ith a huge bag on his shoulders. The bag
came down on top of him, and he lay there white and still. Later I
learned that his spine had been broken, that he would be paralyzed for
life.

But what I saw was only a part. From the policemen's books alone I found
a record for that week of six dockers killed and eighty-seven injured. I
traced about a score of these cases back into their tenement homes, and
there I found haggard, crippled men and silent, anxious women, the
mothers of small children. Curious and deeply thrilled, these children
looked at the man on the bed, between his groans of pain I heard their
eager questions, they kept getting in their mother's way. One thin
Italian mother, whose nerves were plainly all on edge, suddenly slapped
the child at her skirts, and then when it began to cry she herself burst
into tears.

These tragic people gripped me hard. The stokers down in their foul hole
in the bottom of the ship had only disturbed and repelled me. But these
crippled dockers in their homes, with their women and their children,
their shattered lives, their agony, starvation looming up ahead--they
brought a tightening at my throat--nor was it all of pity. For these
labor victims were not dumb, I heard the word "strike!" spoken bitterly
here, and now I felt that they had a right to this bitter passion of
revolt.

But still I felt their way was wrong. How could any real good, any sure
intelligent remedies for all this fearful misery, come out of the minds
of such people as these, who were rushing so blindly into revolt? I went
into saloons full of dockers and stokers, and out of the low harsh
hubbub there the word "strike!" came repeatedly to my ears, recklessly
from drunken tongues. Wherever I went I heard that word. I heard it
spoken in many languages, in many tones. Anxious old women said
"strike!" with fear. Little street urchins shouted it joyously. Even the
greenest foreigner understood its meaning. A little Greek, who had
broken his arm and was one of the cases I traced home, understood none
of my questions. "You speak no English?" He shook his head. "Strike!" I
ventured. Up he leaped. "Yo' bet!" he cried emphatically.

What was it deep within me that leaped up then as though to meet that
burning passion in his eyes?

"Keep your head," I warned myself. "To change all this means years of
work--thinking of the clearest kind. And what clear thinking can these
men do? The ships have got them down so low t