th a view to starving them into submission, seem terribly unjust
to the employers and the class to which the employers belong. To the
workers themselves, on the other hand, such actions have all the
sanctions of conscience. Similarly, many actions of the employers, in
which they themselves see no wrong, seem almost incomprehensibly wicked
to the workers.

Leaving aside the wholesale fraud of our ordinary commercial
advertisements, the shameful adulteration of goods, and a multitude of
other such nefarious practices, it is at once interesting and
instructive to compare the employers' denunciations of "the outrageous
infringement of personal liberty," when the "oppressor" is a labor
union, with some of their everyday practices. The same employers who
loudly, and, let it be said, quite sincerely, condemn the members of a
union who endeavor to bring about the discharge of a fellow-worker
because he declines to join their organization, have no scruples of
conscience about discharging a worker simply because he belongs to a
union, and so effectually "blacklisting" him that it becomes almost or
quite impossible for him to obtain employment at his trade elsewhere.
They do not hesitate to do this secretly, conspiring against the very
life of the worker. While loudly declaiming against the "conspiracy" of
the workers to raise wages, they see no wrong in an "agreement" of
manufacturers or mine owners to reduce wages. If the members of a labor
union should break the law, especially if they should commit an act of
violence during a strike, the organs of capitalist opinion teem with
denunciation, but there is no breath of condemnation for the outrages
committed by employers or their agents against union men and their
families.

During the great anthracite coal strike of 1903, and again during the
disturbances in Colorado in 1904, it was evident to every fair-minded
observer that the mine owners were at least quite as lawless as the
strikers.[124] But there was hardly a scintilla of adverse comment upon
the mine owners' lawlessness in the organs of capitalist opinion, while
they poured forth torrents of righteous indignation at the lawlessness
of the miners. When labor leaders, like the late Sam Parks, for example,
are accused of extortion and receiving bribes, the employers and their
retainers, through pulpit, press, and every other avenue of public
opinion, denounce the culprit, the bribe taker, in unmeasured terms--but
the bribe