Snow on the headlight : $b a story of the great Burlington strikeWarman, Cy
General
Snow on the headlight : $b a story of the great Burlington strike
Warman, Cy
Burlington Strike, 1888 -- Fiction; Strikes and lockouts -- Fiction
Finally the food supply began to dwindle, he was idle, and his wife was
unable to do hard work; they had other small children who now began to
cry for milk, and the father's heart ached for them and he went over the
fence one night prepared to bring all he could get. That day all the
children had milk, but it was soon gone and then came the friendly night
and the performance at the back fence was repeated.
Emboldened by success the man had come to regard it as a part of his
daily or nightly duty to milk his neighbor's cow, but alas! for the
wrong-doer there comes a day of reckoning, and it had come at last to
the freight handler. The freight agent who was called as a witness
testified as to the good character of the man previously, but he was a
thief. Put to the test it had been proven that he would steal from his
neighbor simply to keep his baby from starving, so he went to the
workhouse, his family went to the poor-house, and the strike went on.
"If you were to ask who is responsible for this strike," said the
philosophic tramp to Patsy, "which has left in its wake only waste,
want, misery, and even murder, the strikers would answer 'the company';
the company, 'the strikers'; and if Congress came in a private car to
investigate, the men on either side would hide behind one another, like
cattle in a storm, and the guilty would escape. The law intends to
punish, but the law finds it so hard to locate the real criminals in a
great soulless corporation, or in a conglomeration of organizations
whose aggregate membership reaches into the hundreds of thousands, that
the blind goddess grows weary, groping in the dark, and finally falls
asleep with the cry of starving children still ringing in her ears."
Now an officer brought engineer Dan Moran, the alleged dynamiter, into
court for a special hearing. He wore no manacles, but stood erect in the
awful presence of the judge, unfettered and unafraid.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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