nd their families it would
be hard to overestimate. Small inconveniences were made light of.
Families on strike themselves, or the friends of strikers would crush
into yet tighter quarters so that a couple of boys or two or three
girls out of work might crowd into the vacated room, and so have a
shelter over their heads "till the strike was over." A League member
found her way one bitter afternoon in December to one home where lay
an Italian woman in bed with a new-born baby and three other children,
aged three, four and five years respectively, surrounding her. There
was neither food nor fuel in the house. On the bed were three letters
from the husband's employer, offering to raise his old pay from
fifteen to thirty dollars per week, if he would go back to work and so
help to break the strike. The wife spoke with pride of the husband's
refusal to be a traitor. "It is not only bread we give the children.
We live not by bread alone. We live by freedom, and I will fight for
it though I die to give it to my children." And this woman's baby was
one of 1,250 babies born into strikers' homes that winter.

To me those long months were like nothing so much as like living in a
besieged city. There was the same planning for the obtaining of food,
and making it last as long as possible, the same pinched, wan faces,
the same hunger illnesses, the same laying of little ones into baby
graves. And again, besides the home problems, there was the same
difficulty of getting at the real news, knowing the meaning of what
was going on, the same heart-wearing alternations of hope and dread.

Through it all, moreover, persisted the sense that this was something
more than an industrial rising, although it was mainly so. It was
likewise the uprising of a foreign people, oppressed and despised.
It was the tragedy of the immigrant, his high hopes of liberty and
prosperity in the new land blighted, finding himself in America, but
not of America.

By the end of November the manufacturers were beginning to tire of
watching their idle machinery, and the tale of unfilled orders grew
monotonous. There began to be grumbles from the public against the
disastrous effects upon business of the long-continued struggle.
Alderman Merriam succeeded in having the City Council bring about a
conference of the parties to the strike "to the end that a just and
lasting settlement of the points in controversy may be made."

Messrs Hart, Schaffner and Marx, a firm