It ought to be said, however, that the cattle owners did not abandon the state without a fight. They resisted the collection of taxes, claiming the system to be unjust and against public policy. One of the trial courts decided in their favor, but the case was appealed to the Great Council, which, it will be remembered, retained the Supreme Judicial authority in itself. The matter was referred by this body to six of its members, all lawyers, and indeed the only lawyers in the Great Council, all of whom were Co-operators, and the trial court was reversed. There was also an armed resistance to the collection of the tax, but the cattle men were speedily put to rout, the state militia suffering no other loss than three men wounded. The newspaper press throughout the Union, however, took sides with the cattle men, claiming that the system of taxation had been adopted for the sole purpose of driving these “honest” men from the state and taking possession of “their” ranges. The truth was that the men who left the state on account of this law did so to escape honest burdens and went where the laws were more unjust, or if not unjust not effectual to prevent the shifting of such burdens dishonestly to other shoulders which ought not to bear them. We offered no encouragement to dishonest practices, and if our failure to do so was an advantage to some other state which did, we certainly had no occasion to feel envious.
Mining property owned by corporations or associations was valued at the full par of its capital stock and assessed accordingly.
It was the policy of the state not to encourage the mining of the precious minerals by private enterprise. The miners of the state were fast becoming absorbed in our Co-opolitan Association and wages had risen to nearly four dollars per day for skilled or unskilled workers, because a membership in the Co-opolitan Association or its Industrial Army paid that amount annually.
Mine owners sought to obviate what they called the evil of high wages by importing cheaper labor. At first they attempted the introduction of Chinese miners and later an ignorant class of Italians, Hungarians and Slavonians. Our Great Council prohibited aliens from owning, holding or acquiring real estate or making investments of any kind within the state on and after the date of the passage of a law to that effect. It also prohibited the importation of aliens into the state as laborers, or the employment of any such by any person, association or corporation.
These laws were all held to be valid and constitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States, which some years after their passage had occasion to pass upon them.
The result was that capital engaged in mining in Idaho withdrew and some of the mines were purchased at a low figure and operated by the Co-opolitan Association.
Here again the press of the United States denounced the immorality of the Co-operative Commonwealth, because of its oppressive conduct toward capital. Immoral indeed!
Idaho simply made laws which in other states or countries have never been disapproved as immoral.
The Co-opolitan Association gave to labor the same high wages in all its departments, and in that manner made laborers anxious to join the Association. This left the mine owner to do his own work or pay as much as the worker could earn as a Co-operator.
The capitalist could not compete in the labor market with labor itself, when labor employed its skill and force in its own behalf. If the mine which was made to produce wealth for capital and peril, distress and death for labor, became valueless, because there was no longer a force to work it, whose fault was that?