n 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 familiar
wi