He said he would have pulled up and gone away, but he still had the little home and the garden, and his wife and daughter were still at work, so he hung on grimly, trying to get some other job. “But what good is a man for any other sort of work,” he said, “when he has been trained to the mills for thirty-two years!”
It was not very long after that when the “great strike” began—indeed, it grew out of the organization which he had tried to launched—and Bill Hahn threw himself into it with all his strength. He was one of the leaders. I shall not attempt to repeat here his description of the bitter struggle, the coming of the soldiery, the street riots, the long lists of arrests (“some,” said he, “got into jail on purpose, so that they could at least have enough to eat!”), the late meetings of strikers, the wild turmoil and excitement.
Of all this he told me, and then he stopped suddenly, and after a long pause he said in a low voice:
“Comrade, did ye ever see your wife and your sickly daughter and your kids sufferin' for bread to eat?”
He paused again with a hard, dry sob in his voice.
“Did ye ever see that?”
“No,” said I, very humbly, “I have never seen anything like that.”
He turned on me suddenly, and I shall never forget the look on his face, nor the blaze in his eyes:
“Then what can you know about working-men?”
What could I answer?