e uneducated, was like one
living in isolation among a jealous and alien race. When the house had
been begun, its completion by the winter of 1886 had been expected.
The spring of the following year found it, however, yet incomplete,
and my marriage still a thing of the future. The cause of a delay
calculated to be particularly exasperating to an ardent lover was a
series of strikes, that is to say, concerted refusals to work on the
part of the brick-layers, masons, carpenters, painters, plumbers, and
other trades concerned in house building. What the specific causes of
these strikes were I do not remember. Strikes had become so common at
that period that people had ceased to inquire into their particular
grounds. In one department of industry or another, they had been
nearly incessant ever since the great business crisis of 1873. In fact
it had come to be the exceptional thing to see any class of laborers
pursue their avocation steadily for more than a few months at a time.

The reader who observes the dates alluded to will of course recognize
in these disturbances of industry the first and incoherent phase of
the great movement which ended in the establishment of the modern
industrial system with all its social consequences. This is all so
plain in the retrospect that a child can understand it, but not being
prophets, we of that day had no clear idea what was happening to us.
What we did see was that industrially the country was in a very queer
way. The relation between the workingman and the employer, between
labor and capital, appeared in some unaccountable manner to have
become dislocated. The working classes had quite suddenly and very
generally become infected with a profound discontent with their
condition, and an idea that it could be greatly bettered if they only
knew how to go about it. On every side, with one accord, they
preferred demands for higher pay, shorter hours, better dwellings,
better educational advantages, and a share in the refinements and
luxuries of life, demands which it was impossible to see the way to
granting unless the world were to become a great deal richer than it
then was. Though they knew something of what they wanted, they knew
nothing of how to accomplish it, and the eager enthusiasm with which
they thronged about any one who seemed likely to give them any light
on the subject lent sudden reputation to many would-be leaders, some
of whom had little enough light to give. However chi