were side-tracked at desolate prairie stations miles from
food and water, and helpless, pleading women and children were penned up
in them and left to hunger and thirst and tremble. In vain the railway
officials pleaded with the city authorities for protection for
passengers and trains. "We have been watching everywhere; we've seen no
violence," was the answer. Policemen along the railway lines laughed and
looked on while, almost within swing of their clubs, strikers were
kicking a victim to death. In vain all appeals to the State. This was a
popular movement,--a poor man's protest against the tyranny of a
grasping monopolist,--The People _vs._ Pullman. Let the railways join in
and discard his cars, and all would be well. Contracts be damned! What
cared they for the law of contract when on the eve of revolution--and
election? Feigning to believe that the managers were merely pretending
that their roads were blocked, openly asserting that the managers could
run their trains if they really wanted to, and slyly intimating that all
the destruction thus far effected was at the hands of paid emissaries of
the managers themselves, officials of a great State and of a great city,
sworn to preserve peace and good order and enforce the laws, dared to
look idly on and trust the masses, to whom they betrayed the honor of
the commonwealth, for the vindication of a re-election. Within three
days of the start, passenger traffic, except on the two or three roads
in the hands of the Federal courts, was practically ended, freight
traffic paralyzed, and the great stock-yards were in the hands of a mob
of frantically rejoicing men. "Not one wheel shall turn in any yard in
all Chicago with the morrow's sun," said Elmendorf, slyly and jeeringly
exultant in the presence and hearing of officers and clerks at the
Pullman building late that night. "The managers have played their last
card, made their last bluff. The State and the city virtually tell them
that it is their own fight, with their own men, men whom they have
systematically browbeaten, bullied, swindled, and starved until now the
worm has turned. At last you see the beginning of the end, the dawn of
the glorious future, the rise of labor against capital, and your friends
the magnates have the option of ruin or surrender. I tell you,
gentlemen, three hundred thousand freemen will line those tracks at noon
to-morrow, and if their----" But the officers to whom he addressed
himself turned im