Democratic Sentinel, Volume 1, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 September 1877 — A Standing Army to Awe Labor. [ARTICLE]

A Standing Army to Awe Labor.

The time has come in the United States when the proposition to raise and equip a standing army for the pose of suppressing strikes is advocated by a large fraction of the journals in the country, from the New York Nation down; finds favor and even indorsement with the administration in power, and nowhere seems to create a shock. At the same moment England is boasting of the final and peaceful termination of the long-lived difficulties between labor and capital. The London Standard, commenting on the topics suggested by the death of John Frost, the celebrated Chartist, takes occasion to say: “It may, we think, be fairly taken for granted that the whole cycle of questions connected with what used to be called the ‘Rights of Labor,’ in which the Chartism of forty years ago had its origin, are now practically settled, and that the relations between employers and employed, between labor and capital, will never again become the source of any widespread disaffection in this country.” This country has been widely advertised as a home for the laboring man; as a land of refuge for the oppressed; as a country offering homes and plenty to the industry that would seek them, come from what shore they might. The workingmen of Great Britain have been taught, when longing for food and comfort and blessings, to look toward the setting sun; and, in this country, and in this year of our Lord, it is proposed, perhaps, for the first time in history, to raise a standing army to suppress strikes. England is a martial nation, her music the note of the bugle; but England, whence labor flees, never raised or kept a standing army to quench the wrath of long-suffering workingmen. What country ever did ? Among the results of the late strike we have seen burning cities; the bodies of the slain; a Communistic platform adopted by a great party in this great State; millions of property in asides; starvation made more and bitterer; but it is doubtful if any of the melancholy consequences of the recent disturbances is so much to be regretted as the fact that it is deliberately and widely proposed, and even by the executive branch of the Government itself, to raise a standing army, or to double the existing one, for the single object of crushing hungry and angry workingmen. The sad spectacle is presented in this broad, free land, longing for labor, of a Government with one hand driving laboring men to desperation, with the other bayoneting back their acts of despair; of a Congress enacting laws whose results it must raise a standing army to smother; of a great and peaceful republic whose legislation necessarily leads to insurrection and anarchy unless supported by arms 1 How long will our Congress continue to enact starvation and send it forth in statutes only to be compelled to raise an army to batter down the of the hunger and want it hire enacted ? But this is the comment Congress is asked to make tipon its own policy.— New York Herald.