tains of industry no longer remained close to the industry which they were supposed to captain. "Big business" began to run Lawrence, and for some reason "big business" fell into the hands, in one or two conspicuous cases, of very little-minded men. Not over eighteen months ago the largest figure in the financial control of Lawrence stood up in a Boston court room in a petty automobile case and testified that he did not know how many motor cars he owned! Not over a week ago three investigators called upon another of these mill agents asking the privilege of seeing the mill. One of them was a woman. "I don't see that I owe you anything," said this agent, nodding toward the door.

This stamp of arrogant man is one who does little for industry. The factory and the mill, the product and the labor, become side issues in the game of consolidation and promotion.

The Shadow of Schedule K.

The Commonwealth is paying thousands of dollars a day to keep nine hundred armed men in a city which had been abandoned by the mill men to the sway of ignorance and corruption. At the beginning of the strike it had no police organization worthy of the name "Department." Massachusetts herself is angry. If the full truth was known, if the tariff protection of Schedule K, supposed to be given her citizens, were shown to be "distributed" to a handful of men, leaving the thirty-odd thousand textile workers of Lawrence where they are paid a wage that drives them between bare subsistence in the mills and starvation outside, and if, in addition, it were realized that the cheapest labor had been attracted from Europe by false promises and misrepresentations, Massachusetts would be madder still.

Lawrence is a queer place these days. The sodden life of toil has become picturesque with uniforms and commissaries' trucks, bayonets, and the white wheel spokes used by the militia for "peace weapons"; with the faces of foreign women, suggestive of ancient civilizations, made more beautiful by a stirring of dreams and emotions and with vicious faces of gun men, crooks, and camp followers attracted to the city by the hope of adventure. Cavalry go down the street at dawn, the horses planting uncertain feet upon the ice of the pavements; squads of blue-caped infantry and awkward, newly drafted police march here and there. A hundred kinds of theorists drop off trains to make "investigations."

The strike is no strike. On this everyone is agreed. The American Federation of Labor has tried to organize the situation into

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strike form-the form in which each textile worker belongs to a class not of textile workers in general, but those of his own craft, and may make a collective bargain with his employer. Whatever the merits of the plan, however much the mill agents would like to assist or however much they have assisted the old labor union to organize, there is the cold, bare fact, fortunately or unfortunately as you choose, that the committees of the Central Labor Union control the action of but a handful of the workers, and could deliver by their bargaining little else but the moral support of their organization and its affiliated membership in other cities.

"Work, Eat, Sleep, Die! That's All."

The one startling truth about Lawrence is that nationalities without the organization and without the agitation of trained leaders, even without a common tongue by which to understand each other, felt the last straw break, and together, with the simple instincts of patient animals infuriated at last, rushed out of the mills.

"It is slavery, it is!" said one of them leaning against the front of a building and watching the picket approaching. "Haywood and Ettor and Pearl McGill-that won

derful little girl that speaks-and Trautman the anarchist don't need to tell me that. I have said it long, long ago. I told it like that to my wife. Why, I saw by the papers that those hundred children who went to New York were examined by a board of doctors. Wasn't they undersized and sick and half-starved? That's what they found. The mothers have to work before they're born, and afterward, too. That's it. Families must work everybody work. It is like Haywood says. It can't be denied. Work, eat, sleep, die! That's all. Is that right? Mill owners say they can't pay any more. Well, then, the mills are a failure. They are a worse failure than black slavery. Them colored people was taken care of. They was fed anyhow. They didn't use up the help and let the children die like little turkeys. No, and if the mill owners is right, and they can't pay more, then them mills is a failure."

The man who points to those magnificent low-lying rectangular prisons is not an exception. The idea is everywhere among the workers that if an industry cannot support both capital and labor, it is a failure; that on this premise it should not exist. They point to the congested slums, they point to the suffering polyglots. They are crude, unbaked Americans-some of these 8,500 Italians, 12,000 French-Canadians, 3,500 Lithuanians and the Syrians, Armenians, Franco-Belgians, Hebrews, Poles, Irish, and English, but there are plenty among them who understand crude, unbaked truths. They know, for instance, that the comparison of wages in the mill owners' statistics does not include also a comparison of product. They want to know, as some investigating committee should be empowered to ask, what are the wages paid per yard for cloth production. They laugh cynically at the statements of the average wages which are given out to the newspapers by the mill agents, and then quote average wage figures which are, on their face, a misrepresentation.

The Exploitation of Human Beings.

One could obtain a new insight into the wage question on a recent Sunday. The Syrian church was crowded with workers listening to speeches. The faces of these Syrians are worth traveling miles to see. They wear an expression not of children but of centuries. The women have a calm beauty unsurpassed among all races.

"The average wage you get is $6 a week," said the "agitator" from the chancel of the hushed church.

"What do you get?" asked the visitor in a whisper, plucking the sleeve of a blackhaired man at his right.

"He said it," was the answer, accompanied by a nod toward the speaker.

"But lots of you people and the Italians and the Jews have two or three hundred dollars in the savings bank."

"Yes, sir, every peoples in the family works. They take lodgers. The house is jammed. There isn't room to have children. That makes what peoples has in the bank. They want to go back sometime. Many, many come here. They are fooled. They can't get back again. They have no money."

One family out of every three takes these lodgers, but in the last analysis the major part of the income from this source is wrenched away by the real estate agents.

The household congestion becomes greater. Rents are raised again. It is all a question of what the traffic will bear. Charity workers come in. Money is spent on this. Relief is given. But the rents are raised again. The traffic has been made to bear more. A great unoccupied country surrounds the city, but except for some fifty-odd "model cottages" built by the American Woolen Company, no effective effort to relieve these conditions has been made by the mill owners. Fifty "model cottages" for a population of thirty-odd thousand workers make good advertising. It is a step in the right direction perhaps, but it makes little impression on the slums of Lawrence.

There is not even common businessiike decency in dealing with these laborers. This misnamed "strike" was in the main precipitated by the coming into force of a law of Massachusetts passed over six months ago, limiting the hours of labor for women and children to fifty-four hours a week.

The intent of those behind this law was not to reduce the wages paid, but to shorten the hours. The mill agents knew what they were going to do. They knew they had a foreign, childlike body of workers to deal with. They proceeded to plan a thing so immoral from the point of view of the ordinary manufacturer that other "captains of industry” in Massachusetts have almost universally condemned them. They planned to give no effective notice about reducing the pay when the hours were reduced. The reduction came as a surprise. The decision was announced by means of a "clipped" pay envelope. But it bound together the nations of Lawrence and it has taught the speakers of half a hundred tongues and dialects an English vocabulary, including such words as "strike," "picket," "scab," "mill," "wages," "militia," "capital," "stick together." The impossible had happened. Failing to melt in the famous American melting pot, the

sodden mass had stirred and with a hiss and a scream spilled itself over into another receptacle the common cause of social protest-a pot in which Socialism and revolutionary proposal are boiled down with terrible losses and terrible vapors.

At this moment who can say how much potentiality for real war was in Lawrence? No one. The most stringent military control may not have been a necessity. The sentry who told of the so-called "riots" was right. Much of the preaching of violence which has been attributed to the leaders never existed. A part of the misrepresentation in regard to violence has been due to false reports circulated by those who are out of sympathy with the strikers; a part has been due to the fact that many men believed ignorantly that the preaching of Socialism as an end necessarily meant that the preaching included advice to go out and attain that end to-morrow with the use of the brickbat and torch. To suppose that there has been no "incendiary" talk is ridiculous; to suppose that there has been one-half that reported is to overlook the fact that after all these "strikers" are but poorly represented in the channels of public news as compared with the capitalists.

Somehow we hear a great deal about what Haywood said that was reprehensible, but we do not see published the Russian remark of a rich stockholder that "The way to settle this strike is to shoot down forty or fifty of 'em."

When the only dynamite that has appeared in Lawrence was found in such places as poor Italian's homes, there was a great sensation and the whole affair was laid at the strikers' doors, but when the Commissioner of Education of Lawrence-Breen, an undertaker and politician-was held under bail for having conspired to "plant" this dynamite, very little was made by the great mystery story that lurked behind the motives of the "planting"-the old question of "the man higher up."

Violence is not all on one side. We must face this unpleasant fact. Terrorism, lying and arrogance, intimidation and "anarchy" are not confined to the "cattle of Palermo."

The Picture.

I saw with my own eyes, under the gray light that precedes dawn by an hour, a little group of twenty-five women shivering in the cold about the steps of a church.

I saw them pull their shawls over their heads as they laughed and chatted in low tones. I knew they had assembled to go forth and accost those who would return to

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the mills to work that morning. I knew this was "picketing," which, even when peaceful, is unlawful in the Commonwealth.

I saw them stamp their feet because they were cold.

I saw a detail of men come down the street clad in police uniform, with badges gleaming as they passed under the arc light. I heard horses' hoofs upon the pavement. I heard one neigh. A detachment of cavalry was coming up from another direction.

I saw the patrolmen surround the twenty-five women who had huddled and flattened like hens as the shadow of the hawk falls. I heard the voices of men, but no answer from the frightened women. I heard the cavalrymen. They were nearer.

I saw the women at the command of the policemen move forward. I heard a rough voice call upon God to damn them..

I saw the night sticks driven hard against the women's ribs. I heard their low cries as they hurried away.

I saw one who passed me. "Listen," she called to a friend. "I go home, nurse the little one. I be back yet."

I felt it in my throat. I felt it in my arms. I felt it under the lower eyelids of my eyes. I knew that if that woman had belonged to me, cavalry or no cavalry, I—

There is the terrible thing about a thing like that in Lawrence-that feeling.

law for men.

"The law's a hass."-Bumble.

ET us begin with Indiana, neither a new State nor an old, neither unduly trammeled nor without traditions.

An employee of the "Panhandle" (1. e., the Pennsylvania) Railroad named Peck sued for damages under the Employers' Liability Act and obtained a verdict. Did the company pay? Of course not. It is the obvious business of corporations to discourage such annoying proceedings on the part of the rabble they employ, and whose service alone makes these corporations possible. It is cheaper. infinitely cheaper, to keep on hire a gang of high-priced lawyers to make the discouragement as complete as possible.

So the case was appealed, was reversed of course (that is what the Appellate Courts are for), retried, and still this impudent complainant of a Peck won. Did the company pay now? Certainly not. It again appealed. But the record this time was apparently bombproof; and the new appeal was therefore based on the ground that the law was "unconstitutional." Familiar words! Sometimes I am inclined to paraphrase Dr. Johnson's bitter sentence and say of our beloved Constitution that it is the last refuge of the scoundrel. It is certainly the safe refuge of the corporation and the rich litigant.

Now one appellate court in Indiana having been unable to take care of the endless appeals, writs of error, exceptions, etc., which constitute the main business of the courts, an intermediate court of appeals had been created to relieve the familiar (almost universal) "congestion." The appeal in the Peck case came before this inter

mediate body, which, however, had no jurisdiction in the questions of "constitutionality." Therefore the case was transferred to the State Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court in a brief memorandum said that the constitutionality of the law had been passed on many times, and it had been affirmed not only by the State Supreme Court, but by the United States Supreme Court as well. Case retransferred to the Appellate Court. The Appellate Court's dignity, of course, was deeply injured. It has been told in effect (which seemed the obvious fact) that it did not know the law. Therefore, to prove that it did know the law, the court wrote a long opinion upholding its view. Case retransferred to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court, being now on its mettle, reaffirmed its position, likewise in a long opinion, in which it held, one should say not insanely, that there must be some court to say the final word and this must be the Supreme Court. It also pointed out that this same defendant, the Panhandle Railroad, had already tried four times, unsuccessfully, to plead the unconstitutionality of this same law, to defeat similar judgements, and intimated that it was about time to put an end to this sort of trumpery litigation. Case retransferred to the Appellate Court where under the statute it belonged.

Did the Appellate Court accept this ruling of the Supreme Court? Not in the least. In a memorandum it said: "The case having been submitted to the full court, and four judges not concurring, the case is retransferred to the Supreme Court."

And there the Peck case sleeps!

POWDERED STEK-O

RELIABLE

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All this, gentle reader, happened years ago. The last action of the Appellate Court was January, 1910, and on December 5 last, the case was still on the docket of the Supreme Court. The judgment obtained by Peck, after two trials, was $4,000. How much of this do you suppose will be left for Peck, when the lawyers, aided and abetted by the courts of Indiana, are through?

If this is not judicial anarchy, I, for one, do not know what the terms mean. It is my personal opinion that no crazy bomb thrower who ever landed on these shores has ever done a tenth part of the harm to American institutions which this judicial anarchism in its innumerable manifestations has worked to render justice a thing of jest and contempt.

The Delicate Shadings of Language

Now the grim part of this especial case is that there has been no severer critic of the law and court administration of the law than the Hon. Cassius C. Hadley, who throughout these proceedings sat as Chief Justice of this same Appellate Court of Indiana, and with whose permission I will take from his able address before the Bar Association of Indiana for 1909 my second example:

"A man was driving along the highway in a wagon on a load of hay, when he was knocked from it by an overhanging telephone wire which had been negligently allowed to fall down. He was permanently injured. He sued the company and proved the injury and the negligence. The jury found for the plaintiff, and assessed damages to compensate him for his injury. The defendent took an appeal, and, for the first time, before any court, raised the question of the sufficiency of the averments of the petition. The Supreme Court, two or three years after the suit was instituted, reversed the case on the ground of the insufficiency of the averments, holding that the complaint was bad in this particular, without regard to whether the record showed a fair trial or a just result. It ruled that an allegation that the plaintiff was driving along on said street upon a load of baled hay, and without seeing or knowing the condition of said telephone wire, he drove against and was caught by said wire and was thrown from his wagon, does not show that the plaintiff was thrown because of such wire! And why? Because of the absence of an averment that he was thereby thrown! Before the case reached a second judgment the plaintiff died, and his action died with him."