CABLE NEWS. BRITISH AND FOREIGN.

Feilding Star, Volume I, Issue 287, 10 June 1907, Page 4

CABLE NEWS. BRITISH AND FOREIGN.

I (bt wacrrzuo tbleob/fh — coptbjght ] [PER PBESS ASSOCIATION.] WHOLESALE LABOR MURDERS. New York, June 8. Orchard's confessions arising out of the Stuenenberg trial extend to 18 murders In 1905 Charles H. Moyer, president of the Western Federation of Miners, William D. Haywood, secretary, and George A. Pettibone, an ex-member of the Executive Board, were arrested at Denver as accessories to the dynamiting and murdering of Mr Frank Steunenberg. ex-Governor of Idaho. It is alleged that revenge for former prosecution prompted the murder. Shortly afterwards a man named Harry Orchard was arrested in connection with the murder. He declared that he received from Moyer and another official of the federation £760 fo rthe murder of Steunenberg. After much delay the accused persons were put on trial last month at Boise City, Ihaho. Widespread interest was taken in the proceedings, and the oity was filled with troops. Harry Orchard confessed that he was promised three thousand dollars to kill Governor Steunenberg. He tied a bomb to Steunenberg's gate, and it exploded, with fatal results. He had planned twenty-six murders for the inner circle of the Western Federation of Miners. Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate for the Presidency at the last election, has thrown all his strength into a fight for the release of the accused. Debs, in one of his many newspaper articles, asserts: — "Never before has the whole mass of organised labour in the United States been so spontaneously, so completely, and so resolutely set in motion aB it has been by the disclosure made by the Labor press of the iniquitous conspiracy, under the < cloak of law, _to crush out the spirit of organisation and destroy its usefulness by fastening the odious crime of assassination upon its official representatives and trusted leaders. Whatever other differences may divide the organised workers of America, upon this vital point they are all agreed, that the secret arrest and deportation of Charles Moyer, William Haywood, ' and George Pettibone is not only an infamous outrage upon law-abiding American citizens, bnt that the sole cause for the brutal persecution of I these men is their official connection with a labor union, whose rigid integrity, steadfast devotion and increasing activity to better the moral and material condition of its members baffled all attempts of the master class to encompass its disruption and i destruction." j The whole thing is being sensationalised in the American way. One of the incidents is the publication of the \ 1 photo of winsome Henrietta Hay- j > wood, daughter of one of the accused, i with a large headline, "Will Papa , Die?" followed by a set of verses to , be sung to the tune of "Hold the J . Fort." Newspapers, dwelling on j the delay in prosecution, levelled all sorts of charges against mineowners and capitalists; and it was planned that, when the trial should begin, a mighy army of workers should march through the streets of Greater New York thundering in the ears of John D. Rockfeller : "If Moyer, Haywood, and Pettibone die, twenty million working people will know the reason why." Pages, relieved by coloured headlines, are devoted to a history of the case. Well-known Socialist advocates appeal to thoir comrades, and denounce the accusers of the alleged murderers. In this war of socialist and unscrupulous capitalist, President Roosevelt would appear to stand between. In connection with the quarrel between the President and Mr Harriman, correspondence has been published, and in one letter the President quotes Mr Sherman as saying that Mr Harriman had said he "could buy legislation from the State Legislatures, opuld buy Congress, and, if necessary, the judiciary. On which utterance President Roosevelt comments that "it shows a cynicism and, deep-seated corruption which make the man uttering such sentiments and boasting, nd matter how falsely, of his power to perfarm such crimes, at least aa undesirable a citizen as a Debts, a Moyer, or a Haywood. It is because we have capitalists capable of uttering such sentiments and capable of acting up to them that tbere is strength behind sinister agitators of the Hearst type. Wealthy corruptionists and demagogues who excite in the press or on the stump, in office or out of oflice, class against class, and who appeal to the basest passion of the human soul, are fundamentally alike and equally enemies of the Republic."