III
We have the testimony of no less eminent an authority than United States District Judge John J. Jackson, of the Northern District of West Virginia, that in all his experience on the bench he could not recall a single occasion when any court, either Federal or State, ever abused the writ of injunction in strike questions. It is a definite and authoritative pronouncement; and the restrained and careful language accompanying it, wherein the officials of labor unions are described as “a professional set of agitators,” and “vampires that fatten on the honest labor of the coal miners,” certainly proves that it cannot be an ex parte statement. Yet, for all that, there is a widely diffused sentiment that the writ of injunction has occasionally been abused in strike questions. In the same locality, at about the same time, an injunction issued by United States District Judge B. F. Keller, of the Southern District of West Virginia, declared, among a multitude of other prohibitions, that the strikers “are further inhibited, enjoined, and restrained from assembling in camp or otherwise,” even on grounds leased by them for their meetings.
A pamphlet, prepared by five members of the New York Bar and issued by the Social Reform Club, of New York City, in the summer of 1900, gives the substance of a number of injunctions that have been issued against striking workmen. “In the case of the Sun Printing and Publishing Company vs. Delaney and others in December (1899),” says the pamphlet:—
“The Supreme Court of New York, among other things, enjoined the defendants from the exercise of their right to give the public their side of the controversy with the Sun as an argument against advertising in a paper which they claimed had treated them unjustly; it also forbade them from attempting to persuade newsdealers from selling the paper; and finally wound up with a sweeping restraint ‘from in any other manner or by any other means interfering with the property, property rights, or business of the plaintiff.’ It should be added that, on appeal, the Appellate Division struck out these commands; but they were so plainly subversive of fundamental rights that it is difficult to see how they could have been granted in the first instance.
“In still another case last year—The Wheeling Railway Company vs. John Smith and others (so runs the title of the action without naming the others)—in the United States Circuit Court, West Virginia, two men not parties to the action, nor found to be agents of ‘John Smith and others,’ whoever they may have been, were punished for contempt of court, for, among other things, ‘reviling’ and ‘cursing’ the court? not at all, but for ‘reviling’ and ‘cursing’ employees of the railroad company. If these men had not actually served out an imprisonment in jail for thirty days as a punishment for contempt of corporation, it might be thought that your committee had taken this example from opera bouffe. The legality of this punishment was never passed on by the Supreme Court, for the reason, as your committee understand, that the parties were unable to bear the expense of taking it there, and so served their term in jail.
“During the final drafting of our report a temporary injunction has been granted by a Justice of the Supreme Court in New York City.... This injunction forbids the defendants [certain members of the Cigar Makers’ International Union] even from approaching their former employers for the laudable purpose of reaching an amicable result; it forbids them from making their case known to the public if the tendency of that is to vex the plaintiffs or make them uneasy; it forbids them from trying in a perfectly peaceable way in any place in the city, even in the privacy of a man’s own home, to persuade a new employee that justice is on their side, and that he ought to sympathize with them sufficiently not to work for unjust employers; and, finally, it forbids the union from paying money to the strikers to support their families during the strike.”
Such instances, as the pamphlet states, can be multiplied. Perhaps they do not wholly controvert Judge Jackson’s declaration. But, at least, they illustrate an unbridgeable disparity between the definitions of justice held on the one hand by our interpreters of law, and on the other by the overwhelming majority of the citizenship. That disparity has been great in all recent times; but weekly and daily it grows greater. The stronger inclination of the judiciary to make property the paramount interest is everywhere observed; and the magnates, with an exultant recognition of the fact, make haste to enjoy the fruits of the new dispensation.