Ald. Warreinner: "We are not asking for arbitration, we want a committee appointed to see if there is need of it. Will you consent to that?"
Mr. Wickes: "No."
Ald. McGillen: "In the name of humanity let me beseech you to reconsider your negation."
Mr. Wickes: "Gentlemen, the Pullman company has nothing to arbitrate, we want to see no committee, the Pullman company cannot recede from its position. This is final."
When the committee met again at 4:30 to make its final report, it was completely discouraged. Mr. Elderkin stated the proposition that had been made to the Pullman company and its direct refusal. The alderman begged the labor representatives not to strike and cause widespread suffering.
The general manager's and Pullman's position was so clearly defined that it would be impossible for the public to fail to see it in any but its true light.
The companies were losing millions of dollars but the general managers had determined if necessary to bankrupt every system in the United States in order to crush labor organizations out of existence. The Pullman matter was something of the past, with them they were after the labor organizations, and they were after them with a vengeance.
The government was backing them. The attorney general of the United states,—a corporation attorney as well,—had pledged himself to disrupt every labor organization in the country. President Cleveland, another railroad attorney, had encouraged and abetted them to the same end.
With the subsidized press, the bankers unions, the moneycrat manufacturers and the federal courts arrayed against them, what in the name of justice could they expect?
Surely the martyred president and savior of mankind, the immortal Lincoln, must have anticipated the present deplorable condition when in his message to the second session of the thirty-seventh congress,—to be found in the appendix to the Congressional Globe of the thirty-seventh congress, second section, page 4—when he said: "Monarchy itself is sometimes hinted at as a possible refuge from the power of the people. In my present position I could scarcely be justified were I to omit raising a warning voice against this approach of returning despotism. It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point with its connections not so hackneyed as most others to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital, that nobody labors unless somebody else owning capital somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. * * * Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration. * * * No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty; none less inclined to take or touch aught which they have not earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess and which, if surrendered, will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they, and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them till all of liberty shall be lost."