PUCK'S CARTOONS. The Railroad to Ruin.

This article from the August 1, 1877 issue of PUCK Magazine gives the magazine's opinion of that year's railway strike. PUCK comes down against the strikers, but places some of the blame on the "railway monopolists."

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PUCK'S CARTOONS

THE RAILROAD TO RUIN.

Some of the events of the last week read like a chapter in the French Revolution. The bloody struggles which have taken place in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Baltimore, Reading, and other places, are a lasting disgrace to those who took part in or were in sympathy with the outbreak. After all it was but a nine days reign of terror, and the object for which the vandalism and murder took place was not achieved. Wages are not to be increased by howling, murdering mobs in arms, who have only succeeded in violently setting class against class, although PUCK is no friend to railway monopolists, and is of opinion that to some extent they are responsible for the unsettled state of the country by their gross mismanagement of the property in their hands. On rolls the demon of destruction and death, directed by human friends, crushing in its progress scores of innocent people in a fruitless endeavor to change the course of the natural laws of supply and demand.

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We think were are justified in saying that we have got through the season when the modest and retiring railroad employe [sic] comes forward with his little memorandum of proposed changes in our social system, and delicately intimates that if this [sic] his reasonable demand is not immediately complied with, it will be quite out of his power to prevent anarchy and ruin waving their Afrite wings over the ruin of western civilization.

About this Document

  • Source: Puck Humorous Weekly
  • Publisher: Puck Publishing Co.
  • Citation: 2
  • Date: August 1, 1877