“I don’t know. If the matter of fines is made right, we will say nothing about the rest. When we make complaints, we are usually told that the Baldwins could get machines to cut rags, cheaper than we cut them, and that they only hire us out of charity.�
“I am surprised at the way the rag-cutters are treated,� said Mrs. Wycliff; “I have always heard that the Baldwins were very generous.�
“They are generous,� replied her visitor, “but they are not just. There is an old saying, ‘Be just before you are generous,’ which, if lived up to in Papyrus, would make a wonderful difference in favor of the working class. How have the Baldwins made their millions? Of course the whole world knows that they make a very high grade of paper. It is said that this is due, in some measure, to the pure water found in Papyrus, which is the gift of God. Then, too, it is claimed that Mack Baldwin laid the foundation of the Baldwin millions by manipulations in Wall Street, during the Civil War. But some of those millions are the fruit of low wages. If the Baldwins pay twenty-five cents a day less than a fair wage, to two thousand hands, three hundred days in a year, what is the result? It’s a yearly saving of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, of money due the laborer, is it not? Then, perhaps, the Baldwins may spend fifteen thousand dollars a year in pensions to a very few, and in charity to the working class. Nothing can exceed the cleverness of the Baldwins, in making one dollar in charity, look bigger to the laborer, than ten dollars in wages withheld. I think the time is coming when the law will require the accounts of all such concerns as the Baldwin Paper Company, to be as open as town accounts, and then the lion’s share of profits will go to the laborer. But I guess you have had all the rag-room and paper-mill you want for one day.�
“No, I have been very much interested, and I wish you women might get justice,� replied Mrs. Wycliff. “I think there cannot be any harder or more disagreeable work in the mill than yours, and I wish that you might have better pay and kinder treatment. The Baldwins are well able to pay. I hear that this new library that Zechariah Baldwin is giving to the city of Elmfield will cost a half a million dollars.�
“Yes, I try to restrain my anger, as a Christian woman should,� said Mrs. Clyde, “but my blood boils every time I see that building. We poor women must slave in Zack Baldwin’s rag-room, and the money which ought to go to the mill-help, in higher wages, is given, with a great flourish of trumpets, to the city of Elmfield, which is already rich enough. As to our work. If we try to work a bit faster than usual, we are liable to get cut on the scythes, and there’s many a terrible gash been got in the rag-room. Then how often do you hear of contagious diseases spread by the rags of a paper-mill.
“The worst slap the Baldwins ever got was from a wealthy Southern lady, who visited their mills last summer. She said to Zack Baldwin:—‘The slaves on my father’s plantation in Georgia, were treated with more consideration, and were more contented and happy at their work than your rag-cutters. But the slave-holding system was wrong, and it fell. I think also, the system under which you Northern millionaires eat the apple, and give your employees the core, is wrong and will fall, too,’ But I have stayed too long.� And Mrs. Clyde vanished.
John Wycliff sat in his den, within easy ear-shot, and the pith of the women’s talk was woven into his account of the strike, for the Star.
More than two thousand copies of the Star were sold that day in Papyrus, and its circulation was raised permanently to a point near those figures.
The Honorable Zechariah Baldwin was furious when he read the Star’s account of the strike. Never before had a local newspaper dared to print the news of a Baldwin strike, much less to hold those “captains of industry� up to public criticism, as it had done to-day.
But Terry was happy. He had sold extra thousands of his paper, the largest edition ever sold of a Berkshire newspaper, and scores of citizens, in all walks of life, had congratulated him on his bravery in defying the Baldwins.