The Slaughter of the Innocents.
Miles of Blazing Cars.
The Strikers Hold the Fort and the Freight.
[Cut of man brandishing a bowie knife.]
Now that the strikers' contest has reached its crisis, and the military and civil are powerless to preserve order, and the blood of innocent men and children, shot down by Philadelphia roughs, cries aloud for atonement, it may not be amiss to place the responsibility for this awful condition of things where it belongs. The strikers have manifested, all along, an unwonted forbearance. There was no overt act of violence. The civil process had not been legally exhausted or properly invoked, and Sheriff Fife's misstatements and lying bulletins, and General Pearson's indiscreet bravado, only added fuel to what was already an overmastering flame. In a city where nearly every man is a worker, and where the mercantile community was bitterly hostile to an odious corporation, which had ground its life blood out by discrimination, the folly of bringing a few thousand Philadelphia troops to overawe the one hundred thousand workingmen of the city ought to have been apparent to the dullest observer. The little junta of railroad officials who wrote out the Governor's proclamation at the Union Depot hotel, and their indiscreet buncombe in disregarding Mr. Thaw's advice and cultivating an unnecessary issue with the strikers, and the culminating bloody blunder, which sent thirteen innocent victims to their graves, all show how such martinets as Cassatt, Scott, Gardiner, &c., fail to comprehend the situation. With bands of five and ten thousand men patrolling the streets, the rumors and gun-works sacked, the booming of cannon, and the sharp crack of the strikers' muskets in front of the city hall, the threats of vengeance against the military and the railroad authorities, and the murder of the innocents, all this is directly attributable to the blunder of the sheriff and the indiscreet bluster of the military and railroad authorities, who imagined, because they had a few troops at their back, that they could defy the lightning. The feeling against the Philadelphia soldiery, which seemed to have acted with unseemly precipitancy, was very bitter, and threats were made that they will not be allowed to go home alive. Every law-abiding citizen must deplore extremes, but in a contest like the present, so long as labor, without violence, merely asserted its right to live, it was entitled to the sympathy of every worker in the hive of human industry, and the cowardice and imbecility of the railroad sharks, who sought to overawe all this community by imported bummers, met its proper rebuke. Contrast, in all this crisis, between the mock heroics of the Pennsylvania railroad squad, with its plotting and counter-plotting, and the clear-headed attitude of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, who wisely remained passive until the storm spent itself, shows the difference between the statesmanship of Garrett and the poppy-cock of Scott. As the case stands, every one of the military should be arrested and tried for murder, and their abettors taught a lesson not likely to be soon forgotten.
By Senator Reyburn:
Q. What reason had you for saying that "seventeen citizens shot in cold blood by the roughs of Philadelphia?"
A. From the information that they fired on the populace without orders, and without justification, so far as the information went at that time—it was received to that effect—that they had not fired on the mob, who were in front of them obstructing the track, but fired on the unarmed populace on the hill side.
Q. What do you mean by Philadelphia roughs?
A. That was the expression used, that parties fired on the people without orders, and acting as roughs—firing recklessly, and without orders, and on people who were not firing on them.