A. Well--my office seems to be a general receptacle for persons of diverse opinions. Some of these railroad men came to me with their complaints. I was told their grievances, and that their purpose was merely the restoration of the ten per cent. reduction. Q. Those were employés of what railroad? A. The Pittsburgh, Port Wayne and Chicago road. They admitted their actions were contrary to law, and that they might be amenable, but still they asserted their assumed right to stop the running of trains until their demands were complied with. By Mr. Lindsey: Q. You say they asserted their right to stop the trains? A. An assumed right. They supposed they had such a right. Some of them supposed, ignorantly, that they had such a right--a great many of them honestly believed that. By Mr. Larrabee: Q. Did they claim that they had any right to set themselves up against the authorities? A. No; at no time; as they construed the laws of the Commonwealth, they did not want to set themselves up against them. By Senator Reyburn: Q. Do you know what the feeling was in this city when the strike broke out? A. I know that the people of the city of Pittsburgh almost universally condemned the reduction of the salaries of the railroad men at that time. The strikers knew that they had the sympathies of the people of Allegheny county--of all classes--in their efforts to have a living rate of wages restored to them, and thousands of people not engaged in the strike, on that Saturday afternoon, in July last, were gathered in the vicinity of the Pennsylvania railroad workshops, not for the purpose of violating any law, but either from motives of sympathy with the strikers or prompted by curiosity to witness the military. It may be inferred, that at least one half of those people were women and children, and these, without warning, were fired into and many of them killed or wounded. Of course, this caused universal indignation and condemnation, and was the occasion of all the subsequent troubles and destruction. A pacific course pursued towards these men would have avoided the catastrophe that followed. The first great blunder in dealing with the strikers in Pittsburgh, was in the attempt to operate the road by the use of a military force, instead of using the troops to preserve order and to keep the peace. Q. You say that the sympathies of the people of Pittsburgh were with the strikers or with the railroad employés and against the reduction of their wages. Do you mean as long as no overt act was committed? Or what did they regard as an overt act? A. They would have regarded as an overt act the destruction of property. Q. Did they regard the stopping of trains as an overt act? A. I think that certain classes of people did not regard the stopping of the trains an overt act, but they would have regarded the forcible taking of men from the trains--men who were willing to work--or the preventing them from working, as an overt act.