The two men shook hands, and Marsten departed into the night. Sartwell sat in his office for some minutes thinking over the situation.
CHAPTER XXXV.
The second strike was as clean-cut as the first: that is to say, no laggards remained behind in the works; there was apparent unanimity among the men, and apparent determination on the part of the masters. To all outward seeming it was to be a straightforward, brutal trial of strength between Capital and the Union. Marsten cared little for public sympathy, which Gibbons had considered of great importance; and Sartwell cared for it nothing at all. The public took small interest either way. It was known that the company had voluntarily advanced the wages of the men a short time before, and employers generally said that this showed the folly of sentimentality in business; that no master should advance wages until he was forced to do so. There was no gratitude on the part of the workingman, they averred, and some of the newspapers took the same tone. But even those journals favourable to labour had qualms about the wisdom of the strike under the circumstances, although they hoped it would succeed.
Marsten, however, paid small heed to the comments of friend or foe; he knew that success or failure did not lie in what the papers said, but in perfect organization and in hitting hard. He knew that, if he won, most of the praise would go to the determination of the men and the opportuneness of the strike; while, if he lost, he would have to shoulder all the censure that had to be bestowed. He picketed the works in the usual way, choosing for that duty the staunchest of his friends among the men. He asked the remainder of the employees to keep away from the gates and leave the conduct of the fight entirely to him and those he had chosen as his lieutenants.
Once the fight was on, Sartwell determined to give no quarter. He resolved to fill up the works, if possible, with men from outside, and to take back none of the old employees who did not sign a paper promising to abandon the Union. In the former strike he had been anxious to get his men back in a body, and had made no real attempt to fill their places. He knew in the beginning of the second struggle that he was fighting for his life, and that if he suffered defeat he would resign, and the place that had known him for years would know him no more. He had no fear that the company would discharge him if he lost the battle,—in fact he knew they would use every effort to induce him to remain; but it was his own stubborn pride, as his wife called it, that he felt he could not overcome even if he had wished to do so. Sartwell, like certain swords of finely-tempered steel, would break, but would not bend. Years of unflinching determination in what he thought was right had made him a man over whom he himself had but slight control; and he sometimes recognized with grim humour that while he could persuade all his confrères to take a devious but safe course upon any given problem, he could not induce himself to follow anything but the straight line. He worked night and day at the task of filling the factory with new men. He scoured the country for them, and his telegraph bills alone were enormous; but men were scarce—good men are always scarce, and now even indifferent workers were hard to find. Gibbons had once said that the workingman of modern times suffers from the fact that he is merely a cog in a big wheel, but this truism tells also against the employer who is trying to fill his shops. If a cog is useless by itself it must not be forgotten that the wheel is also useless until the cog is replaced. It is easy for an employer to supply the place of a single cog; but when the whole wheel is cogless, ninety-nine cogs are of no avail if the hundredth necessary to complete the circle cannot be found.
It was here that Sartwell had the first touch of his opponent’s quality, and his anger was lost in admiration for the young man’s shrewdness and knowledge of the business. The fight had been conducted so quietly that no one in the neighbourhood would have known, from any sign of disturbance, that war was in progress. Marsten made no attempt to buy off the new men, who came and went from the works unmolested by the pickets. Marsten sometimes talked with the strangers, telling them of the strike, and asking where they came from; advising them to get work elsewhere, but never making any attempt either to coerce or to bribe them. Sartwell wondered at this, and hoped Marsten would continue such a mild and harmless warfare; nevertheless its very mildness made him anxious, and he cautioned his new employees to give no information to the strikers, though he was well aware of the uselessness of trying to inculcate secrecy—for men will talk. In fact Marsten kept himself well informed of what was going on inside the works, and saw that the manager was quite shrewdly concentrating his attention to one branch of a department, instead of trying to fill the whole factory at one time. He was gradually collecting his hundred cogs from all points of the compass, and by and by would have one big wheel and pinion, out of the many wheels and pinions, revolving. One day at noon, when the men came out, Marsten, rapidly running his eye over them, saw a new man, and at once he recognized that here at last was the hundredth cog.
“You’re a new-comer?” he said, accosting him.
“Yes,” answered the man; “I came this morning.”