Then suddenly the big butcher president leaped upon a pile of stones and yelled:  “It’s off, boys.  We’ll all of us quit again!” And so the cattle butchers declared a new strike on the spot; and gathering their members from the other plants, where the same trick had been played, they marched down Packers’ Avenue, which was thronged with a dense mass of workers, cheering wildly.  Men who had already got to work on the killing beds dropped their tools and joined them; some galloped here and there on horseback, shouting the tidings, and within half an hour the whole of Packingtown was on strike again, and beside itself with fury.

There was quite a different tone in Packingtown after this—­the place was a seething caldron of passion, and the “scab” who ventured into it fared badly.  There were one or two of these incidents each day, the newspapers detailing them, and always blaming them upon the unions.  Yet ten years before, when there were no unions in Packingtown, there was a strike, and national troops had to be called, and there were pitched battles fought at night, by the light of blazing freight trains.  Packingtown was always a center of violence; in “Whisky Point,” where there were a hundred saloons and one glue factory, there was always fighting, and always more of it in hot weather.  Any one who had taken the trouble to consult the station house blotter would have found that there was less violence that summer than ever before—­and this while twenty thousand men were out of work, and with nothing to do all day but brood upon bitter wrongs.  There was no one to picture the battle the union leaders were fighting—­to hold this huge army in rank, to keep it from straggling and pillaging, to cheer and encourage and guide a hundred thousand people, of a dozen different tongues, through six long weeks of hunger and disappointment and despair.

Meantime the packers had set themselves definitely to the task of making a new labor force.  A thousand or two of strikebreakers were brought in every night, and distributed among the various plants.  Some of them were experienced workers,—­butchers, salesmen, and managers from the packers’ branch stores, and a few union men who had deserted from other cities; but the vast majority were “green” Negroes from the cotton districts of the far South, and they were herded into the packing plants like sheep.  There was a law forbidding the use of buildings as lodginghouses unless they were licensed for the purpose, and provided with proper windows, stairways, and fire escapes; but here, in a “paint room,” reached only by an enclosed “chute,” a room without a single window and only one door, a hundred men were crowded upon mattresses on the floor.  Up on the third story of the “hog house” of Jones’s was a storeroom, without a window, into which they crowded seven hundred men, sleeping upon the bare springs of cots, and with a second shift to use them by day.  And when the clamor of the public led to an investigation into these conditions, and the mayor of the city was forced to order the enforcement of the law, the packers got a judge to issue an injunction forbidding him to do it!