LEADERS AND FOLLOWERS, TWO CLASSES-By l'irgil G. Marani 211 EFFICIENCY IS THE WORLD'S NEED-By Rev. John S. Rutledge 214 Cleveland, O. The American Employer A MAGAZINE DEVOTED TO THE INTERESTS OF THE BUSINESS MEN OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA WHO HIRE LABOR Published by The American Employer Publishing Co., 404 Chamber of Commerce Building, Cleveland, O. J. H. SMITH, Pres. and Treas. J. W. EBERHARDT, Vice Pres. JOHN WEBER, Sec. A. S. VAN DUZER, Ed. and Man. The violation of law is not a class matter. All citizens are amenable to law and subject to punishment for its violation. THE AMERICAN EMPLOYER has heretofore protested against the exemption of any man from legal responsibility, either criminal or civil, because he labors, and will continuously so protest whenever the occasion warrants. It would ill become this magazine, therefore, to plead that if a man be an employer of labor, who, it may incidentally be remarked, also works, he may violate the law. There is no warrant for any such contention. The law, should play no favorites. When a man violates a statute of state or nation, he should be made to be responsible for his act, no matter what his station in life may be. To place dynamite in exposed position is rightly a crime. result at any time in the violent death of human beings. The act may The accusation is made that certain men financially interested, and men connected, directly or indirectly, with the textile manufacturing industries in Massachusetts "planted" dynamite during the Lawrence strike to discredit the strikers. Wm. M. Wood, president of the American Woolen Co., was arrested. A mill contractor named Ernest W. Pittman committed suicide after having, it is said, talked incautiously to District Attorney Pellatier, of Boston, at or after a wine banquet. A newspaper man is declared to have written and his paper to have printed a story of the finding of dynamite before the explosive was actually found. One or two lesser lights in the industrial and political world. are accused in the same connection. Other arrests have been prophesied.. Having made its confession of faith as above in unmistakable terms, THE AMERICAN EMPLOYER differs from various papers representing organized labor, which, since the Massachusetts developments, have tried, convicted and sentenced everybody mentioned in that connection. We decline to prejudge the cases of the Massachusetts men, who have been accused of crime, but on the other hand, we do not hysterically shriek for their immediate exoneration before trial, after the manner of labor organizations and their papers in re Ettor and Giovannetti. There are several reasons for waiting, before adjudging William M. Wood guilty of dynamite planting, for the state of Massachusetts to prove its case against him. One is, admitting only for the sake of argument that Wood has no sense of morality, that a man of sufficient ability to reach his position in business would know better than to do such an ineffably foolish thing. One would think that an acute business man, before resorting to criminality to discredit a strike, would reflect that a strike conducted by William D. Haywood would sooner or later discredit itself. Another reason for allowing Mr. Pellatier to prove his case is that the conversation of an intoxicated person is notoriously unreliable. Pittman being intoxicated, if such were the case, and Pellatier, of course, sober, any leading questions on the part of the attorney might have provoked in Pittman that spirit of bravado and boastfulness, which so often characterizes the man in his cups. Any man who has reached mature life knows that the mildest and meckest of men, in words at any rate, sometimes become raging lions of dare deviltry when they have been drinking. Pittman, it is true, has committed suicide, and if that act were the result of his talk at the banquet and of the subpoena to testify before the grand jury which followed it, Pittman's deed can be as readily understood whether his admissions under the influence of liquor were true or false. After all, the position taken by the labor leaders and their papers in this affair, is about the most illogical taken by them in any labor matter. Wood and the others must be immediately condemned, then punished, because they have been accused of planting dynamite. The McNamaras must be excused, forgiven and canonized since they have admitted that they used. dynamite to blow up buildings and killed twenty innocent men in one explosion. Pity the down-trodden capitalist. He has not a right to be alive, according to these persons. The McNamaras in prisons are martyrs; the Massachusetts business people, untried, are villains. Just a few examples of what these papers say about this thing. The New York Call, daily, Socialistic, prints an article dated at Lawrence, Mass., by Phillips Russell, who says: "It seems pretty plain now that the two (namely the alleged dynamite planting and the shooting of Anna La Pizza in the Lawrence riot) were directly connected; that is, that the same set of persons who caused the planting of dynamite also caused the murder of Anna La Pizza. Both plots were concocted, of course, for the purpose of getting something to fasten on Ettor and Giovannetti." Again Russell says, and mark the anarchistic significance of this: "Do they think we have forgiven Parsons and Spies of Chicago?" Solidarity, the I. W. W. New Castle, Pa., paper, says: "The only difference between dynamiters of Lawrence and other places where dynamite has been planted is the fact that the Lawrence bunch have been caught with the goods, while others have succeeded in escaping." Just one other significant quotation from a labor paper. The Commercial Telegraphers' Journal, September number, declares that "the amazing facts thus far brought up show emphatically that there was ample justification on the part of labor for the suspicion of a frame-up in the McNamara case until that was dissipated by the men pleading guilty." In other words, laboring men must never be suspected of crime until they own up, but the employer is convicted of crime when he is accused. For years every time that a labor dynamiting outrage has been uncovered, labor howls that the employers have planted the dynamite. It is the same old cry of labor, against which cry we are raising our voice now and forever-one set of laws for one set of men and another set of laws for another set of men. Convict the employer on accusation, but believe nothing against the employe until he admits it. Punish the man without proof if he has money; forgive a criminal if he works with his hands for money. That sort of things will not do in the United States. One law for all and all amenable to law. That Election In Ohio Ohio had her constitutional amendment election and a majority of the nearly 600,000 electors who voted said yes to almost all the socialistic propaganda presented in 42 contemplated amendments. Strangely, among the few amendments that were lost was that to limit injunctions. With all but one county heard from this proposition had 239,990 favorable votes, while 256,229 votes were cast against it. The proposed article read: SEC. 21.-Laws may be passed, prescribing rules and regulations for the conduct of cases and business in the courts of the state, regulating proceedings in contempt and limiting the power to punish for contempt. No order of injunction shall issue in any controversy involving the employment of labor, except to preserve physical property from injury or destruction; and all persons charged in contempt proceedings with the violation of an injunction issued in such controversies shall, upon demand, be granted a trial by jury as in criminal cases. Either some of the radical voters did not know what they were doing, or else so-called progressiveness, which stood for the initiative and referendum, the minimum wage concealed under "employes' walfare" and other equally raw things, balked at depriving courts of equity of power in injunction and at crippling the arm of the judiciary in enforcing its own decrees. Other proposed constitutional changes that were lost were woman's suffrage, the abolition of capital punishment, the use of voting machines in elections, a proposal to limit the employment of women in public office in the state; regulating "out-door" advertising, which promised to put the billboard people out of business; $50,000,000 for good roads, and to omit the word "white" in the constitutional clause describing who shall be voters in the state. This last was the strangest result of the election. Colored men have voted in Ohio since the civil war on the strength of the federal constitution as amended, yet the voters decided not to amend the state restriction against colored voters as embodied in the state constitution of 1851. However, the state of Ohio has apparently swallowed, among other indigestible things, the initiative and referendum, workmen's compensation from a fund to be contributed to by compulsion by employers alone, removal of public officials otherwise than by impeachment, court verdicts rendered by nine jurymen, the taxation of state and municipal bonds, inheritances, incomes, franchises, and production of minerals, double liability of bank stockholders, and, concealed in a clause labeled "conservation of natural resources", a proposition to regulate the methods of mining, weighing, measuring and marketing coal, oil, gas and all other minerals. The votes had hardly been counted before the daily papers carried reports of an intention to attack the result of the election in the courts on two grounds. One of these was that certain of the proposed amendments, while receiving majorities of votes cast upon them did not receive a majority of the total vote cast at the election. Proposals for taking depositions in criminal cases, limiting the veto power of the governor, material liens and liens for labor, judicial reform, abolishing justices of the peace in certain cities, to make the school superintendent of the state an appointive instead of an elective officer, taxation, a short method of amending the constitution, a schedule of amendments and a liquor license did not in any case receive a majority of the vote cast on the woman's suffrage question, the question on which the most votes were cast, though all of them received a majority of votes cast for them. The total vote on the woman's suffrage question was 586,296. If some of the voters did not express themselves on woman's suffrage and the total vote |