"
However, "we mean no conflict with legitimate enterprise, no antagonism
to necessary capital." The remedy consists first in work of education:
"We mean to create a healthy public opinion on the subject of labor (the
only creator of values or capital) and the justice of its receiving a
full, just share of the values or capital it has created." The next
remedy was legislation: "We shall, with all our strength, support laws
made to harmonize the interests of labor and capital, for labor alone
gives life and value to capital, and also those laws which tend to
lighten the exhaustiveness of toil." Next in order were mutual benefits.
"We shall use every lawful and honorable means to procure and retain
employ for one another, coupled with a just and fair remuneration, and,
should accident or misfortune befall one of our number, render such aid
as lies within our power to give, without inquiring his country or his
creed."
For nine years the Order remained a secret organization and showed but a
slow growth. In 1878 it was forced to abolish secrecy. The public mind
was rendered uneasy by the revolutionary uprising of workingmen of Paris
who set up the famous "Commune of Paris" of 1871, by the destructive
great railway strikes in this country in 1877 and, lastly, by a wave of
criminal disorders in the anthracite coal mining region in Eastern
Pennsylvania,[13] and became only too prone to attribute revolutionary
and criminal intents to any labor organization that cloaked itself in
secrecy.
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