We do not admit, until we have further examined the question, that the law is as laid down by the Judge; but if it be, the sooner such a tyrannical and wicked law is abrogated the better. His doctrine has, it is true, a decision of the Supreme Court in its favor; but the reasoning by which he attempts to show the propriety of that decision is of the weakest possible texture. The idea that arrangements and combinations for certain rates of wages are injurious to trade and commerce, is as absurd as the idea that the current prices of the markets, which are always the result of understandings and combinations, are injurious.
The next day the tailors were heavily fined. The _Evening Post_, declaring this monstrous, showed its wicked absurdity in a series of clear expositions. It had been made criminal for the working classes to settle among themselves the price of their own property! According to Judge Edwards, the owners of the packets, who had agreed upon $140 as the standard fare to Liverpool, were criminals; so were the editors, who had agreed upon $10 for a yearly subscription; so were the butchers and bakers. The very price current was evidence of conspiracy. Bryant recalled the fact that in England the Tories themselves had expunged the laws against labor unions from the statute books twelve years before. “Can anything be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of generosity and justice, than the law which arms the rich with the legal right to fix, by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is not slavery, we have forgotten its definition. Strike the right of associating for the sale of labor from the privileges of a freeman, and you may as well bind him to a master, or ascribe him to the soil.”
Other newspapers, of which the _Journal of Commerce_ and the _American_ were the most prominent, took the side of Judge Edwards. For a time the excitement was intense. A mass-meeting of mechanics, which the _Evening Post_ declared the largest ever seen in the city, was held in City Hall Park on the evening of June 13; and Bryant continued his editorials at intervals for a month.
THE RISE OF THE SLAVERY QUESTION; THE MEXICAN WAR
Bryant’s real editorial career dates from 1836, for all that had preceded was mere preparation. He quickly mastered his first discouragement, and throwing aside the idea of becoming an Illinois farmer or lawyer, devoted himself to the _Evening Post_ as the work, poetry apart, of his life. We catch a new and determined note in his letters by 1837, when he was laboring like a born journalist at his desk from seven to four daily, and, says his assistant, was so impatient of interruption that he often seemed irascible. He was so fully occupied, he wrote Dana in February, “that if there is anything of the Pegasus in me, I am too much exhausted to use my wings.” In an unpublished note to his wife, who had returned in the fall of 1836, he declared: “I have enough to do, both with the business part of the paper and the management of it as editor, to keep me constantly busy. I must see that the _Evening Post_ does not suffer by these hard times, and I must take that part in the great controversies now going on which is expected of it.”