The Streetcar Superintendent Who Made a Hard Job Less Arduous

The resignation of Superintendent Clark of the Consolidated street car lines will be regretfully received by the employees. He has, since his advent, applied rules which have ameliorated the condition of the men, and there is no doubt that it was to his humane influence that a strike was averted last summer. Acting at that time in concert with the managers of other roads in this city, efforts were undoubtedly made to meet the more serious grievances of the employees.

The chief grievance of which street car men complain is found in the arbitrary and even tyrannical rules too many superintendents enforce. It will be remembered that in the great strike of Brooklyn car men it was not wages but oppressive regulations which provoked the men into resistance. One of these was that men were needlessly required to hold themselves in readiness for a call from 5 o’clock in the morning till 4 o’clock in the afternoon, day after day, without a cent of pay. Men who were on the car till 1 o’clock were arbitrarily ordered to report at 6 next morning. There was formerly very much of that sort of thing in this city, too, and not so much by fault of the management as of the foremen or bosses.

That it was needless is shown by the great change effected by Mr. Clark, and there is no question that the road is more efficiently conducted now than ever before. The men are treated with consideration, their work is assigned to them with a reasonable regard for the locations of their homes, their need of meal time and other personal necessities is recognized, and the man who is last on is permitted to report latest next day. A hard life has been made less arduous and the men respond the more willingly to the claims necessarily made upon them.

Strikes are bad things. They impose suffering and loss upon employer and employed, and involve entirely innocent interests. But so is war a bad thing; nations have recognized that sometimes the provocation is so great that only by war can rights be maintained. Workingmen are often called ignorant. Some of them are so, but so much greater is the reason that they shall be treated always with justice and never without patient allowances. Against their vitality and their necessities are pitted the calculations of sordid self-interest. Capital and labor are united in production, but too often when they go into the counting house to divide the results, capital finds means to enhance its own share and detract from that of labor.