Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/607

Rh prepares them for any and all alliances or changes that promise increased wages, and makes them easy dupes of the designing and turbulent.

One result of the indifference of railroad managements toward their subordinates has been to array against them agencies most potent in fermenting discontent—secret societies, brotherhoods, and similar organizations; for it is a notorious fact that these mainly owe their success and strength to the assistance and relief they hold out to their members and their families in sickness, disablement, and death. Thrown upon his own resources, the man who has constantly before him the perils of his vocation and the misfortunes that would result from inability to earn wages, naturally enrolls himself in any organization that promises the needed protection. Constantly confronted with the history and with comparisons of the grievances of his fellow members, and without motive or cause for attachment to his employers; perhaps, unconsciously, feelings of discontent and ill-will arise, and naturally he meets any reduction of wages or suspension from labor with outraged feeling, and often with violent actions born of long though secret hostility, where there should have been but fraternity and good-fellowship of affiliated interests. That this is no senti, mental picture, many of the actors of the great labor-strike of 1877 testify. On more than one line was the statement afterward repeatedly made by railroad men, that had it not been for the protection from want afforded by the Locomotive Brotherhood and other kindred organizations, whose influence in antagonism to capital was so potently felt in that struggle, and which protection they had repeatedly besought their officers to inaugurate for them, they would never have joined or been influenced by those organizations.

To recapitulate the many serious disadvantages and losses, direct and indirect, suffered by our railroads through strained relations with their employés, though recognized and felt with anxious solicitude by their executive and administrative officers, would little interest the general public; nor, indeed, as a rule are railroad investors apt to give serious attention to what they consider matters of administrative detail beneath their notice, until, at last, they force themselves into prominence by threatening their profits or speculations. But the unparalleled rapidity with which railway, mining, and manufacturing industries dependent thereupon have sprung into existence in America in the last three decades, calling for an ever-increasing supply of labor skilled in the manipulation of coals and metals, and their products, has had the effect of directing the attention not only of those immediately or by contiguity interested, but also of the general public, to all that pertains to the welfare of workers in that field. While labor agitations and strikes do not now, perhaps, exercise graver influences for good or ill over those pecuniarily interested than they have always done, the publicity given to such movements by a press eager for news and