THE housemaid of a college president had been offered a situation in the family of a New York millionaire. As the wage promised her would have denuded the academic cupboard, she was asked a shade respectfully-by the -by the president, whether she intended to accept. 'No,' replied the girl primly, 'I think I prefer to remain in a middleclass family.'

Let the reader hesitate, therefore, before deciding hastily that he is too wise or too foolish, too rich or too poor, to be within bowshot of the housemaid's innocently poisoned arrow. For to be described as belonging to the American middle class to-day is something between a compliment and an insult. To disentangle the one from the other, let me invite you first to give ear to a parable which has the added virtue of having been snapshotted as it was happening.

THE PARABLE1

Twelfth week of the strike in Elmport. It began in April. Until June, the strikers had managed to avoid that response to the incitements of a mill

The facts of the strike upon which this 'parable' is based are complicated. Many of them are in dispute. The author of this article simply describes the events as he saw them. ConVOL. 114-NO.1

subservient constabulary which a nation, suckled in the creed that the natural rights of man are the commonlaw rights of eighteenth-century Englishmen, reproachfully terms 'disorder.' Then befell the riot. A woman was killed outright by a revolver-shot fired, some say, by the police, some say by the strikers. Ten people, mostly mill-operatives, were carried to the hospital with cracked sconces or bullet wounds. Nineteen strikers were thrown into jail on charges of riot or murder. Parades were forbidden. The Poles were denied the use of their own society hall for strike meetings; and the town invoked an ordinance aimed at freedom of speech and public assemblage. A sympathetic clergyman offered his churchyard as a meetingplace. The town government retaliated with another ordinance, to prohibit any meeting on property abutting on a public highway,- this, somewhat on the principle of the French Assembly which decreed that no deputy should be a crown minister. 'Say, rather, gentlemen,' replied that statesman sarcastically, 'no deputy named Mirabeau!' From the flat-topped tombstone of

troversy concerning his appeal to the Middle Class is perhaps more profitable than dispute concerning the experiences which led him to make it. THE EDITORS.

a soldier of the Américan Revolution, a strike-leader, haranguing his fellows, was dragged to arrest. The town later voted twelve thousand dollars for special police. These reserves, by an amazing blunder in tact, were recruited in part from the police of Lawrence, the worst-hated by mill-workers of any constabulary in New England.

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The theatre of this bitter warfare with its threatenings and slaughter is a sweet, gracious port-town, once a fishing village, quaintly nestled among great, dome-like glacial hills and majestic sweeps of salt marsh washed by a sounding surf among sand-dunes.

There are three towns in Elmport. One is a winding of elm-arched streets among the ample, gambrel-roofed homesteads of two centuries ago. Wide chimneys and peaked dormers shoulder among the boughs of sleek maples, shapely elms, and ancient oaks. Burnished colonial brasses gleam in the sunshine on front doors. Gardens, behind white fences and hedges of box, are gay with old-fashioned flowers. In the cool, dim parlors of these stately houses, amid ancestral mahoganies, dwell the children of the old settlers who keep the stores of the town (which are maintained by the wages of the operatives), or go to their daily tasks in the city, or live on the incomes of their investments (including stock in these strike-fettered mills).

Across a stone bridge of pre-revolutionary date, under the gaunt walls of the mill buildings, lies the second Elmport, the new. Its streets shimmer in the blistering glare of sun on shadeless asphalt and brick walls; its dooryards are grassless; its wooden tenements stand bleak in winter, sweltering in summer. Here are no crimson rambler roses to sound their note of color against greenery; here is only hardeyed poverty intensified by the grim battle of strike-time, when wages have

stopped and expenses are going on. Against the old Elmport of farmers and sea-captains is set the new,—a mill population of alien birth. These two are working out their destinies.

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But aloof, on the eminences commanding views of the open downs and the illimitable sea-horizon, are the villas of the rich, the third Elmport. So the three great classes are represented here: the rich, indifferent; the middle class, bewildered; the poor, in revolt.

When the trouble at Lawrence, the year previous, was ended, it was evident that something must be done to revindicate before the country the repute of that city. Not that Lawrence was worse governed than many another American city, but that the strike, applying the acid test to the efficacy of our institutions, revealed their defects in the worst possible light. Was there, then, a conscientious effort to remedy the conditions which had produced the strike? There was not. But a wealthy citizen, dying, left five thousand dollars to build a memorial flag-pole. Instead of removing the causes which created the protest of the foreign laborers in the mills, your sole idea was to rebuke the protest. This was the reply of the middle class. You substituted the symbol for the thing.

In Elmport it was the same. 'As a rebuke to the methods of the I.W.W.' and 'to vindicate the loyalty of the town to our national institutions,' Elmport resolved-to arbitrate the strike? No. The attempt at this was a failure because the mill management denied that there was 'anything to arbitrate.' To mitigate the discontent by scouring up the reeking tenements? No. A militant young clergyman had proposed this, to be promptly checked in his generous enthusiasm by the revelation that the rents from these tene