert mechanicians in the country called forth not even a passing remark and years of study and assiduous attention to business threatened to go for naught The union was unanimous in the bpinion that the present wretched outlook for the profession was due entirely to the deplorable frequency with which bank officers and confidential agents of financial institutions betrayed the confidence reposed re-posed in them and it was declared the sense of the meeting that such conduct was prejudicial to the best interests of the union was opposed to the wellbeing of the public at largo and against the proper maintenance of law order and morality in the community A prominent member of the union told with tears in his eyes how he had been defrauded by the cashier of the Frankfurter Sausage Bank in which many wealthy brewers were heavy depositors The member stated that he located the position of the safe after overcoming many obstacles last January and labored until June tunneling tun-neling underneath the vault form a cellar two squares distant The bottom of the safe was then discovered to bo of chilled steel and it was necessary to wait a month I For the construction of the instruments to be used in boring through the plates The work was so difficult and labor and material so high that it was scarcely expected ex-pected to realize more than enough from the operation to pay expenses and the opening of the vault was deferred until after the payment of July bills in order that the deposits might be as large as possible The prominent member of tho union broke down entirely and sobbed aloud as he related that on the day pro coding the very night the haul was to be made he read in the newspapers that the cashier of the bank had fled with half a million in currency and unregistered United States bonds and when he called upon him at his elegant manLlaa in Quebec Que-bec the cashier not only refused to allow him 10 per cent of the gross receipts jut declined to pay the expense of the tunneling and didnot even ask him to dine The union unanimously agreed that the cashiers conduct was sickening and calculated to call forth reproach upon mankind An oven more distressing instance of official perfidy was narrated by the chairman chair-man of the Committee on Watchmen and Timo Locks He stated that ho made a contract with the president of the Bread and Milk Savings Institution of a neighboring neigh-boring city by which the vault of that establishment was to be broken into on the same day that the president hypothe cated the funds thus removing suspicion entirely from the office The terms of he contract were that the operator upon the safe was to receive onehalf of the proceeds but the contemptible wretch who in reality took the money not only refused to divide with the burglar but actually placed the police upon his track and he was obliged to split upon the men who had cracked the safe with him to avoid prosecution The secretary of the Union presented statistics showing that the recent trans Qtions of James D Fish and Ferdinand Vard had thrown a score of honest hardworking hard-working burglars out of employment and kept hundreds of thousands of dollars out of circulation among them to draw interest for capitalists already sufficiently bloated A committee was appointed to draw up a preamble and resolutions embodying em-bodying these facts and suggesting a method for the righting of wrongs suf erad by the Union which will be acted upon at the next meeting I |