Messages from the Governors (Volume 7); Comprising Executive Communications to the Legislature and Other Papers Relating to Legislation from Organizat (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1909 Excerpt: ... to business and to labor, would be anything approaching a return to the unsound and vicious condition of things which has so long prevailed, and from which we are now slowly emerging. It can have no possible result but another downfall and a more wide-spread ruin. If, in the meantime, any legislation is found necessary and practicable for the protection of the laboring classes against frauds and wrongs on the part of the individuals or corporations by whom they are employed, it should be promptly undertaken with a proper sense of the importance of the great interests involved. Riots Of July. Times of distress like those above referred to, never failed to open a wide field to a class of agitators and demagogues, who, whilst declining to work themselves, make it their business to go amongst honest men who would labor if they could find work, and endeavor to stir up strife and discord. During the last summer these agitators, reinforced from every large city in Europe, were unusually active and malignant. Spreading themselves all over the country, they endeavored to create discontent among all those who had employment and to stir up the evil passions of those who had not. Combinations were formed for strikes on all the principal railway lines and in all the large mining and manufacturing establishments. These efforts culminated in wild scenes of riot and bloodshed in several States. Like scenes were threatened in this State on the first of July and broke out in acts of open violence on the 21st of that month. The trains upon the Erie and New York Central railways were forcibly stopped, the depots, freight houses and rolling stock taken possession of by violence and threatened with destruction by fire; honest and innocent laborers and employes who refused to aba...