Would not employers be equally unscrupulous? They would not. They could not afford the disturbance, the stoppage of the business, the risk of unfair decisions in a country where it is “popular” to favor and encourage, not the just, but the poor. The labor leaders have nothing to lose, not even their employment, for their work is labor leading. Their dupes, by the way, would not be dupes forever, for with enforced arbitration the game of “follow my leader” would pay only until there should be nothing to follow him to but empty treasuries of dead industries in an extinct civilization. If there must be compulsory arbitration it should at least not apply to that sum of all impudent rascalities, the “sympathy strike.” As to the men who have set up the claim asserted by the “sympathy strike,” I shall refer to the affair of 1904. If it was creditable in them to feel so much concern about a few hundred aliens in Illinois, how about the grievances of the whole body of their countrymen in California? When their employers, who they confessed were good to them, were plundering the public, they did not strike, sympathetically nor otherwise. Year after year the railway monopoly picked the pockets of the Californians; corrupted their courts and legislatures; laid its Briarean hands in exaction upon every industry and interest; filled the land with lies and false reasoning; threw honest men into prisons and locked the gates of them against thieves and assassins; by open defiance of the tax collector denied to children of the poor the advantages of education—did all this and more; and these honest working men stood loyally by it, sharing in wages its dishonest gains, receivers, in one sense, of stolen goods. The groans of their neighbors were nothing to them; even the wrongs of themselves, their wives and their children did not stir them to revolt. On every breeze that blew, a great chorus of cries and curses was borne past their ears unheeded. Why did they not strike then? Where then were the fiery altruists and storm-petrels of industrial disorder? The ingenious gods who have invented the Debses and Gomperses, and humorously branded them with names that would make a cat laugh, have never put it into their cold selfish hearts to order out their followers to redress a public wrong, but only to inflict one—to avenge a personal humiliation, gratify an appetite for notoriety, slake a thirst for the intoxicating cup of power, or punish the crime of prosperity.