[The New York Herald noted that the owners claimed the order amounted to] a confiscation of property…
[Sprinkler systems are a] cumbersome and costly apparatus.
Labor commissions, factory commissions and investigations, commissions on every subject in the Business Directory, have chilled capital; and when capital catches cold, labor freezes to death….Is the main cause of the lack of work hard to seek? Is it not that business has had too much interference from the state…too many everlasting commissions first prying into every man's affairs, and then telling him how to run them?
The business men of this country who have made and saved money should no longer be supervised, criticized, or controlled by men who have neither made nor saved it.
To my mind this is all wrong….The experience of the past proves conclusively that the best government is the least possible government, that the unfettered initiative of the individual is the force that makes a country great and that this initiative should never be bound...
Notwithstanding all the talk of a probable exodus of manufacturing interests the commission has not found a single case of a manufacturer intending to leave the State because of the enforcement of the factory laws.
I do not believe in legislation so radical that it means an attack on the valuation of real estate or driving out of our state manufacturing concerns or other large business enterprises.
We are of the opinion that if the present recommendations are insisted upon…factories will be driven from the city, labor will be compelled to accompany them, factories, tenements, and small houses will become tenantless with the final result of demoralization in tax collections by the city. What is wanted is evolution and not revolution.
You must relieve [New York's] real estate from the terrible yolk of oppression which has been throttling it for some years past…
That same threat was made when the child labor law was passed and not one of the manufacturers moved out.
