“This is sedition!” one man in the group was crying.  Another called it revolt and revolution, and another called it anarchy.

“I can’t see it,” Bertie said.  “I have been out in the streets all morning.  Perfect order reigns.  I never saw a more law-abiding populace.  There’s no use calling it names.  It’s not any of those things.  It’s just what it claims to be, a general strike, and it’s your turn to play, gentlemen.”

“And we’ll play all right!” cried Garfield, one of the traction millionaires.  “We’ll show this dirt where its place is—­the beasts!  Wait till the Government takes a hand.”

“But where is the Government?” Bertie interposed.  “It might as well be at the bottom of the sea so far as you’re concerned.  You don’t know what’s happening at Washington.  You don’t know whether you’ve got a Government or not.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” Garfield blurted out.

“I assure you I’m not worrying,” Bertie smiled languidly.  “But it seems to me it’s what you fellows are doing.  Look in the glass, Garfield.”

Garfield did not look, but had he looked he would have seen a very excited gentleman with rumpled, iron-grey hair, a flushed face, mouth sullen and vindictive, and eyes wildly gleaming.

“It’s not right, I tell you,” little Hanover said; and from his tone I was sure that he had already said it a number of times.

“Now that’s going too far, Hanover,” Bertie replied.  “You fellows make me tired.  You’re all open-shop men.  You’ve eroded my eardrums with your endless gabble for the open shop and the right of a man to work.  You’ve harangued along those lines for years.  Labour is doing nothing wrong in going out on this general strike.  It is violating no law of God nor man.  Don’t you talk, Hanover.  You’ve been ringing the changes too long on the God-given right to work . . . or not to work; you can’t escape the corollary.  It’s a dirty little sordid scrap, that’s all the whole thing is.  You’ve got labour down and gouged it, and now labour’s got you down and is gouging you, that’s all, and you’re squealing.”

Every man in the group broke out in indignant denials that labour had ever been gouged.

“No, sir!” Garfield was shouting.  “We’ve done the best for labour.  Instead of gouging it, we’ve given it a chance to live.  We’ve made work for it.  Where would labour be if it hadn’t been for us?”

“A whole lot better off,” Bertie sneered.  “You’ve got labour down and gouged it every time you got a chance, and you went out of your way to make chances.”

“No!  No!” were the cries.

“There was the teamsters’ strike, right here in San Francisco,” Bertie went on imperturbably.  “The Employers’ Association precipitated that strike.  You know that.  And you know I know it, too, for I’ve sat in these very rooms and heard the inside talk and news of the fight.  First you precipitated the strike, then you bought the Mayor and the Chief of Police and broke the strike.  A pretty spectacle, you philanthropists getting the teamsters down and gouging them.