The businessmen of the city, whose interests were likely to suffer severely in the event of a prolonged strike, presented a formal request, both to the company and to its employees, to submit the matter in dispute between them to arbitration. And both refused. The men on the ground that their demand was too unequivocally plain and just to be submitted to the uncertain judgment of arbitrators; and the company on the ground that it could not, without loss of self-respect, concede to any one the right to say whom it should or should not employ at its works.
So the strike went on. The plant remained idle. The fires in the furnaces were drawn. Only watchmen remained on duty. Some half-finished orders, sent to a smaller mill of another company to be completed, precipitated a strike at that plant also; and then the workmen of a third mill, infected with the spirit of revolt, determined to take advantage of the situation to better their own condition, and joined in the general upheaval. The original strike had not been called in exact accordance with union rules. The men had been too precipitate in their action, and some of the union officials felt that they should have been sent back to work in order that union discipline might prevail. But their cause was so entirely just, the conduct of the company had been so flagrant, and its purpose so plain, the sympathy of union labor in the city was so overwhelmingly with the men, that their strike was endorsed, not only by the union to which they belonged, but by the federated unions of the city as well. With this backing the fight went on. Silence hung over the Malleson mills. No smoke ascended from the chimneys. No roar of forge or rattle of machinery was heard there. No sight or sound or soul of industry gave life or movement to the place. The very snow upon the paths that crossed the yard, paths trodden daily in happier times by human hundreds, lay now untracked and undisturbed. Idle men loitered along the streets of the city, or stood aimlessly on sunny corners. Merchants were despondent and fearful. The business of the town was in a state of alarming depression. The saloons alone retained their normal prosperity. By and by came hardship, destitution, misery. Not all workmen are sufficiently provident to lay by enough to tide them over a rainy day. Many of those who were, found their resources drained as the days of the strike grew long. The strike-fund voted by the union was but a pittance in comparison with the needs which it helped to supply, and even that fund drew toward exhaustion with the prolongation of the struggle.
Perhaps those who suffered most were day-laborers not affiliated with any union, employed outside the mills and factories, whose occupations, indirectly affected by the strike, and by the general business depression, were now closed to them. They, indeed, were in sore straits. Public aid was asked for, but the response was neither quick nor liberal. It is one thing to sympathize with the victims of disaster; it is quite another thing to open your purse to them.
It was the first of February when the strike was called. Through all that month severe weather prevailed. There were howling blizzards, unprecedented snowfalls, arctic temperatures. It is no wonder that by the first of March the suffering among the poor had become wide-spread, intense and tragic.
And all because the Malleson Manufacturing Company had dismissed, and would not take back into its employ, one big, red-haired, raw-boned, good-natured workman; and because his fellow-laborers would not work without him.
High cause indeed for which to plunge and hold a city in distress. The rights of capital! The dignity of labor! Strange shibboleths to be bandied about the streets while idle men grew desperate, and women and little children were starving and freezing in destitute and miserable homes.
CHAPTER XVII
A HOPELESS QUEST
There was work and a plenty of it for the charitably inclined to do during those sad March days. Some noble-souled women, caring not which side in the conflict was right or which side wrong, went about like ministering angels to relieve the destitute and care for the suffering. Ruth Tracy was one of these. Her days were filled with her hard and unlovely tasks among the poor, and her nights were often sleepless because of the scenes she had witnessed by day.
In her visits to the homes of the destitute she had often met the rector of Christ Church. His errands were similar to hers. They counseled together, they compared notes, they parceled out relief. Together they traveled through snow-burdened, wind-swept, desolate streets. More and more he came to rely upon her big-hearted judgment, and her sympathetic aid. He shared with her the problem of the poor that lay so heavily on his own heart. She became necessary to him, invaluable, indispensable. And as for her, his nobility of character, his great passion for suffering humanity, his tireless energy in the doing of all good deeds, these things loomed ever larger and larger in her mind, as she watched him day by day in the performance of his self-appointed and self-rewarded tasks.