should be maintained, and the
government would see to that, not because they were on the side
either of the employers or the workmen, but because they were bound
to protect the public from the danger that a general arrest of
industry would entail." He continued:--

"The means whereby the people of this land live are highly
artificial, and a serious breakdown would lead to starvation among
a great number of poorer people. Not the well-to-do would suffer,
but the poor of the great cities and those dependent upon them, who
would be quite helpless if the machinery by which they are fed--_on
which they are dependent for wages_--was thrown out of gear.

"The government believes that the arrangements made for working the
lines of communication, and for the maintenance of order, will
prove effective; but, if not, other measures of even larger scope
will be taken promptly. It must be clearly understood that there is
no escape from these facts, and, as they affect the supply of food
for the people, and _the safety of the country, they are far more
important than anything else_."

To this the railway workers answered that it is to protect their own
food that they strike, and that food is as important to them as to
others, that practically all those who are dependent on wages are
willing to undergo the last degree of suffering to preserve the right
to strike, that the means of livelihood of this majority are no whit
less important than the "safety" of the rest of the country. Moreover,
if the government is allowed to use military or other means to aid the
railways to transport food, fuel, and other things, more or less
essential, it prevents that very "paralysis" which is the necessary
object of every strike. Industrial warfare of this critical kind must
indeed be costly to the whole community, often endangering health and
even life itself, but the workers are almost unanimous in believing that
a few days or weeks of this, repeated only after years of interval,
costs far less in life and health than the low wages paid to labor year
after year and generation after generation. _They demand the right to
strike unhampered by any government in which capitalistic or other than
wage-earning classes predominate._ Only when the government falls into
the hands of a group of wholly non-capitalist classes--of which wage
earners form the majority--will the