“No,” said French, “you have not. The worker who joins a strike faces at least the possibility of capital closing its works and retiring from the field, and the men who have been extravagant, idle, unthrifty, or unfortunate, and most of you have been one or the other, have no moral right to bring upon themselves or those dependent upon them, either suffering or mendicancy.”
“Mr. French,” said the Chairman, “you know a good many things, but you don’t know the power of the labor organizations of the land. If we willed it, we could in one day stop production and transportation all over the United States.”
“You would do well to think three or four times,” replied French, “before exercising any such power as that. You workingmen are overstepping the bounds not only of moderation, but of common justice and common sense. Suppose you should do what you threaten, what do you suppose the capitalists would do in turn? You don’t know? Well, I can tell you. We would say that we were weary of your exactions, your interference, and your airs. We would say to you: ‘You have stopped the wheels; very well, we will not start them. You have extinguished the furnace fires, we will not rekindle them. You have disabled the engines, we will not repair them. With the downward stab of your vicious knife you have cut our surface veins, but you have received the force of the blow in your own vitals—bleed to death at your leisure. We will retire for a while and nurse our scratches.’
“You don’t know what you are talking about,” continued the old man. “You don’t conceive the misery and ruin that would result from sixty days’ stoppage of labor in the fields and foundries and factories and furnaces, and sixty days’ suspension of traffic over the railroads of our land. With the disabled engines in the roundhouses, and the cars covered with dust in the deserted yards; with ships and steamers lying idle at the wharves or sailed away to trade between the ports of other lands, whose governments, wiser or more powerful than ours, would not suffer the moral law to be violated by either individuals or societies; with moss gathered upon the turbines; with chimneys towering smokeless to the skies; with the music of forge and anvil hushed; with almshouses crowded, asylums filled, and jails overflowing; with men suffering and women growing gaunt from hunger, and little children sobbing themselves to the fevered sleep of famine; with the furniture in the auction room, trinkets and clothing in the pawn shop, and families once comfortable wandering shelterless under the stars; with even disease welcomed as a friend who should pilot the sufferer to the deliverance of death, would you find consolation for it all in the reflection that you had, maybe, carried your point and prevented non-union men, who are as good as yourselves in every way, from working alongside you at the same wages you demanded for yourselves?”
“Mr. French,” said the Chairman, “what do you wish us to do?”
“I don’t care what you do,” was the response, “but if you have any sense, you will go home and repeal your fool resolution to strike if non-union workers are employed.”
“That, Mr. French,” said the spokesman, “we cannot and will not do.”
“No?” replied the millionaire. “Well, you must go to destruction then in your own way. Goodmorning.”
At noon the next day the hod-carriers dropped their hods, not only at the post-office block, but at all buildings in process of construction by any capitalist or contractor belonging to the Builders’ and Manufacturers’ Union. The brick-masons stopped work because they would not lay brick with mortar mixed or carried by a non-union laborer. The house carpenters declined to drive a nail in aid of the erection of any building in which a brick should be laid by one not belonging to the Bricklayers’ Union. No plumber or gasfitter would carry his tools to a building whose timbers had been put in place by a scab carpenter. The teamsters would not haul sand, brick, lime, or lumber for use in any building to be erected by any member of the association of which Lorin French was president. The iron-moulders abandoned in a body the great shops, rather than work on columns or fronts which had been ordered for the tabooed buildings. Engineers and firemen struck, rather than attend to the running of machinery in factories where non-union men were employed, and all workers engaged in any factory, foundry, mill, shop, or business owned, in whole or in part, by any member of the Builders’ and Manufacturers’ Union, joined the general strike, while the railroads were compelled, in self-protection, to refuse freight offered by any member of the organization of which Lorin French was president.
No attempt was made by French or his colleagues to supply the places of the strikers with non-union workers, although every mail from the East brought hundreds of applications for employment, but each factory, foundry, and shop was closed, one after the other, as the workers joined the strike. The ten men whose labors on the post-office building had begotten all this commotion, continued steadily at work. They were surrounded each day, while at their labors, by hooting thousands, who gathered in the vicinity, but any near approach to them was prevented by a company of Pinkerton’s men, armed with Winchesters, who had been sworn in as deputy sheriffs, and who escorted them to and from their labors, to French’s building, No. 1099 Market Street, where they, as well as their guards, were accorded quarters, and in the upper story of which Mr. Lorin French had, under existing circumstances, deemed it expedient to establish his residence as well as his offices.