The press of the United States, as a rule, is on the side of abused men of any class, not excepting laboring men who strike against oppression of any kind or against reduced compensation, but often and often within a very few years, within the memory of men who are still young, the press has been obliged by common-sense alone to condemn strikes of men whose condition they regarded as deplorable, but whose immediate purpose was absolutely indefensible. A business man in a position which he does not entirely understand seeks the counsel of a lawyer or of some one who fully comprehends the case in all its bearings. The laboring man seems to think such a course unnecessary, and he suffers the consequences. Will any unions, guilds, Knights of Labor, help the workingmen to maintain such rights as they have and gain such as they need? Yes, if there are brains behind them. “In union is strength,” but strength may be just as effective in a bad sense as a good one, and the more of it there is the worse will be the showing made if the cause is not just. If workingmen were divine, all their past efforts would have done a great deal of good, but they are only human, and there is no getting away from the fact that when any lot of men first are brought together through sense of wrong, their first thought is revenge, which never meets the public’s views. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” is an expression from authority so high that we are obliged to treat it with respect, and it is certain that during the present generation a desire for vengeance by any one or for any reason whatever has never called forth the sympathy of the public. Human nature is a very weak article. No one knows this better than the wise man who has a great deal of it himself; so in all quarrels he assumes that there is a great deal of right on both sides and that reconciliation or adjustment must be brought about by conciliation and compromise. The laboring man on strike is not given to either conciliation or compromise. Whatever his wrongs may be, he has first endured them for a long time and when he has begun to complain of them his complaints have never been made directly, but simply are voiced among his fellows, then increased in volume. The argument on the other side has never been brought to his attention, and consequently he regards himself as the only person wronged and almost as the only person who has any interest in the matter in any way. It never occurs to him that his employer, like nineteen in twenty of all the employers of the United States, is doing his business on the basis of general confidence and borrowed capital, and that what might seem fair to the employer as an individual may be utterly impossible when demanded of the employer as a business man.