We confess we did not believe the story that some
of the strikers at Messrs. Carttegie's Homestead Mills had endeavoured to poison the non-Unionists. The devotees, we thought, of the new gospel of Labour are capable of violence even to the shedding of blood, but they are not capable of so dastardly a crime as poisoning the food of their " brothers " merely because, rather than be hungry, they accept lower wages. The evidence, however, accumulates. Patrick Gal- lagher, the cook who originally revealed the plot, and his assistant, Davidson, have been arrested, and the Coroner has ordered the bodies of all who have recently died at the mills to be exhumed and examined. Mr. Christie, an official of the Carnegie Company, affirms that the practice was carried on on a great scale, that thirty- two men have died, and that two thousand more have sickened, some of whom will give evidence at the inquest. The poison employed is supposed to have been arsenic ; but there is a suspicion in some cases of the use of croton-oil, which the poisoners probably fancied would produce illness and excessive weakness, but not death. Another case of the same practice has been discovered in West Virginia. We do not know that poison is worse morally than dynamite ; but its use always suggests a meaner and more devilish kind of hate. Clearly the Unionists and Free Labourers hate one another more than nations at war do, for the latter always avoid the use of poison. And yet we are told that in the industrial millennium which is coming, war will be extinct, and all man- kind will love one another !
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