d decided that there was
something that they wanted too. They decided that I and thousands of
other people in New York would have to wait over on the shores of
America until they got it.

After postponing my plans until things had settled down, I took passage,
and in due time found myself standing on English soil, only to be
informed that, while I might be allowed perhaps at least to stand on
English soil, that was really as much as I could expect. I could not go
anywhere because a number of men on the railways had decided that there
was something they wanted and that I would have to wait till they got
it.

I could go down and look at the silent, cold locomotives on the rails,
and I could be as wistful and hopeful as I liked about getting up to
London, but these men had decided that there was something that they
wanted and I must wait.

I could not think of anything I had ever done to these men, and what had
Liverpool and London done to them?

After I was duly settled in London, and had begun to get into its little
ways, and was busily driving about and attending to my business as I had
planned, 6,000 more men suddenly wanted something, brought me up to a
full stop one rainy day, and said that they had decided that if I wanted
to ride I would have to walk, or that I would have to poke dismally
about in a 'bus, or worm my way through under the ground. As I
understood it, there was something that they wanted and something that
they were going to get; and while of course in a way, they recognized
that there might be something that I wanted too, I would have to wait
till they got theirs.

I could not think of anything I had ever done to them, nor could I see
what the thousands of other good people in London that I saw walking and
puddling about, or watched waiting twenty minutes or so with long,
hopeful, dogged whistles for cabs, had done to them.

A few days more, and my morning paper tells me suddenly of some more men
who wanted something--this time up in Lancashire. They had decided that
they wouldn't let some two or three hundred thousand other men go to
their work until they got it. They hushed cities to have their own way.
Day by day I watched them throwing the silence of the cities in their
employers' faces, closing shops, closing up railroads, telling the world
it must pay more for the clothes on its back, and all because--a certain
Mr. and Mrs. Riley of Accrington, North Lancashire did not like or did
not t