One of the firm appeared before the girls and told them in kind phrases that the company was friendly to the union, and that they desired to encourage it, and that they might better give assistance, they would like to know what girls belonged to it.  The girls, taken in by this speech, acknowledged their membership; only, instead of a few that the company had thought to discover and weed out, it developed that one hundred and fifty girls were members.  That evening they were told, in the same kind way, that, because of a lull in the trade, due to an uncertainty as to fashions in sleeves, there was for the time being no more work.  The girls took their discharge without suspicion; but the next morning they saw in the newspaper advertisements of the company asking for shirt-waist operators at once.  Their eyes opened by this, the girls picketed the shop, and told the girls who answered the advertisement that the shop was on strike.  The company retaliated by hiring thugs to intimidate the girls, and for several weeks the picketing girls were being constantly attacked and beaten.  These melees were followed by wholesale arrests of strikers, from a dozen to twenty girls being arrested daily.

Out of ninety-eight arrested all but nineteen were fined in sums of from one to ten dollars.

With the aid of the police and a complaisant bench the Triangle Company had been successful in its attempt to empty the young union’s treasury, and had likewise intimidated the workers till their courage and spirit were failing them.  The manufacturers had accomplished their object.

At this stage the New York Women’s Trade Union League took up the battle of the girls.  Every morning they stationed allies in front of the factory, to act as witnesses against illegal arrest, and to prevent interference with lawful picketing.  The wrath of the police was then turned upon the League.  First one and then another ally was arrested, this performance culminating in the unlawful arrest of Mary Dreier, president of the League.  The police were sadly fooled upon this occasion, and their position was not in any degree strengthened, when they angrily, and just as unreasonably freed their prisoner, as soon as they discovered her identity.  “Why didn’t you tell me you was a rich lady?  I’d never have arrested you in the world.”

This was good copy for the newspapers, and the whole story of wrongful discharge, unlawful arrest and insulting treatment of the strikers by the police began to filter into the public mind through the columns of the daily press.  It was shown that what had happened in the case of the Triangle employes had been repeated, with variations, in the case of many other shops.  Respectable and conservative citizens began to wonder if there might not be two sides to the story.  They learned, for instance, of the unjust “bundle” system, under which the employer gives out a bundle of work to a girl, and when she returns the completed