Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 312, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 December 1919 — PERTINENT POINTS IN PALMER’S SURRENDER. [ARTICLE]

PERTINENT POINTS IN PALMER’S SURRENDER.

Here are a few plain and fundamentally important facts in connection with the coal controversy, strike and settlement: r ' 1. The coal miners repudiated valid wage agreements, many of which would not expire until April, 1920, and demanded a 60 per cent increase in wages, with other concessions. 2. The operators refused. to grant the demands, but offered to arbitrate. 3. The miners refused to arbitrate and ordered a strike. 4. President Wilson denounced the strike as unjustifiable and unlawful, and called upon the miners to return to work. 5. Attorney General Palmer brought an injunction suit upon the allegation that the strike was unlawful, and secured a mandatory writ ordering cancellation of the strike order. 6. The strike ordeF was cancelled, but the miners did not return to work —which return was -the chief purpose of the suit. 7. While the miners were thus engaged in what the president and the attorney general declared to be an illegal act, the attorney general negotiated with them concerning compliance with the law made terms satisfactory to them by which their return to work was secured. 8. These terms included a concession of a material part of the .strikers’ demands, the appointment of a tribunal satisfactory to them to lletermine what additional concessions should be made, and conveyed an implied forgiveness of the illegal acts already committed. 9. Although the operators had offered to arbitrate all the demands, as 'made at the time of the threatened strike, the attorney general granted part of the demands and then insisted that the operators had agreed to arbitrate the remainder, which they had never offered to do.

„ 10. If the agreement of the attorney general shall stand, the miners gain at least the concessions already made, and may gain much more through the arbitration, forced upon the operators, thus demonstrating that unjustifiable and unlawful acts are profitable—in other words, that dishonesty is the best policy. 11. If the attorney general’s agreement shall stand, the department of justice thereby establishes the policy of negotiating terms with criminals—for the attorney general declared the strike criminal, 'but said he preferred to prosecute the case in the civil courts. 12. Success of the unjustifiable and unlawful acts of the striking miners will be due notice to all class interest that the way to win is to repudiate agreements and imperil the public welfare, thereby forcing the government, through its duly authorized, agencies, to yield at least* k part of the demands and make agreements that may give to the law-breakers all that they ever expected or hoped to secure.