when your scanty savings were all
used up, and you had to stand, humiliated and sorrowful, at the relief
station, or in the "Bread Line," to get food for your little family.

Those were the dark days when your dream of a little cottage in the
country, with hollyhocks and morning-glories and larkspurs growing
around it, melted away like the mists of the morning. It was the dream
of your young manhood and of your wife's young womanhood; it was the
dream of your earliest years together, and you both worked and saved
for that little cottage in the suburbs where you would spend the
sunset hours of life together. The Great Strike killed your beautiful
dream; it killed your wife's hopes. You have no dream now and no hope
for the sunset hours. When you think of them you become bitter and
try to banish the thought. I know all about that faded dream,
Jonathan.

Why did you stay out on strike and suffer? Why did you not remain at
work, or at least go back as soon as you saw how hard the fight was
going to be? "What! desert my comrades, and be a traitor to my
brothers in the fight?" you say. But I thought you did not believe in
classes! I thought you were opposed to the Socialists because they set
class to fight class! You were fighting the company then, weren't you;
trying to force them to give you decent conditions? You called it a
fight, Jonathan, and the newspapers, you remember, had great headlines
every day about the "Great Labor War."

It wasn't the Socialists who urged you to go out on strike, Jonathan.
You had never heard of Socialism then, except once you read something
in the papers about some Socialists who were shot down by the Czar's
Cossacks in the streets of Warsaw. You got an idea then that a
Socialist was a desperado with a firebrand in one hand and a bomb in
the other, madly seeking to burn palaces and destroy the lives of rich
men and rulers. No, it was not due to Socialist agitation that you
went out on strike.

You went out on strike because you had grown desperate on account of
the wanton, wicked, needless waste of human life that went on under
your very eyes, day after day. You saw man after man maimed, man after
man killed, through defects in the machinery, and the company, through
your old chum and playmate, refused to make the changes necessary.
They said that it would "cost too much money," though you all knew
that the shareholders were reaping enormous profits. Added to that,
and the fact that you