that there was nothing to arbitrate, and that they were merely
asserting their right to manage their own affairs in their own way. One
of the presidents was reported to have told a member of the Board, who
personally summoned him, to get out and to go about his business. Then,
to Fulkerson's extreme disappointment, the august tribunal, acting on
behalf of the sovereign people in the interest of peace, declared
itself powerless, and got out, and would, no doubt, have gone about its
business if it had had any. Fulkerson did not know what to say, perhaps
because the extras did not; but March laughed at this result.

"It's a good deal like the military manoeuvre of the King of France and
his forty thousand men. I suppose somebody told him at the top of the
hill that there was nothing to arbitrate, and to get out and go about
his business, and that was the reason he marched down after he had
marched up with all that ceremony. What amuses me is to find that in an
affair of this kind the roads have rights and the strikers have rights,
but the public has no rights at all. The roads and the strikers are
allowed to fight out a private war in our midst as thoroughly and
precisely a private war as any we despise the Middle Ages for having
tolerated--as any street war in Florence or Verona--and to fight it out
at our pains and expense, and we stand by like sheep and wait till they
get tired. It's a funny attitude for a city of fifteen hundred thousand
inhabitants."

"What would you do?" asked Fulkerson, a good deal daunted by this view
of the case.

"Do? Nothing. Hasn't the State Board of Arbitration declared itself
powerless? We have no hold upon the strikers; and we're so used to being
snubbed and disobliged by common carriers that we have forgotten our
hold on the roads and always allow them to manage their own affairs in
their own way, quite as if we had nothing to do with them and they owed
us no services in return for their privileges."

"That's a good deal so," said Fulkerson, disordering his hair. "Well,
it's nuts for the colonel nowadays. He says if he was boss of this
town he would seize the roads on behalf of the people, and man 'em with
policemen, and run 'em till the managers had come to terms with the
strikers; and he'd do that every time there was a strike."

"Doesn't that rather savor of the paternalism he condemned in Lindau?"
asked March.

"I don't know. It savors of horse sense."

"You are pretty far gone,