ht they might choose
to ask for. Each concession would be, as it is now, followed by a new
demand, and the first arbitrators might as well allow them all that they
demand and all that they mean to demand hereafter.

Would not employers be equally unscrupulous. They would not. They could
not afford the disturbance, the stoppage of the business, the risk
of unfair decisions in a country where it is "popular" to favor and
encourage, not the just, but the poor. The labor leaders have nothing to
lose, not even their jobs, for their work is labor leading. Their dupes,
by the way, would be dupes no longer, for with enforced arbitration the
game of "follow my leader" would pay until there should be nothing to
follow him to but empty treasuries of dead industries in an extinct
civilization. If there must be enforced arbitration it should at least
not apply to that sum of all impudent rascalities, the "sympathetic
strike."

As to the men who have set up the monstrous claim asserted by the
"sympathetic strike," I shall refer to the affair of 1904. If it was
creditable in them to feel so much concern about a few hundred aliens in
Illinois, how about the grievances of the whole body of their countrymen
in California? When their employers, who they confess were good to them,
were plundering the Californians, they did not strike, sympathetically
nor otherwise. Year after year the railway companies picked the pockets
of the Californians; corrupted their courts and legislatures; laid its
Briarean hands in exaction upon every industry and interest; filled the
land with lies and false reasoning; threw honest men into prisons and
locked the gates of them against thieves and assassins; by open defiance
of the tax collector denied to children of the poor the advantages of
education--did all this and more, and these honest working men stood
loyally by it, sharing in wages its dishonest gains, receivers, in one
sense, of stolen goods. The groans of their neighbors were nothing to
them; even the wrongs of themselves, their wives and their children did
not stir them to revolt. On every breeze that blew, this great chorus
of cries and curses was borne past their ears unheeded. Why did they not
strike then? Where then were their fiery altruists and storm-petrels
of industrial disorder? No!--the ingenious gods who have invented the
Debses and Gomperses, and humorously branded them with names that would
make a cat laugh, have never put it into thei