“I can’t help it if you’re Mr. Roosevelt, you can’t go any farther than this. ...  Now git.”  He gave Bonbright a violent and unexpected shove, which almost sent the young man off his feet.  He staggered, recovered himself, and stood glowering at the officer.  “Move!” came the short command, and once more burning with indignation, he obeyed.  Here was another man acting in his behalf, summoned to his help.  It was thus the police behaved, roughly, intolerantly, neither asking nor accepting explanations.  It did not seem to Bonbright this could be the right way to meet the emergency.  It seemed to him calculated only to aggravate it.  The application of brute force might conquer a mob or stifle a riot, but it would leave unquenched fires of animosity.  A violent operation may be necessary to remove a malignant growth.  It may be the only possible cure; but no physician would hope to cure typhoid fever by knocking the patient insensible with a club.  True, the delirium would cease for a time, but the deep-seated ailment would remain and the patient only be the worse for the treatment. ...  Here the disease was disagreement, misunderstanding, suspicion, bitterness of heart between employer and employees.  Neither hired strike breaker nor policeman’s baton could get to the root of it. ...  Yet he, Bonbright Foote VII, was the man held out to all the world as favoring this treatment, as authorizing it, as ordering it!

He walked quite around the block, approaching again on a side street that brought him back again just ahead of the police.  This street was blocked by excited, restless, crowding, jeering men, but Bonbright wormed his way through and climbed upon a porch from which he could see over the heads of the foremost to where a line of police and the front rank of strikers faced each other across a vacant space of pavement, the square at the intersection of the streets.

Behind him a hatless man in a high state of excitement was making an inflammatory speech from a doorstep.  He was urging the mob to charge the police, to trample them under. ...  Bonbright leaned far over the railing so he could look down the street where the main body of the mob was assembled.  There was another speaker.  Bonbright recognized Dulac—­and Dulac, with all his eloquence, was urging the men to disperse to their homes in quiet.  Bonbright listened.  The man was talking sense!  He was pointing out the folly of mob violence!  He was showing them that it achieved nothing. ...  But the mob was beyond the control of wise counsel.  Possibly the feet of many had pressed brass rails while elbows crooked.  Certainly there was present a leaven of toughs, idlers, in no way connected with the business, but sent by the devil to add to the horror of it.

One of these, discreetly distant from the front, hurled half a brick into the line of police.  It was a vicious suggestion.  Other bricks and missiles followed, while the crowd surged forward.  Suddenly the line of patrolmen opened to let through a squad of mounted police, who charged the mob. ...  It was a thing requiring courage, but a thing ordered by an imbecile.