History was making fast.  The air was vibrant with things happening and impending.  The country was on the verge of hard times,* caused by a series of prosperous years wherein the difficulty of disposing abroad of the unconsumed surplus had become increasingly difficult.  Industries were working short time; many great factories were standing idle against the time when the surplus should be gone; and wages were being cut right and left.

* Under the capitalist regime these periods of hard times were as inevitable as they were absurd.  Prosperity always brought calamity.  This, of course, was due to the excess of unconsumed profits that was piled up.

Also, the great machinist strike had been broken.  Two hundred thousand machinists, along with their five hundred thousand allies in the metalworking trades, had been defeated in as bloody a strike as had ever marred the United States.  Pitched battles had been fought with the small armies of armed strike-breakers* put in the field by the employers’ associations; the Black Hundreds, appearing in scores of wide-scattered places, had destroyed property; and, in consequence, a hundred thousand regular soldiers of the United States has been called out to put a frightful end to the whole affair.  A number of the labor leaders had been executed; many others had been sentenced to prison, while thousands of the rank and file of the strikers had been herded into bull-pens** and abominably treated by the soldiers.

* Strike-breakers—­these were, in purpose and practice and everything except name, the private soldiers of the capitalists.  They were thoroughly organized and well armed, and they were held in readiness to be hurled in special trains to any part of the country where labor went on strike or was locked out by the employers.  Only those curious times could have given rise to the amazing spectacle of one, Farley, a notorious commander of strike-breakers, who, in 1906, swept across the United States in special trains from New York to San Francisco with an army of twenty-five hundred men, fully armed and equipped, to break a strike of the San Francisco street-car men.  Such an act was in direct violation of the laws of the land.  The fact that this act, and thousands of similar acts, went unpunished, goes to show how completely the judiciary was the creature of the Plutocracy.

** Bull-pen—­in a miners’ strike in Idaho, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, it happened that many of the strikers were confined in a bull-pen by the troops.  The practice and the name continued in the twentieth century.

The years of prosperity were now to be paid for.  All markets were glutted; all markets were falling; and amidst the general crumble of prices the price of labor crumbled fastest of all.  The land was convulsed with industrial dissensions.  Labor was striking here, there, and everywhere; and where it