“I saw something of it this morning, driving through the town. I could not help knowing what it was. But why did they do it? What do they want?”
“They did it,” and Otis Greenough sat up with a judicial air, “because they are rascally dogs, and do not know when they are well off. And they want?—well,—the earth—more pay, shorter hours, and the Lord knows what besides.”
“Well, and why shouldn’t they have it?”
The question fell like a bomb upon her surprised audience.
“To be sure, I know very little of these things, practically, although I have taken the prescribed doses of social economy in my readings under Professor Townsend,” she went on; “but it has occurred to me, within a few days, that the laboring classes have very little control over their own lives, and are not much more than slaves to us who hold the reins of power.”
“Bless me!” thought Otis Greenough, staring at her. If his office-door had suddenly spoken, offering him officious counsel as to his method of conducting the mills, he could hardly have been more surprised. “Bless me! No Floyd Shepard about her.”
“If the operatives are poorly paid, and we are making more money than ever before (I think I understood you so the other day?),” the young woman was saying, “why shouldn’t their wages be raised? It seems but fair, to me.”
“Much you know about it, little girl,” Mr. Greenough found voice to say, addressing her as he used to in by-gone days, when she occasionally strayed into the mills and teased to be taken through them. “Much any young lady of the world can know of such matters. We would not have you turn from being your own charming self, and become a learned blue-stocking, or bloomered reformer; but there are many, many reasons which come between the questions of profit and loss, and the petty details of operatives’ wages, which cannot be explained to you here and now. They were contented enough until some rascal or other, having become imbued with the spirit of these labor unions starting up all over the country, must needs organize one here. By Jove! I’ll employ detectives and hunt out the disturbing elements and shut them up. I have offered every mother’s son a chance to go back to work to-morrow morning, on condition that he drops this union business; but I am told to-night that not one of them will accept. Ignorant creatures! I’ll show ’em what it means to fight a rich and strong concern like this, in the vain hope of bringing us to their terms.”
“Meanwhile,” it was Villard who spoke, “we are to go on resisting their combined ignorance and impatience, and perhaps worse elements, losing thousands of dollars in the warfare, are we?”
“Yes, rather than give in one inch to them,” answered Mr. Greenough. “This is the first organized strike and must be made a warning to future disturbers. It’s those confounded Englishmen trying to transplant their foreign ideas to American soil. If we give in to them now, we establish a bad precedent.”