e brought to the
harbor. On the docks there were not only negroes now, thousands of
immigrant laborers were brought from Ellis Island and put to work at
double pay, and on every incoming vessel the stokers were all kept on
board. Among the strikers there was a break that swiftly spread and
became a stampede. And in the following week the work of the harbor went
on as before, with its regular commonplace weekly toll of a hundred
killed and injured. Peace had come again at last.

* * * * *

On Saturday morning of that week I stood on the deck of a ferryboat
packed with little commuters who waved and cheered a huge ocean liner
bound for Europe. Lying deep in the water, her hold laden heavy with the
products of this teeming land, her decks thronged with travelers with
money in their pockets, her band playing, her flags streaming out, and
over all on the captain's bridge the officers up there in command--she
was a mighty symbol of order and prosperity and of that Efficiency which
to me had been a religion for so many years. We all followed the great
ship with our eyes as, gathering headway, she steamed out past the
Statue of Liberty toward the battleships beyond.

"Well," said an amused little man close by me, "I guess that'll be about
all from the strikers."

"Oh my smiling little citizen--you've only seen the beginning," I
thought.

What were the strikers thinking now, and what would they be thinking
soon? They had wanted easier lives, they had wanted to feel themselves
powers here. Caught up in the tide of democracy now sweeping all around
the earth, they had wanted to feel themselves running themselves in all
this work they were doing. So they had come out on strike and become a
crowd, and in the crowd they had suddenly found such strength as they
never dreamed could be theirs. And they would not easily forget. The
harbor was already seeing to that, for already its work had gone on with
a rush, and all its heavy labor was weighing down upon them--"like a
million tons of brick on their chests." I remembered what Joe Kramer had
said: "It's got so they can't even breathe without thinking."

Was the defeat of this one strike the end?

The grim battleships answered, "Yes, it is the end."

But the restless harbor answered, "No."

What change was coming in my life? I did not know. Of one thing only I
was sure. The last of my gods, Efficiency, whose feet had stood firm on
mechanical laws