The Altruist, I discovered in an indirect way, sacrificed a large part of his private income in providing for the many who could find no employment. The excitement of the occasion afforded him a kind of painful happiness. The war of liberation had begun. He gave a lecture in his auditorium on “The Defeat that is Success.”
“I am really beginning to sway these young working-men,” he confided to me exultantly afterward. “The labour-movement will lose its chief danger if men who occupy neutral ground between the two parties in the struggle can act as mediators. It is full of noble impulse that often acts irrationally, and needs judicious guidance. The labourer fails in presenting his claims in the right way because he cannot think logically or speak efficiently. I am coming to think that my mission is to interpret the mind of the working-man.”
The Doctor, though she breathed out many imprecations against the strike, helped a score of its stranded victims.
“Do you think that this kind of protest against injustice is always wrong?” I asked, rather deprecatingly, one day.
“Yes, when it is stirred up by outsiders,” she answered with emphasis. “With the labour-movement itself, in spite of its terrible mistakes, I feel deep sympathy. In any demand so persistent, so universal, there must be a certain justice, a certain right.”
But her next remarks were not so agreeable.
“I cannot understand how employers fail to see the trend of all this agitation, and to realize that great concessions must be made to the working-men. The peace of the country is menaced, yet the question at issue is left, in times of outbreak to the military, in times of quiet to professional agitators, a class of vagrants who represent neither labour nor capital, and understand the position of neither employer nor employé. The burden of responsibility which the business men of the country refuse to shoulder is taken up by men like our friends the Anarchist and the Young Reformer. The greatest danger lies there.”
I smiled, thinking that possibly many of the agitators were, like the Anarchist, not so dangerous as they tried to be.
The news of the relief for her companions in revolt affected the Tailoress but slightly. She shut herself up in her garret room with her remorse. We visited her, and attempted consolation, but to no effect.
At last she softened a little. One day the Altruist came to me with a grieved look.