People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 January 1895 — DECISIONS ARE LAW. [ARTICLE]

DECISIONS ARE LAW.

BUT MIGHTY POOR LAW AND WORSE JUSTICE. Whole Fault Was It That at the Same Time the A. K. C. Went Oat on a Strike Some Other Follows Had a Grievance of Their Own to Settle?

In speaking of the sentence of Debs, ' Attorney Darrow said: “The dicision is bad law, but the ' sentence is remarkably lenient. ” Unjust, but lenient. A remarkable combination of right j and wrong. Robbing a man of his liberty, then consoling him with the thought that ; he might have been treated much I worse. After atl, it is “remarkable leniency” ; on the part of a plutocratic judge, when he had a chance at such a power- j erful leader of labor as Debs, not to have sentenced him to prison for life. Might just as well have sentenced ; him twenty years as six months for ■ nothing. This thing of decisions of judges taking the place of law is worse than j “bad law.” Bad law is bad enough, j but bad decisions without any law at all to support them are worse than j anarchy. These things breed revolution. Since the Judge reasoned back to ! Debs as the cause of the riots, why not ; reason a little further back to Grover Cleveland and George M. Pullman. ! They were causes prior to Debs, and I and should have suffered the penalty, j Or perhaps the thirty years republic I can rule is responsible, since it built ! up Pullman and the railway corporations and forced the laborers to either j work at starvation wages, or be shot j down for a “change.” Either the republican party or the j change ought to be sentenced to : prison. Or perhaps the judge who issued the j injunction, interfering with the legal j rights of Mr. Debs ought to be im- j prisoned. Or perhaps the Railway Managers association that decided to support Pullman before the railway strike was ordered, was the original cause of the trouble. And perhaps the booby soldiers who blew up a cannon Vhile trundling it ; about the streets, killing innocent | women and children, were the cause j of some rioting. Or perhaps the fool people of the I United Statos who submit to such out- | rages all ought to be imprisoned. Or perhaps the producers of the country are guilty of overproduction, forcing the capitalists to increase their faeilties for gobbling to such an extent that they produce riots. Or perhaps it was Columbus who discovered America thus opened the field for the creation of this free American spirit j that opposes plutocracy. Or perhaps i it was a mistake that the world was j created at all, since the fact that it exists has made room for anarchists. Or perhaps the A. R. U. ought to have waited until the coming of the millenium before it struck, so that nobody else would have had a grievance to settle at the same time. i'liey should have waited until all the other unemployed people of Chicago starved to death, so that they could not have taken advantage of the disturbance to wreak their vengeance upon the greedy corporations that rob them of a chance to ea n a living. “Contempt of court.” How can we have anything else but contempt for such a contemptible court?