employer, offering to raise his old pay from fifteen to thirty dollars per week, if he would go back to work and so help to break the strike.  The wife spoke with pride of the husband’s refusal to be a traitor.  “It is not only bread we give the children.  We live not by bread alone.  We live by freedom, and I will fight for it though I die to give it to my children.”  And this woman’s baby was one of 1,250 babies born into strikers’ homes that winter.

To me those long months were like nothing so much as like living in a besieged city.  There was the same planning for the obtaining of food, and making it last as long as possible, the same pinched, wan faces, the same hunger illnesses, the same laying of little ones into baby graves.  And again, besides the home problems, there was the same difficulty of getting at the real news, knowing the meaning of what was going on, the same heart-wearing alternations of hope and dread.

Through it all, moreover, persisted the sense that this was something more than an industrial rising, although it was mainly so.  It was likewise the uprising of a foreign people, oppressed and despised.  It was the tragedy of the immigrant, his high hopes of liberty and prosperity in the new land blighted, finding himself in America, but not of America.

By the end of November the manufacturers were beginning to tire of watching their idle machinery, and the tale of unfilled orders grew monotonous.  There began to be grumbles from the public against the disastrous effects upon business of the long-continued struggle.  Alderman Merriam succeeded in having the City Council bring about a conference of the parties to the strike “to the end that a just and lasting settlement of the points in controversy may be made.”

Messrs Hart, Schaffner and Marx, a firm employing in forty-eight shops between eight and nine thousand workers, agreed to meet with the committee and the labor leaders.  After long hours of conferring a tentative agreement was at length arrived at, signed by the representatives of all parties, approved by the Chicago Federation of Labor, and, when referred to the army of strikers for their confirmation, was by them rejected.  Indeed the great majority refused even to vote upon it at all.  This was indeed a body blow to the hopes of peace.  For the unfavorable attitude of the strikers there were, however, several reasons.  The agreement, such as it was, did not affect quite a fourth of the whole number of workers who were out, and a regular stampede back to work of the rest, with no guarantee at all, was greatly to be dreaded.  Again, a clause discriminating against all who it should be decided had been guilty of violence during the strike, gave deep offense.  It was felt to be adding insult to injury, to allude to violence during a struggle conducted so quietly and with such dignity and self-restraint.  But a further explanation lay in the attitude of mind of the strikers themselves.  The idea of compromise