and compromise.... To me the situation which
this problem presents is, beyond comparison, the most serious and
the most far-reaching which the modern democracies have to face."
Dr. Butler concludes that this question "will wreck every
democratic government in the world unless it is faced sturdily and
bravely now, and settled on righteous lines." (My italics.)[272]

Our Ex-President, however, has ceased apparently to "wabble." In Mr.
Roosevelt's medium, the _Outlook_, an editorial on the strike of the
municipal street cleaners of New York City reads in part as follows:--

_Men who are employed by the public cannot strike. They can, and
sometimes they do, mutiny. When they should be treated not as
strikers but as mutineers._

This issue was presented by the refusal of the men to do what they
were ordered to do. _When soldiers do that in warfare they are
given short shrift._ Of course, in combating accumulating dirt and
its potent ally, disease, an army of street cleaners is not face to
face with any such acute public dangers as those confronting a
military force; and therefore insubordination among street cleaners
does not call for any such severity as that which is absolutely
necessary in war times; _but the principle in the one case is the
same as that in the other--those who disrupt the forces of public
defense range themselves on the side of the public enemy_. They are
not in any respect on the same basis as the employees of a private
employer. _They are wage earners only in the sense that soldiers
are wage earners._[273]

When Senator La Follette indorsed the right of railway mail clerks to
organize, President Taft said (May 14, 1911):--

"This presents a very serious question, and one which, if decided
in favor of the right of government employees to strike and use the
boycott, will be full of danger to the government and to the
republic.

"The government employees of France resorted to it and took the
government by the throat. The executive was entirely dependent upon
these employees for its continuance.

"When those in executive authority refused to acquiesce in the
demands, the government employees struck, and then with the
helplessness of the government and the destruction of all authority
and the choking of government activities it was se