f the Military Misunderstood--
Orders of the President in Regard to the Pacific Railways.

In 1894 the vast development of railroad communication between the
Mississippi valley and the Pacific Ocean, and the similar building
of new cities and founding of industrial enterprises in the region
between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific, both in anticipation
of the future development of the country rather then in response
to any demand then existing, having been substantially completed,
or suspended for an indefinite time, a large amount of capital so
invested was found for the time unproductive, and a great number
of laborers were left in the Pacific States without any possible
employment. The great majority of these laborers were, as usual,
without any accumulated means to pay their transportation to any
other part of the country, and hence were left to drift as they
might toward the East, subsisting by whatever means they could find
during their long tramp of many hundreds of miles. Similar and
other causes had produced at the same time industrial depression
throughout the country, so that the unfortunate laborers drifting
eastward were only an additional burden upon communities already
overloaded with unemployed labor. Thus the borrowing of foreign
capital to put into unprofitable investments, and the employment
of great numbers of laborers in making premature developments, met
with the consequences which are sure to follow disregard of natural
laws. The management of the Pacific railroads did not appear to
appreciate the wisdom of mitigating, so far as was in their power,
the evil which had resulted from their own policy, by giving free
transportation to the laborers who had been stranded on the Pacific
coast. Hence all the transcontinental roads were soon blocked by
lawless seizures of trains, and suffered losses far greater than
they saved in transportation. Indeed, the requisite transportation
of destitute laborers eastward would have cost the roads practically
nothing, while their losses resulting from not providing it were
very great. Every possible effort was made for a long time to deal
effectively with this evil by the ordinary course of judicial
proceedings; but such methods proved entirely inadequate. The
government was finally compelled, in consequence of the almost
total interruption of interstate commerce and of the transportation
of the United States mails and troops, to assume military control