The railway managers based their decision to reject my counsel in this
matter upon their conviction that they must at any cost to themselves or
to the country stand firm for the principle of arbitration which the men
had rejected. I based my counsel upon the indisputable fact that there
was no means of obtaining arbitration. The law supplied none; earnest
efforts at mediation had failed to influence the men in the least. To
stand firm for the principle of arbitration and yet not get arbitration
seemed to me futile, and something more than futile, because it involved
incalculable distress to the country and consequences in some respects
worse than those of war, and that in the midst of peace.
I yield to no man in firm adherence, alike of conviction and of purpose,
to the principle of arbitration in industrial disputes; but matters have
come to a sudden crisis in this particular dispute and the country had
been caught unprovided with any practicable means of enforcing that
conviction in practice (by whose fault we will not now stop to inquire).
A situation had to be met whose elements and fixed conditions were
indisputable.
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