The employees of the North Side Cable Car Company made a resolution yesterday which, although humanitarian, is at the same time laughably impractical or even asinine.

On account of moral reasons a resolution was adopted which obliged the employees to notify Mr. Yerkes three days ahead of the outbreak of any strike of course not for the purpose of giving him time to hire necessary scabs, but because a committee of strikers promised Mr. Yerkes to do so.

Besides this, a deciding factor in that resolution was the possibility that the public would suffer if not informed of an intended strike beforehand. This all is very humanitarian but also very crazy. First of all, it does not appear reasonable to have any kind of regard towards a man like Yerkes.

This cold blooded, mercenary, self-seeking egoist has always treated his employees so infamously that it would be entirely in order for the workers to repay him in his own coin. Instead of doing so they are induced to inform him three days before the outbreak of any strike, so that he can have time to send his agents to Pittsburgh, Kansas City and Philadelphia to hire the necessary scabs.

One could object that the committee promised a three days notice to Yerkes or, as another side states, even entered a contract to do so.

But did not Yerkes have long enough notice? Did he not know for 14 days that his employees demanded decent wages and bearable working hours and that they were mutually determined to enforce eventually the granting of their demands? Could there be any question of a moral obligation for allowing a continued grace of time?

Such soft-headedness is not understandable to us - in such a case "morale" becomes immoral.

It is further said the public must be given time to get prepared for the strike. This too looks very nice and laudable, but again damn impractical. The more the public is able to get prepared for a strike the less it will be felt and the longer Yerkes can stand it.

The strikers might have been able to acquire the sympathies of the public by their noble appearance, which might not have been possible otherwise, but we believe that the strikers expect too much of those sympathies. What good does it do when the people declare that the strikers are right and at the 3same time ride in cars conducted by scabs?

Or do the strikers believe that the public is going to boycott Yerkes' cable cars because they are operated by scabs? Crazy hallucination! The dear public is absolutely uninterested, with a few exceptions, in whom it is riding with, as long as it is correctly delivered there and then for its nickel.

If the strikers intend to rely upon the sympathies of the public, then they are as lost as they possibly can be. That lesson could have been learned from the brewery helpers' strike where even members of labor unions preferred scab beer to union beer and left their long frequented places because they substituted their usual beverage with union beer.

It seems, therefore, to us, less calculation that appears in the resolution of the cable car employees than that damned good nature which traps the working class all the time only too easily. All it needs is a silver tongued orator who will speak of humanity, decency, good example, morale and other high sounding abstractions, and almost at once the workers, themselves treated without humanity, without decency, without morale, feel a human 4reaction and decide to humbly kiss the hand that has just struck them.

War demands the abolition of all unjustified sentiment; to handle the enemy with velvet gloves while he is strangling us is laughable, is criminal. This damned good nature has no room any more in this world.