MACHINE GUNS FOR THE OVERWORKED.
These deadly conditions prevailed on the Vanderbilt railroads even more than on any others; it was notorious that the Vanderbilt system was not only managed in semi-antiquated ways so far as the operation was concerned, but also that its trainmen were terribly underpaid and overworked. [Footnote: "Semi-antiquated ways." Only recently the "Railway Age Gazette," issue of January, 1909, styled the New York Central's directors as mostly "concentrated absurdities, physically incompetent, mentally unfit, or largely unresident and inattentive.">[ In reply to a continued agitation for better hours on the part of the Vanderbilt employees, the New York Legislature passed an act, in 1892, which apparently limited the working hours of railroad employees to ten a day. There was a gleam of sunshine, but lo! when the act was critically examined after it had become a law, it was found that a "little joker" had been sneaked into its mass of lawyers' terminology. The surreptitious clause ran to this effect: That railroad companies were permitted to exact from their employees overtime work for extra compensation. This practically made the whole law a negation.
So it turned out; for in August, 1892, the switchmen employed by various railroad lines converging at Buffalo struck for shorter hours and more pay. The strike spread, and was meeting with tactical success; the strikers easily persuaded men who had been hired to fill their jobs to quit. What did the Vanderbilts and their allies now do? They fell back upon the old ruse of invoking armed force to suppress what they proclaimed to be violence. They who had bought law and had violated the law incessantly now represented that their property interests were endangered by "mob violence," and prated of the need of soldiers to "restore law and order." It was a serviceable pretext, and was immediately acted upon.
The Governor of New York State obediently ordered out the entire State militia, a force of 8,000, and dispatched it to Buffalo. The strikers were now confronted with bayonets and machine guns. The soldiery summarily stopped the strikers from picketing, that is to say, from attempting to persuade strikebreakers to refrain from taking their places. Against such odds the strike was lost.
If, however, the Vanderbilts could not afford to pay their workers a few cents more in wages a day, they could afford to pay millions of dollars for matrimonial alliances with foreign titles. These excursions into the realm of high-caste European nobility have thus far cost the Vanderbilt family about $15,000,000 or $20,000,000. When impecunious counts, lords, dukes and princes, having wasted the inheritance originally obtained by robbery, and perpetuated by robbery, are on the anxious lookout for marriages with great fortunes, and the American money magnates, satiated with vulgar wealth, aspire to titled connections, the arrangement becomes easy. [Footnote: More than 500 American women have married titled foreigners. The sum of about $220,000,000, it is estimated (1909), has followed them to Europe.] Romance can be dispensed with, and the lawyers depended upon to settle the preliminaries.