tained must put up a sufficient bond to indemnify the party enjoined that he will be fully insured against any injury resulting by reason of his being enjoined from proceeding as he desires. Now, I am not a lawyer, and I may not be able to contend with a distinguished lawyer, and I yield most humbly and as gracefully as I know how to the superior legal knowledge of the chairman. But there are certain things that have been ground both the right way and the wrong way in my make-up, and against them no legal training can shunt me off my track.

Mr. LITTLEFIELD. There is no desire to do that, and I do not think that you have the slightest trouble in explaining yourself and expressing yourself. I just wanted to get at the legal propositionthat is, from your point of view.

Mr. GOMPERS. This is a question involving property and property rights and not personal liberty, and it is the personal-liberty feature to which I am addressing myself.

Writs of injunction, in so far as they enjoin acts forbidden by law, are superfluous, erroneous, and unnecessary, and they have no function to perform. In so far as writs forbid acts which the law does not forbid, they are erroneous, and their future issuance should be prohibited by the enactment of our bill, H. R. 4445.

I want to say a word in regard to the Constitution. I am not a believer in that sort of politics to which the phrase has become associated. "What is the Constitution among friends?" because I think that while there has been too much of that sort of thing, yet I do believe, as I tried to indicate at a former hearing, that the Constitution of our country will become enlarged or narrowed in the same ratio that the people of our country show their earnestness and willingness and determination that their rights and their welfare be protected.

But it is not difficult to imagine that the Constitution is usually interpreted and enforced as the expression of the will of those who for the time being are in power. The opponents of our bill are not only opposed to it because it would accord to us equal rights with every other citizen of the country. They know that in opposing this bill they are standing for the inequality before the law of the wageworkers when engaged in any labor dispute. They are opposed even to the organizations of labor. They are opposed to the workingmen organizing. Why, in the hearings before the committee composed of your predecessors, upon the public platform, in their business meetings, in their official journals, in their speeches everywhere and anywhere it is the same thing.

They are opposed to everything for which the labor movement and the labor organizations stand. They are opposed to the collective bargaining; they are opposed to conciliation; they are opposed to the policy of arbitration. If you will examine the arguments made by the opponents of this bill, H. R. 4445, you will find the statement made that they are opposed to these things, and ask the American workman to stand as an individual and assert his rights and stand for what he can get, as if an individual workman can secure any recognition, any redress in a modern industrial plant, when the great industries of the country are concentrated, when wonderful plants, great machinery costing immense sums of money are required to operate the plants, and the workmen have lost their individuality as soon as

they enter the plant and secure their employment, and can secure economic and social recognition only by the association of themselves with their fellows.

They say, "Yes; make your workmen in your unions better men. Make them benevolent societies." Yes; make them benevolent societies. And some of our friends would have no objection to make contributions toward them, and with every contribution made cut wages and increase the hours of labor.

Mr. LITTLEFIELD. A sort of a Standard Oil proposition?

Mr. GOMPERS. And not only that, but these railroad and other corporations and street railroads and these beneficent philanthropic employers, who introduce all this sort of things for the purpose of weaning away the workmen from the unions, with the knowledge that their isolation from their fellow-workmen who would otherwise consider the difficulties that affect them as workmen, and their interests, would fritter away their time in saying nice things of each other and patting the other employers upon the back and sounding in laudatory terms their philanthropy and good wishes to their workmen, while they, the employers, would be still cutting their wages further. They want a union of workmen to be patterned after the fashion that the Sultan of Turkey hires a man to take care of his harem.

The idea of an opponent of this bill declaring that the organizations of labor are destroying all liberty of contract between the employer and the employed! Imagine a man walking into one of the plants of the United States Steel Corporation and offering to make a contract with the company for his labor. Imagine a switchman or a maintenance-of-way man, a track man, going up to the superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and asking him to enter into a contract between himself and the company regarding his labor, wages, and conditions of employment.

It is an insult to intelligent men to ask them to seriously consider such an argument against the organizations of labor and the purposes for which they stand. Higher wages? Yes; higher wages, surely. Who are more entitled to get a larger share out of the products of labor than the workingman-a larger share than they are now getting?

We will have our unions, but not as some of our friends would have them, as I have already designated. But here let me say that a few months ago the Czar of Russia issued his famous ukase in which he, among other things, extended to the people of that country the immutable foundations of liberty based on the real inviolability of personal freedom of conscience, speech, union, and association; and not only proclaimed for Russia, but for Finland and the entire Russian domain.

We ask, Mr. Chairman, for nothing extraneous, nothing that is unjust or improper. We want no immunity from the law for any crimes or unlawful conduct of which any man in the labor movement may be guilty. I grant you that here and there some man may be gathered into the fold of a union of labor who, either from a perverted mind or for wrongs which he has suffered elsewhere or here, may do a thing which no man can defend, and which no union man will defend. But you must bear in mind that the organized working

men of America have not always the choice of material. They have not always the choice of material.

The employers of labor, and particularly those who are usually hostile to the efforts of the workingmen to improve their condition, send their agents to any part of Europe, and scour the cities and the towns and the slums of these places, and bring over these people and bring them into the factories and mills and shops and roads and quarries and mines, and then employ them. We try to keep our unions of labor as nearly, as fully, within the bounds of reason and of law and of decency as it is possible, and we are doing effective work on those lines.

But we say to you, gentlemen, that if these men are good enough to be brought over into this country to live, if they are good enough to help the employer as against the effort of the American workmen to improve their condition, if they are good enough to be employed for the profit of the unscrupulous employer, they are good enough for us to try to organize them and make better men of them. No man can truthfully charge that a man because he becomes a member of a labor organization thereby becomes a lawless citizen, that he thereby becomes a lawless man.

I could show you, Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, and demonstrate it beyond question, that the unions of our country, including the unions represented by my good friend, Brother Fuller, publish either weekly or monthly official journals-magazines-many of which will compare favorably with and far surpass in excellence of real genuine human interest and knowledge many of the pretentious and popular magazines. They contain information of the highest character, of the most intense interest to men as both workmen and mechanics to improve their mechanical ability, to devote their time and thought to the study and solution of problems affecting their work and their employment, and pages upon pages of diagrams and problems and questions and answers in the common school teachings, of reading, writing, and arithmetic, of the higher studies, of history, of economics, sociology, trade, power, science, learning, literature, poetry, art-everything. And when men undertake to address this committee and say that the organizations of labor do not do these things, they say that either which they do not know, or, knowing, say that which is positively untrue.

Incidental to this movement of labor there is occasionally a conflict. No one will excuse it; no one will attempt to palliate it; but this movement of the working people of our time is the struggle of the discontented masses of labor with the conditions as they exist, and it is their protest against it, and they will find the lawful means to bring about the improvement in their condition to-day upon the economic field, upon the political field.

We ask you gentlemen to give us an effective anti-injunction bill before this Congress adjourns. The workingmen of the United States are impatient with this long and vain pleading, asking and petitioning for substantial relief from the grievances which exist, and which they know and feel, and they are determined to have it. We have been disappointed often. The Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives has recommended the passage of the bill which I advocate-H. R. 4445. The House passed it once. The

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Senate rejected it. It has been insinuated that it is all very good; pass it in one House, and defeat it, kill it, in the other; smother it. But whether that be so or not, I repeat, the American workingmen have grown impatient, and they are not less sensible to their own rights and power then are the workingmen of other countries. On the strength of their American citizenship and their devotion to the institutions of our country they demand recognition; they demand from Congress the heeding of their too long vain requests. If we shall be disappointed in this Congress, well, there will be other Congresses, and perhaps then we may have others who are more fairly inclined to the earnest requests of the workingmen of our country. Mr. LITTLEFIELD. That closes all that the proponents of the bill have at this hearing, I believe.

Mr. FULLER. We would like to request of the committee the opportunity, if anything is said by the other side that we would like to make answer to, of replying to it. At this time we are through.

Mr. LITTLEFIELD. Before the hearings are closed we will take that into account. I have not any doubt that the committee will give you an opportunity to rebut.

Mr. PARSONS. I now introduce Mr. Mahoney, representing the National Association of Manufacturers.

STATEMENT OF T. J. MAHONEY, OF OMAHA.

Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, I shall try, as far as possible, to direct what I have to say to the precise problems that are before the committee. If the committee had plenty of time and my associates and myself had plenty of time, it might perhaps be interesting to travel off on some of the side issues and discuss matters that are purely questions of economic interest. But I realize that time is precious to all of us, and perhaps to none of us more so than the committee, and I realize that we are presenting to the committee the question of the propriety of the enactment of certain legislation. That comes up in a concrete form in the two bills that have been mentioned to-day, the one advocated in the first instance by Mr. Fuller, which seems to be repudiated by the American Federation of Labor, which has been, I suppose, authoritatively spoken for by its president, Mr. Gompers, representing all that large body of organized labor affiliated with the American Federation.

I hope to invite your attention to certain practical, rather than moral, theoretical, considerations. You are asked to pass certain legislation, which will have certain restrictive provisions upon the power of the Federal courts in the exercise of their chancery jurisdiction. The first inquiry is, naturally, What is the occasion that gives rise to the demand for this legislation? Now, an occasion of that character might be found in either of two ways: First, that the law of the land as it exists to-day is oppressive, or, second, that the administration of the chancery jurisdiction by the courts has been oppressive, not by virtue of lawful sanction, but by virtue of an abuse of power. Can an affirmative answer be given to either of these inquiries? First, is the law of the land as it now exists oppressive; is it unjust? Second, has there been such an abuse of power by the courts as to nake a restriction of their power appear reasonably necessary in the interests of justice?

Of the law as it is at the present time we are advised only in small part by the statutes enacted by Congress. It has been suggested that you can not find any statutory authority for the issuance of the injunctions against which these complaints are made. That may be true, outside of what is found in the Sherman antitrust act. But is it not also true that the great body of the law, both common law and equity law, is to be found outside the lids of the Revised Statutes? You can not find in the statute books of the United States, with the exception of those that relate to certain safety appliances used on railroads carrying interstate commerce, any statutory authority for the proposition that a master ordinarily is under the lawful obligation to exercise due care and to furnish his servants ordinarily safe appliances with which to work and a fit place in which to work. So that it is no argument against the exercise of this chancery power and authority that it is not bottomed on statute or statutory provision. The inquiry as to what the law is, in the main, must be answered by a resort to the decisions of the courts. We there find what the courts have said are enjoinable acts and enjoinable combinations, and what they have said are not. It would be impracticable to stand here by the hour and read these authorities to a committee of eminent lawyers. I only refer to them just as I would in the use of authorities before a court made up of a bench of eminent jurists-to remind the tribunal what the law is, and to aid myself in the orderly presentation of my argument.

You will probably find in the disposition of the cases of Arthur v. Hayes, and the Debs case, and the case of the Duluth, Ann Arbor and North Michigan Railroad Company v. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company et al., in those three cases you will find a complete statement of the line of demarcation between those things that the Federal courts hold may and ought to be enjoined and those things which those courts hold are not subject to the writs of injunction.

Mr. LITTLEFIELD. Who drew the opinion in the Arthur case?

Mr. MAHONEY. In the case of Arthur v. Oates the opinion of the circuit court, the reviewing court, was by Mr. Justice Harlan of the Supreme Court, who was at that time assigned to that circuit.

Mr. LITTLEFIELD. That is, he drew that opinion as sitting in the circuit court?

Mr. MAHONEY. Yes, sir.

Mr. LITTLEFIELD. And not as sitting in the Supreme Court of the United States?

Mr. MAHONEY. It was not an opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States. It was a review of the order of his honor Judge Jenkins, in granting the temporary injunction, sitting upon the circuit bench of Wisconsin. Now, in that case take the order that was made in the nisi prius court and the order that was made in pursuance of the decision of Mr. Justice Harlan and you have the line of demarcation pretty well defined there.

The property in question in that particular instance was in the hands of receivers appointed by the United States circuit court, and there can be no reasonable doubt that that circumstance was an important, if not the controlling, factor which impelled the circuit judge to make the writ as sweeping as he made it, the theory being that as the court had taken possession of the property it had a right to exercise a certain species of control which it would not have exer