he big strike. The Bohemians had come
then, and after them the Poles. People said that old man Durham himself
was responsible for these immigrations; he had sworn that he would fix
the people of Packingtown so that they would never again call a strike
on him, and so he had sent his agents into every city and village in
Europe to spread the tale of the chances of work and high wages at the
stockyards. The people had come in hordes; and old Durham had squeezed
them tighter and tighter, speeding them up and grinding them to pieces
and sending for new ones. The Poles, who had come by tens of thousands,
had been driven to the wall by the Lithuanians, and now the Lithuanians
were giving way to the Slovaks. Who there was poorer and more miserable
than the Slovaks, Grandmother Majauszkiene had no idea, but the packers
would find them, never fear. It was easy to bring them, for wages were
really much higher, and it was only when it was too late that the poor
people found out that everything else was higher too. They were like
rats in a trap, that was the truth; and more of them were piling in
every day. By and by they would have their revenge, though, for the
thing was getting beyond human endurance, and the people would rise and
murder the packers. Grandmother Majauszkiene was a socialist, or some
such strange thing; another son of hers was working in the mines of
Siberia, and the old lady herself had made speeches in her time--which
made her seem all the more terrible to her present auditors.

They called her back to the story of the house. The German family had
been a good sort. To be sure there had been a great many of them, which
was a common failing in Packingtown; but they had worked hard, and the
father had been a steady man, and they had a good deal more than half
paid for the house. But he had been killed in an elevator accident in
Durham's.

Then there had come the Irish, and there had been lots of them, too;
the husband drank and beat the children--the neighbors could hear them
shrieking any night. They were behind with their rent all the time,
but the company was good to them; there was some politics back of that,
Grandmother Majauszkiene could not say just what, but the Laffertys had
belonged to the "War Whoop League," which was a sort of political club
of all the thugs and rowdies in the district; and if you belonged to
that, you could never be arrested for anything. Once upon a time old
Lafferty had been caught