If the
men want to stop work, nobody has a right to interfere with them.
Certainly I haven't. But have they the right--the question hangs on this
point--to interfere with the farmers who want to get their crops to
market as badly as the strikers want to quit work? The kind of general
strike these people have in mind bears less relation to industry than it
does to war; and you know what I think about war and the rights of
non-combatants. They want to tie up the whole system of transportation
until they starve their opponents into submission. The old damnable
Prussian theory again, you see, that crops up wherever men take the
stand, which they do everywhere they have the power, that might is a law
unto itself. Now, I am with these men exactly half way, and no further.
As long as their method of striking doesn't interfere with the rights of
the public, they seem to me fair enough. But when it comes to raising
the price of food still higher and cutting off the city milk
supply--well, when they talk of that, then I begin to think of the human
side of it.
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