CHAPTER IV

THE STRIKE—­AN INVENTION FOR MAKING CROWDS THINK

When I was arranging to slip over from New York and get something I very much wanted in England last spring, I found myself held up suddenly in all my plans because some men on the docks had decided that there was something that they wanted too.  They decided that I and thousands of other people in New York would have to wait over on the shores of America until they got it.

After postponing my plans until things had settled down, I took passage, and in due time found myself standing on English soil, only to be informed that, while I might be allowed perhaps at least to stand on English soil, that was really as much as I could expect.  I could not go anywhere because a number of men on the railways had decided that there was something they wanted and that I would have to wait till they got it.

I could go down and look at the silent, cold locomotives on the rails, and I could be as wistful and hopeful as I liked about getting up to London, but these men had decided that there was something that they wanted and I must wait.

I could not think of anything I had ever done to these men, and what had Liverpool and London done to them?

After I was duly settled in London, and had begun to get into its little ways, and was busily driving about and attending to my business as I had planned, 6,000 more men suddenly wanted something, brought me up to a full stop one rainy day, and said that they had decided that if I wanted to ride I would have to walk, or that I would have to poke dismally about in a ’bus, or worm my way through under the ground.  As I understood it, there was something that they wanted and something that they were going to get; and while of course in a way, they recognized that there might be something that I wanted too, I would have to wait till they got theirs.

I could not think of anything I had ever done to them, nor could I see what the thousands of other good people in London that I saw walking and puddling about, or watched waiting twenty minutes or so with long, hopeful, dogged whistles for cabs, had done to them.

A few days more, and my morning paper tells me suddenly of some more men who wanted something—­this time up in Lancashire.  They had decided that they wouldn’t let some two or three hundred thousand other men go to their work until they got it.  They hushed cities to have their own way.  Day by day I watched them throwing the silence of the cities in their employers’ faces, closing shops, closing up railroads, telling the world it must pay more for the clothes on its back, and all because—­a certain Mr. and Mrs. Riley of Accrington, North Lancashire did not like or did not think that they liked, the North Lancashire Trades Union. (The general idea seemed to be to have all the others join in, everywhere—­fifty-four million spindles, and four hundred and forty thousand looms—­and wait and keep perfectly still until Mr. and Mrs. Riley could make up their minds.)