PICKETING, DANGEROUS PRACTICE.

PICKETING, DANGEROUS PRACTICE.

The time is coming when picketing as conducted by labor unions at the present time is going to be sternly ended by the strong hand of the law. The time when this kind of law will come will depend, no doubt, on better observance of the law by the great corporations. It is a well known fact that the great corporations like the coal trust and many railway corporations violate various laws of the country as to organization and operation with impunity. This is done generally without personal and physical violence as is too often the manner of violence resorted to by strikers, yet the results are even more insidious because hidden in greater or less degree from the public gaze. But this kind of defiance of the public will as expressed in the law of the country will not always be submitted to, either.

Picketing in a peaceful way is all right, but where pickets and those whom the represent resort to vile insults to those who desire to work, and poundings and kickings and even murdering of those who have committed no offense, it should be no more tolerated when committed by strikers and their pickets than when committed by other criminals. Men not bound by contract have the right to puit work when they please, but they have no right to prevent others from working who wish to work. Insults and threats and physical punishment, inflicted upon persons whose only offense is a willingness to work for the wages and in places others have refused are clearly illegal acts and should be punished as such.

The courts of Chicago in passing upon cases of this sort recently growing out of the strikes in that city, are to the effect that the law must check labor unions in these things. Judge Cavanaugh in passing upon cases before him said among other things:

"Men who work with their hands not only have the right to organize and join, but the result has shown that such organization has been of benefit not only to themselves but to the community at large. It must not be forgotten that for each of these rights the employer has a correlative, and that persons no belonging to these organizations may work where, for what wage and under what conditions they see fit also that these last have the right to so perform their labor safe from violence, insult and intimidation.

"It is lawful at all reasonable times for the person who is upon a strike to occupy the streets adjacent to the place of his late employment, and to accost, advise with and persuade another not to take this place. But the person who accosted has rights in the matter as well, prominent among which is that such peaceful advice and persuasion shall not be delivered to him from out of a cloud of threats and insults and not within sight of blows and bloodshed."

The cases in point grew out of the strike now on at the Kellogg switchboard factory in Chicago, when pickets requested non-union men not to work, then jeered them, threatened them and finally resorted to physical violence. The court's position in substance is as follows:

That any picket who is a part of a system which leads to violence is equally responsible with those who hurl stones or wield the clubs.