the State Board of Arbitration, which took up its quarters, with a great many scare-heads, at one of the principal hotels, and invited the roads and the strikers to lay the matter in dispute before them; he said that now we should see the working of the greatest piece of social machinery in modern times.  But it appeared to work only in the alacrity of the strikers to submit their grievance.  The road; were as one road in declaring that there was nothing to arbitrate, and that they were merely asserting their right to manage their own affairs in their own way.  One of the presidents was reported to have told a member of the Board, who personally summoned him, to get out and to go about his business.  Then, to Fulkerson’s extreme disappointment, the august tribunal, acting on behalf of the sovereign people in the interest of peace, declared itself powerless, and got out, and would, no doubt, have gone about its business if it had had any.  Fulkerson did not know what to say, perhaps because the extras did not; but March laughed at this result.

“It’s a good deal like the military manoeuvre of the King of France and his forty thousand men.  I suppose somebody told him at the top of the hill that there was nothing to arbitrate, and to get out and go about his business, and that was the reason he marched down after he had marched up with all that ceremony.  What amuses me is to find that in an affair of this kind the roads have rights and the strikers have rights, but the public has no rights at all.  The roads and the strikers are allowed to fight out a private war in our midst as thoroughly and precisely a private war as any we despise the Middle Ages for having tolerated—­as any street war in Florence or Verona—­and to fight it out at our pains and expense, and we stand by like sheep and wait till they get tired.  It’s a funny attitude for a city of fifteen hundred thousand inhabitants.”

“What would you do?” asked Fulkerson, a good deal daunted by this view of the case.

“Do?  Nothing.  Hasn’t the State Board of Arbitration declared itself powerless?  We have no hold upon the strikers; and we’re so used to being snubbed and disobliged by common carriers that we have forgotten our hold on the roads and always allow them to manage their own affairs in their own way, quite as if we had nothing to do with them and they owed us no services in return for their privileges.”

“That’s a good deal so,” said Fulkerson, disordering his hair.  “Well, it’s nuts for the colonel nowadays.  He says if he was boss of this town he would seize the roads on behalf of the people, and man ’em with policemen, and run ’em till the managers had come to terms with the strikers; and he’d do that every time there was a strike.”

“Doesn’t that rather savor of the paternalism he condemned in Lindau?” asked March.

“I don’t know.  It savors of horse sense.”

“You are pretty far gone, Fulkerson.  I thought you were the most engaged man I ever saw; but I guess you’re more father-in-lawed.  And before you’re married, too.”