COMMENT

The American Federation of Labor will claim credit with the conservative citizen for refusing to "endorse" Russian Bolshevism, but it adopts Sovietism in principle when it pledges its moral support to the striking Boston policemen, puts upon Commissioner Curtis the responsibility for the crimes which that strike precipitated, and in remarkably vapid words declares that the righteous public rebuke of the strike "is but one more sacrifice in the human struggle against autocracy, injustice and wrong, out of which had grown a better and a brighter day for their successors and fellow-workers." Whether or not the Federation "endorses" Lenine and Trotzky and their robberies and plunder and the lasting ruin which they have visited upon Russia makes little difference, after such an exhibition of anti-social sympathy and influence as the adoption of the Boston police strike report. The police strike was a desertion of duty, no more and no less, and the responsibility for the disorder and destruction in which it instantly resulted has long since been placed, by the practically unanimous approval of the people of Boston, on the heads of the striking policemen. Such of these men as were weakly misled, and who have suffered as the result of their separation from their only apparent means of earning a living, may receive individual human sympathy. The authors and engineers of the strike are deserving of nothing but the infamy which the Boston public has definitely and forever visited upon them.

Mr. Gompers had a great opportunity to prove the sincerity of his patriotism and the reality of his claim to public spirit when the strike came up, by repudiating and denouncing it. He failed in the test; he attempted to put the blame on a governor and a police commissioner who had acted promptly to save the public service from guardians who refused to guard. Mr. Gompers had his chance and lost it. His Federation of Labor, of which he has shown himself to be the dictator at Montreal, has indorsed this dangerous and detrimental judgment. It has by this choice deprived itself of the credit which it might gain by its present repudiation of Sovietism. --Boston Transcript.