RAILWAY MANAGERS AND EMPLOYES. 587 



prepares them for any and all alliances or changes that promise in- 

 creased wages, and makes them easy dupes of the designing and tur- 

 bulent. 



One result of the indifference of railroad managements toward their 

 subordinates has been to array against them agencies most potent in 

 fermenting discontent secret societies, brotherhoods, and similar or- 

 ganizations ; for it is a notorious fact that these mainly owe their 

 success and strength to the assistance and relief they hold out to 

 their members and their families in sickness, disablement, and death. 

 Thrown upon his own resources, the man who has constantly before 

 him the perils of his vocation and the misfortunes that would result 

 from inability to earn wages, naturally enrolls himself in any organi- 

 zation that promises the needed protection. Constantly confronted 

 with the history and with comparisons of the grievances of his fellow- 

 members, and without motive or cause for attachment to his employ- 

 ers ; perhaps, unconsciously, feelings of discontent and ill-will arise, 

 and naturally he meets any reduction of wages or suspension from 

 labor with outraged feeling, and often with violent actions born of 

 long though secret hostility, where there should have been but frater- 

 nity and good-fellowship of affiliated interests. That this is no senti- 

 , mental picture, many of the actors of the great labor-strike of 1877 

 testify. On more than one line was the statement afterward repeat- 

 edly made by railroad men, that had it not been for the protection 

 from want afforded by the Locomotive Brotherhood and other kindred 

 organizations, whose influence in antagonism to capital was so potently 

 felt in that struggle, and which protection they had repeatedly be- 

 sought their officers to inaugurate for them, they would never have 

 joined or been influenced by those organizations. 



To recapitulate the many serious disadvantages and losses, direct 

 and indirect, suffered by our railroads through strained relations with 

 their employes, though recognized and felt with anxious solicitude by 

 their executive and administrative officers, would little interest the 

 general public ; nor, indeed, as a rule are railroad investors apt to 

 give serious attention to what they consider matters of administrative 

 detail beneath their notice, until, at last, they force themselves into 

 prominence by threatening their profits or speculations. But the unpar- 

 alleled rapidity with which railway, mining, and manufacturing indus- 

 tries dependent thereupon have sprung into existence in America in the 

 last three decades, calling for an ever-increasing supply of labor skilled 

 in the manipulation of coals and metals, and their products, has had 

 the effect of directing the attention not only of those immediately or 

 by contiguity interested, but also of the general public, to all that per- 

 tains to the welfare of workers in that field. While labor agitations 

 and strikes do not now, perhaps, exercise graver influences for good or 

 ill over those pecuniarily interested than they have always done, the 

 publicity given to such movements by a press eager for news and ex- 



