ng brought to a dead standstill
throughout the region of disaster at the very time when hearts are
breaking for daily news, and communication is of the utmost importance
to alleviate the quarantine.

11. _Employees will be benefited_ by passing from a regime of oppression
to one of elevation; from low wages[6] and long hours to high wages and
short hours; from a service almost hopeless of promotion to a service of
almost limitless possibilities to the man of character, brain, and
energy; from an employment in which they are regarded as so much
machinery to be obtained at the lowest market rates and worked for all
the profit there is in them to an employment in which their comfort and
advancement are among the main objects of solicitude with the
management; from a business in which they have no share to a business in
which they are equal partners with all their fellow-citizens; from
serfdom to liberty and manhood. No more boycotting and black-listing, no
more denial of the rights of organization and petition.

[6] In the last Congressional investigation, dated May 26,
1896, the great telegraph inventor P. B. Delayner testified
that the pay of American operators had fallen forty per cent
in the last twenty years; and he said that, "while the British
operator has had two increases of pay since 1891, his American
brother has had four reductions, and to-day the British
operator is better paid for the same amount of work, and by
his environment occupies a higher plane of comfort and
contentment, than the American operator. Good behavior and
diligence in his duties warrant him a life position, from
which the whim and caprice of no one can drive him. He is not
an itinerant wandering from place to place looking for work
and hired for a day or a week, to be again sent adrift, nor is
he permitted to work overtime to the detriment of his health
and the exclusion of another wage-earner from his share. His
increasing years of service are taken into account in various
beneficial ways. He has his yearly vacation. He is not cut off
in sickness, and, most important of all, he is not 'turned
down' in old age, but is retired on a pension, proportioned to
his years of service" (Sen. Doc. 291, 54-1, pp. 4, 6).

Some of the consequences will be the