keting on his own operatives. Some came with timid steps; others,
mostly women, fairly ran; still others were self-possessed, almost
defiant--and such he marked. There were those who, when the picketers
held them by the sleeve, broke precipitately from their annoyers, and
those who hesitated, listening with troubled faces, with feelings torn
between dread of hunger for themselves and their children and sympathy
with the revolt. A small number joined the ranks of the picketers. Ditmar
towered above these foreigners, who were mostly undersized: a student of
human nature and civilization, free from industrial complexes, would from
that point of vantage have had much to gather from the expressions coming
within his view, but to Ditmar humanity was a means to an end. Suddenly,
from the cupolas above the battlement of the mill, the bells shattered
the early morning air, the remnant of the workers hastened across the
canal and through the guarded gates, which were instantly closed. Ditmar
was left alone among the strikers. As he moved toward the bridge they
made a lane for him to pass; one or two he thrust out of his way. But
there were mutterings, and from the sidewalk he heard a man curse him.

Perhaps we shall understand some day that the social body, also, is
subject to the operation of cause and effect. It was not what an
ingenuous orthodoxy, keeping alive the fate of the ancient city from
which Lot fled, would call the wrath of heaven that visited Hampton,
although a sermon on these lines was delivered from more than one of her
pulpits on the following Sunday. Let us surmise, rather, that a decrepit
social system in a moment of lowered vitality becomes an easy prey to
certain diseases which respectable communities are not supposed to have.
The germ of a philosophy evolved in decadent Europe flies across the sea
to prey upon a youthful and vigorous America, lodging as host wherever
industrial strife has made congenial soil. In four and twenty hours
Hampton had "caught" Syndicalism. All day Tuesday, before the true nature
of the affection was developed, prominent citizens were outraged and
appalled by the supineness of their municipal phagocytes. Property, that
sacred fabric of government, had been attacked and destroyed, law had
been defied, and yet the City Hall, the sanctuary of American tradition,
was turned over to the alien mob for a continuous series of mass
meetings. All day long that edifice, hitherto chastely famil