ciary which ultimately enforce the command of the State have
been beyond their reach. To bend these branches of the government to its
will, organized labor has fought a persistent and aggressive warfare.
Decisions of the courts which do not sustain union contentions are
received with great disfavor. The open shop decisions of the United
States Supreme Court are characterized as unfair and partisan and are
vigorously opposed in all the labor journals. It is not, however, until
the sanction of public opinion eventually backs the attitude of the
unions that the laws and their interpretation can conform entirely to
the desires of labor.

The chief grievance of organized labor against the courts is their
use of the injunction to prevent boycotts and strikes. "Government by
injunction" is the complaint of the unions and it is based upon the
common, even reckless, use of a writ which was in origin and intent a
high and rarely used prerogative of the Court of Chancery. What was in
early times a powerful weapon in the hands of the Crown against riotous
assemblies and threatened lawlessness was invoked in 1868 by an English
court as a remedy against industrial disturbances. * Since the Civil War
the American courts in rapidly increasing numbers have used this weapon,
and the Damascus blade of equity has been transformed into a bludgeon in
the hands even of magistrates of inferior courts.

* Springfield Spinning Company vs. Riley, L.R.6 Eq. 551.

The prime objection which labor urges against this use of the injunction
is that it deprives the defendant of a jury trial when his liberty is
at stake. The unions have always insisted that the law should be so
modified that this right would accompany all injunctions growing out of
labor disputes. Such a denatured injunction, however, would defeat the
purpose of the writ; but the union leader maintains, on the other hand,
that he is placed unfairly at a disadvantage, when an employer can
command for his own aid in an industrial dispute the swift and sure
arm of a law originally intended for a very different purpose. The
imprisonment of Debs during the Pullman strike for disobeying a
Federal injunction brought the issue vividly before the public; and
the sentencing of Gompers, Mitchell, and Morrison to prison terms for
violating the Buck's Stove injunction produced new waves of popular
protest. Occasional dissenting opinions by judges and the gradual
conviction of lawyers and of soc