New York, March 28—At this writing the word is reassuring about the postal strike, so it is time for the post mortems. They will appear (as in this column), but just as surely, they will be forgotten. It is hard to remember when last the nation mobilized itself in order to prevent the recurrence of a commonly acknowledged outrage.
The point of the matter is that a society cannot function which extends to its civil servants the right to immobilize that society. It is as plain as that. The right of a citizen of the United States to communicate with another citizen, whether his mother, his boss or his supplier, is about as close to an absolute right as exists. The postal workers never struck before, no doubt in tacit recognition of the sacredness of their responsibility. But defiance is in season, and it can hardly be expected that they should exercise the restraint that others have not recognized. It is no more against the law for the postman to strike than for the teacher in New York City, who struck and got away with it. It is, I suppose, especially ironic that it was the teachers’ union in New York that conducted the last, most spectacular strike in the country. After a couple of months of which the teachers returned to their classrooms to pursue the teaching of civic virtue.
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