Whole Number 1537

"T

THE STRIKE WON'T STOP until the steel-workers become the lawmakers at Washington," declares Mr. T. J. Vind, general organizer of the American Federation of Labor in the Chicago district, and his defiant cry finds echo in the statement of a Washington correspondent of the Socialist New York Call, that "organized labor enters upon what may be the last battle with the industrial overlords of America." "Labor has ideas of the way the fight should be carried to the most powerful of our profiteers," says the Allentown (Pa.) Labor Herald, which predicts an outbreak of sympathetic strikes and has a vision of millions of employees "facing a small bunch of bankers who insisted upon retaining the twelve-hour work-day and company-controlled collective bargaining for the purpose of making industrial slaves of their employees." It remarks further that "about that time the thought might enter the heads of these millions of employees that these bankers are as unnecessary to production in the United States as they were in Russia, and we may get the idea at the same time to get rid of them completely and run the basic industries for the benefit of those who labor." While many editorial writers outside the labor press accuse the leaders of this strike of aiming at nothing less than industrial revolution, The New Majority, of Chicago, organ of the Labor party, counters with a charge of "high treason" against Judge Gary, of the United States Steel Corporation. By denying the strikers "their constitutional rights of free speech, press, and assemblage," it affirms, "he has set himself and his steel trust up in defiance of the Government and Constitution of the United States as superior to them." And it continues:

"Judge Gary is trying to foment violent revolution. His unarmed workers are seeking to avail themselves of the protection of the Government and its Constitution. Judge Gary is organizing an army in the United States to defeat the Constitution of the United States-to overthrow it and establish the dictatorship of the steel trust. This is the crime of high treason, the punishment of which is fixt at death by the statutes of our country. If a workingman were guilty of attempting to do what Judge Gary is doing, he would be taken into custody and by orderly processes of the law the full punishment for his crime I would be meted out to him."

The whole vast army of more than 4,000,000 organized workers in this country, according to the correspondent of The Call previously quoted, "will be mobilized to win this strike, if that be necessary." And thereafter, it adds, "no other industry will remain strong enough to make war against the trade-union movement with any hope of success." In its editorial columns a few days later the same paper complains that "Republican, Democratic, and independent journals have mobilized their power to crush the slaves of the mills, to create 'public opinion' that will drive them back into submission to the masters of steel." Of the conditions under which the men of the steel-mills work it goes on to say:

"The slaves of the mills have no need of acquainting themselves with Dante's view of the infernal regions. They know what hell is. The work in the iron- and steel-mills is the most exhausting of any industry. If the industry was operated with any deference to human welfare, all the iron and steel could be produced during the cool months. These slaves often work almost naked, surrounded with hissing white-hot iron or steel. All their vital powers are sweated through their pores. Many