of every state. Politicians have made many attempts to get it out of politics, and have been to a greater or less degree and in certain localities, temporarily, successful. But we all understand that wherever the saloon exists it is becoming every year more and more a political power.

The above is an instance of these two great powers so vitally connected with the public life of our nation working in the nicest and sweetest harmony. The general superintendent of a great railroad is, in respect to certain matters, under the absolute domination, and subject entirely to the dictation, of brewers in a certain city on his line.

Of course a common carrier must be subject to the laws which govern common carrying. He is as much under obligation to carry the products of brewers as to carry church building material or transport teachers and clergymen on passenger trains. But has it come to this, that the American citizen must abrogate his common rights of citizenship; must shut himself out from the practical and ethical interests of his community; when great questions of public welfare are up for discussion he must keep silence; when the interests of his boys and girls, his home, are at stake, he must be as indifferent as an Egyptian mummy? In other words, he must repudiate his manhood in order to be considered competent to build a bridge or work on a section of a railroad that runs through that community.

What had this employee done? Had he in any way interfered with the obligation of a common carrier resting upon his employers? Had he hindered their doing their full duty to every public interest? Not in the slightest degree. He had simply cast his vote as an alderman in favor of good order in the community. He had done nothing directly to decrease the number of saloons nor to reduce by so much as one glass the beer transported by the railroad. The brewers evidently thought an anti-screen rule indirectly hostile to them. Being on the board of aldermen he had certain obligations arising out of that office; but here is a demand from a business interest in a distant city that he perjure himself with reference to his oath of office expressed or implied as alderman, certainly the oath he took before he cast his first vote as an American citizen. He is required by his employer to refuse to act conscientiously as an honorable and patriotic American citizen.

In other words, the brewers intend to run this country in their interests. In every community where "their business" is carried on they propose to make that community's

laws. They have men employed whose business it is to see to it that no railroad which serves as carrier for their products shall employ any man who desires even remotely to exercise his rights of citizenship when those rights seem to interfere with what the brewers consider a higher right -their own private profit. Not only do they demand this, which is a small matter, but they are able to enforce their demands upon the railroads, which is by no means a small matter. How any self-respecting railway superintendent can write such a letter as the above is to me incomprehensible. The fact is, that letter is not self-respecting. It is the abrogation of self-respect. It is the admission of a slavery so abject that many a man would rather resign any salary that any railroad could give him rather than sign his name to such a letter.

The following is an example of another sort of railway official:

The Wine and Spirit Gazette of New York publishes the following, to which we call the attention of the brewers and jobbers who ship goods to their customers by rail:

"The Railroad Company is enforcing most rigorously its new rule forbidding its employees from indulging in wine, liquor, or beer. It has a strong force of detectives employed watching the men, and resorts to every artifice to catch them drinking. One young engineer who was hauled over the coals protested his innocence and insisted that he never drank. Thereupon a photograph was promptly produced showing the young man in the act of drinking a glass of beer. The kodak had done the business and his head rolled in the basket. An engineer who notoriously never touches liquor of any kind was discharged for not reporting a subordinate who did. This is carrying the business rather beyond the bounds of legitimacy. A company may properly demand strict sobriety from its employees while on duty, but it certainly has no right to interfere with them other times. [Indeed!] Employees are not slaves!"

We have reason to know that the Railroad Company has no use for papers published in the interest of the liquor trade, but freely issues editorial passes to the prohibition papers in exchange for advertising space. "A word to the wise."

The above slip was sent by a certain paper published in the interests of the liquor traffic, to a prominent official of the railroad named, accompanied by a threat to publish it unless advertisements and passes were forthcoming. The railroad official paid no attention to the communication; which course seems to me infinitely more dignified and worthy of the high position of the general manager of a great railroad than the letter which stands at the head of this article, with its shameful subserviency to the impudent - dictation of the liquor traffic.

It is quite easy to understand that the business temptation

is great where hundreds of thousands of dollars in freight are the basis of the correspondence. In other words, all rights of American citizenship and self-respecting manhood are subject to the demands of business success. This is the generic principle. The specific result in this case is that business success in its turn is absolutely subject to the liquor interest.

It is no wonder that Mr. Roosevelt felt called upon to publish the statement that he was not deceived in his work in New York City into thinking that he was fighting somebody who wanted his beer on Sunday or the keeper of some sevenby-nine saloon who wanted to sell a few glasses more for what profit there was in it. He said:

[Our opponents] know that we are fighting the richest and powerfulest organization that there is in this city; that this is an organization which has much money in its control and which will spend its money as freely as it can to defeat the effort to secure an honest government. I refer to the brewery influences. We are fighting them. You will understand that we have opposed to us the corrupting power of wealth.

So this series of facts, like most other social and industrial and trade matters in America, leads back to one root question: whether, whatever our fundamental intentions may be and however little doubt there is concerning the ultimate outcome, we are at present building chiefly a democracy or a plutocracy.

THE TELEGRAPH MONOPOLY.

BY PROF. FRANK PARSONS.

IV.

EVILS OF THE PRESENT SYSTEM (continued).

The sixth count in the indictment of the present telegraphic system in America, is the illtreatment of employees, and a general abuse of the employing power,-child-labor, overworked operators, long hours and small pay for those who do most of the work, short hours and big pay for those who manage and scheme, less wages to women than to men for the same work, favoritism and unjust distinctions between men in the same service, a settled policy of reducing wages and increasing work, denial of the right of petition, the right of organization, and the right to consideration because of long and faithful service, fraud, oppression, merciless discharge, blacklisting, boycotting, breaking agreements, treating men as commodities to be bought at the lowest market price and thrown away like a sucked orange as soon as the company has squeezed the profit out of their lives,such are the items, or some of the items, under this vital count.

The employment of thousands of little boys twelve to sixteen years old is a very serious wrong. These children ought to be in school, not in the street. One of the best things about public business is that it does not impose the burdens of toil upon childhood. In the postoffice the carriers are men, not boys. There is no better measure of the difference in the spirit of national enterprise, and the spirit of a great private corporation, than is to be found in the contrast between the fine looking men who act as messengers for Uncle Sam 8 hours a day on salaries of $600, $800, and $1000 a year, and the little mind-starved, opportunity-cheated boys that act as messengers for the telegraph companies 10 to 16 hours a day on salaries of $2 or $3 a week.

The work of a telegraph operator is very exhausting.1 He suffers from close confinement, cramped position, strenuous attention, and rapid work of brain and arm. President

1 Testimony of operators, Blair Com. of the U. S. Senate, vol. 1, pp. 116, 125, 187, 193

Orton of the Western Union testified that no operator should perform more than 6 hours' work per day.2 Yet as a matter of fact the majority of operators are on duty from 12 to 13 hours," and the day is often much longer than that. Victor Rosewater, himself an operator for many years, and for several years manager of the Western Union Telegraph Company at Omaha, told the Bingham Committee in 1890 that "At railroad stations 16 hours a day is a short day's work. I have worked 18 hours a day." Hon. John Davis after telling the Henderson Committee in 1894 about the overworking of railway engineers continued his testimony as follows:

"Telegraph operators, who, as you know, control the running of trains, are also overworked, and they are not competent for duty after a great loss of sleep. One train despatcher said that he sometimes had to work 20 hours a day, but sometimes found himself obliged to take some sleep in the meantime, though he made it as short as he dared."

Worst of all, the aim of the companies is not to lighten the burdens of their workers but to increase them. The victory of the Western Union in the great strike of '83 gave the managers an opportunity for rearrangement which they improved to such purpose that Dr. Green, the president, is reported as saying:

"The several hundreds of thousands of dollars which have been lost in the strike I regard as the best financial investment made by the company. Hereafter General Eckert tells me that he will get one-third more work out of a man for a day's service, and the economy of such a step will retrieve the loss in less than six months.”

One-third more work in a day, though the men were already suffering from overwork, and paralysis, consump

* Id., 119, 156. In the large city offices nine or ten hours constitute a day's work, but elsewhere the day is from 12 hours up, and even in the city operators are not seldom obliged to work 13 and 14 hours a day (p. 150).

Bingham Rep., Rosewater, p. 6.

5 I. T. U. Hearings, p. 59. The testimony about the engineers is so pertinent to the present subject of corporation ill treatment of employees that it seems well to give it in condensed form. Mr. Davis said that in many cases "Railroad engineers are worked 48 hours at a time without sleep"; also that "engineers have frequently told me that they have put tobacco in their eyes to keep themselves awake," and are sometimes obliged to leave the engine in charge of the fireman to get an hour's sleep, although it is dangerous to trust the fireman because his eyes are apt to be dazzled by the fire he has been replenishing at night, so that he cannot see well ahead for half an hour afterward and sometimes for several hours afterward.

• Ibid.

7 Wanamaker's Argument, etc., p. 221.