The State Herald Editorial July 19, 1889

Worse and Worse.

As additional facts reach the public from Johnstown the responsibility of the occurrence is more directly traceable to certain individuals and organized bodies. The mayor of Johnstown is one of the men who should at once be brought before a grand jury, and indicted for culpable complicity in manslaughter. The members of the lake club who threatened to discharge an employe if he did not cease to warn them that the dam was liable at any moment to give away, ought to be arrested as criminals and tried as such, and if convicted, as they should be, should be sent to prison for life, or hanged, according to the nature of their complicity and responsibility.

One of the monstrous features of the dam was that it was not a granite wall laid on rock, but a mass of earth heaped up, with some rough stones heaped up against its sides. Here for years has death been piled up, and liable at any moment to be launched on the thousands of unsuspicious residents below. There was a time when sluice-gates could be opened and extra pressure against the dam be relieved; but this permitted the Ash to escape, and the Pittsburg sportsmen allowed the gates to become worthless from disuse. To preserve game for some Pittsburg swells, the lives of fifteen thousand people were sacrificed.

These wealthy sportsmen, these pleasure-seekers, sat in a secure place, in the amphitheatre, like the noble Roman spectators when they gave the signal when the wild beasts were to be admitted into the arena to rend the bodies of the human victims. The Pittsburg pagans did not give the signal, but they were told that the massacre was about to occur and made no effort to stop it.

Somehow it seems as if the Quaker state is marked in the perpetration of certain oppressions in which the poorer elements are the sufferers. For years the details of coal mining in that state have contained tales of horror but little less revolting and distressing than the calamity which has just eventuated at Johnstown. Every year the world learns that thousands of miners are thrown out of employment to suffer and starve while the mine-owners manipulate the supply so as to regulate the market. The blackest, wickedest, cruelest aggregation of wretchedness, oppression and tyranny in all the continent is to be found in the anthracite coal mines of Pennsylvania.

Constructively, the action of the owners of the Conemaugh lake is as brutal, as murderous, as the atrocious exactions of the coal tyrants, and equally deserving of punishment. It is an inconsistent record for a state which claims the highest order of refinement and civilization, and which takes its name from a Quaker whose chief characteristics were fraternal love and universal peace.-Chicago Herald.