"Starvation of a Nation" Illegal
On the day that Debs telegraphed Phelan to take measures to paralyze all those lines which entered Cincinnati—work which was already well under way—at the very crisis of the strike, on the application of the receiver of the Cincinnati, New Orleans & Texas Pacific Railway Company, and on a petition which alleged a malicious conspiracy to prevent the receiver from operating that road, Phelan was arrested by an order of Judge Taft for inciting the employees of the receiver to quit their employment and for urging them to prevent others from taking their places, by persuasion if possible, by clubbing if necessary. The receiver asked for the commitment of Phelan for contempt, alleging that the whole boycott was an unlawful and criminal conspiracy, and that, for his acts in maliciously inciting the employees of the receiver, who was operating the railroad under order of the United States Court, to leave his employ in pursuance of that unlawful combination, Phelan was in contempt of court.
Was the combination of Debs and his associates illegal? Judge Taft said that it was, not only because boycotts are illegal under the law of every State in the Union where the question has arisen, with one possible exception, but because this combination of men, in their efforts to gain their own personal ends, had trampled upon the rights of the public. He said:
The railroads have become as necessary to the life and health and comfort of the people of the country as are the arteries in the human body, and yet Debs and Phelan and their associates propose, by inciting the employees of all the railways in the country to suddenly quit their service without any dissatisfaction with the terms of their employment, to paralyze utterly all the traffic by which the public live, and in this way to compel Pullman, for whose acts neither the public nor the railway companies are in the slightest degree responsible and over whose acts they can lawfully exercise no control, to pay more wages to his employees. Certainly the starvation of a nation cannot be a lawful purpose of a combination, and it is utterly immaterial whether the purpose is effected by means usually lawful or otherwise.
The "starvation of a nation," for such purposes, by such means, stopped, so far as Phelan was concerned, on the day these words were read by Judge Taft—the 13th day of July, 1894. It stopped because after a protracted and exciting trial, in which many witnesses were called and Phelan was fully heard in his own defense, Taft sent Phelan to jail for six months. Those who believe that the starvation of a nation is within the rights of labor engaged in a private quarrel, must tell us wherein this Judge did wrong.
These three cases are legal landmarks showing the limitations of industrial warfare. They are what the lawyers call "leading cases." They lay down clearly and dispassionately the law which marks the rights of the public to remain unmolested by the conflict of labor and capital at war. Such decisions are in American law what the Treaty of Paris is in the Law of Nations—a declaration of the rights of neutrals.
If, as a candidate for the presidency, Mr. Taft is to suffer from unpopularity created in any quarter by these decisions which he made as judge, he must endure it, for the search for popularity is not a part of the functions of a judge.
The Courage of Great Judges
The picture of Taft in the Phelan case, reading in a court-room crowded with angry and hostile men a decision which was to send their leader to jail; a decision which was to play a large part in determining one of the most distressing industrial wars of our day;—this picture recalls another court, another great occasion long ago.
In 1768 John Wilkes, who had been prosecuted relentlessly by the British Crown, and who had been outlawed and driven to France, returned to England, appeared before Lord Mansfield in the Court of Kings Bench, and demanded that the judgment of outlawry be reversed. The nation was frenzied by faction. Abuse and threats of personal violence were heaped upon the Chief Justice. In a courtroom crowded with the enemies of Wilkes, the greatest of English judges reversed and annulled the decree of outlawry. In doing it, he gave what seemed a death blow to his own favor with the King, who had placed the judicial ermine on his shoulders. After he had rendered this judgment, facing the angry sycophants of the Crown, he spoke these words: