women who
had been sincerely ready to risk starvation for the justice of their
claims during the fight would in peace become indifferent, fail to attend
Union meetings, fail to pay Union dues; and the organization, strong in
the time of defeat through the members' zeal, would weaken through their
negligence in the critical hour of an ill-established success.

The main contestants in this struggle had been the cloak makers on one
side, and on the other the manufacturers belonging to the Cloak and Suit
Manufacturers' Protective Association. The majority of the manufacturers
in the association are men of standing in the trade, controlling large
West Side establishments, and supplying fifty per cent of the New York
output, though they represent only a small percentage of the cloak houses
of New York. These cloak houses altogether number between thirteen and
fourteen hundred, most of them on the East Side and the lower West Side,
manufacturing cheap and medium-grade clothing. Such smaller houses had
frequently broken the strikes of the last twenty-five years by temporary
agreements in which they afterwards proved false to the workers. Many
small dealers had become rich merchants through such strike harvests.

On this account the cloak makers naturally distrusted employers'
agreements. On the other hand, in many instances in the settlement of
former strikes, cloak makers had made with certain dealers secret terms
which enabled them to undersell their competitors. For this reason the
manufacturers naturally distrusted cloak makers' agreements. With this
mutual suspicion, the strike of 1910 began in June in two houses, an East
Side and a West Side house. From the first house the workers went out
because of the subcontracting system, and from the second practically on
account of lockout.

On the 3d of July, a mass meeting of 10,000 cloakmakers gathered in
Madison Square Garden. It was decided that the question of a general
strike should be put to the vote of the 10,000 Union members. Balloting
continued at the three polls of the three Union offices for two
succeeding days. Of these 10,000, all but about 600 voted in favor of the
strike, and of these 600 the majority afterward declared that they, too,
were in sympathy with the action.

The wide prevalence of the difficulties which led to the decision of the
10,000 workers assembled at Madison Square Garden was evinced by the fact
that within the next week an army of over 40,00