After Patience Had Ceased To Be A Virtue

It makes a wonderful difference whose ox is gored.  Quincy, under the iniquitous reserve rule, stole Baldwin from the Unions, and also subscribed to the national agreement, a narrow-minded device designed to crush out the Unions and monopolize the base ball business.  The Unions, however, were not crushed, but after patience had ceased to be a virtue, retaliated by fighting the national agreement associations with their own disreputable weapons, especially contract breaking, whereupon there is a howl as if virtue had been supplanted by vice.  Such hypocritical canting is valueless in the light of past events, and having hot only endorsed but practiced contract-breaking under those contemptible subterfuges, the reserve rule and national agreement, it may as well swallow its own vile medicine without even making a wry face.

-St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 29, 1884