"Strikers?" I exclaimed.
"Yes," she added, "men who will not work until their employers pay them the amount they think they ought to be paid."
Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! the great crowd passed us in long file, dusty, worn, hard-worked men. My heart swelled as I looked at their strained faces; I could not go any farther on my walk; I had to rush home to ask grandmother questions.
"Grandmother!" I cried, panting into her room, "strikes in a country that follows Christ!—And men asking for a license to sell poison to their fellow-men!"
I fell on my knees in front of her chair and sobbed, I could not have told why.
She took my face in her soft old withered hands, and holding it was about to speak, when my Aunt Gwendolin, who had overheard me, came into the room and cried indignantly:
"That crank of a Mrs. Paton has been talking to the girl; I know her very words. That woman should be forcibly restrained!"
Grandmother did not answer her, but continued to stroke my face until I grew quieter, and until my aunt had left the room. Then in reply to my many pointed questions she told me in brief, that the reason men got licenses to sell liquor was that they paid money for them, and the country granted them for the sake of the great revenue they brought into its treasury.
"Oh, grandmother!" I cried, raising my head from her lap, "when Britain tried to induce the Chinese Emperor to legalise the opium traffic because of the import duty, he said, 'Nothing shall induce me to derive a revenue from the vice and misery of my people'!"—I had read all this in my books on China.
Grandmother was wiping away tears, and I said no more.