e seemed to have some real influence.

He had not spoken ten words when some one by the door cried, "Come
outside! Big crowd out here want to get in." It was moonlight and not
very cold, so every one moved out of the hall, and Philip mounted the
steps of a storehouse near by and spoke to a crowd that filled up the
street in front and for a long distance right and left. His speech was
very brief, but it was fortified with telling figures, and at the close
he stood and answered a perfect torrent of questions. His main counsel
was against a strike in the present situation. He had made himself
familiar with the facts on both sides. Strikes, he argued, except in
very rare cases, were demoralizing--an unhealthy, disastrous method of
getting justice done. "Why, just look at that strike in Preston,
England, among the cotton spinners. There were only 660 operatives, but
that strike, before it ended, threw out of employment over 7,800 weavers
and other workmen who had nothing whatever to do with the quarrel of the
660 men. In the recent strike in the cotton trade in Lancashire, at the
end of the first twelve weeks the operatives had lost in wages alone
$4,500,000. Four strikes that occurred in England between 1870 and 1880,
involved a loss in wages of more than $25,000,000. In 22,000 strikes
investigated lately by the National Bureau of Labor, it is estimated
that the employees lost about $51,800,000, while the employers lost only
$30,700,000. Out of 353 strikes in England between 1870 and 1880, 191
were lost by the strikers, 71 were gained, and 91 com-promised; but in
the strikes that were successful, it took several years to regain in
wages the amount lost by the enforced idleness of the men."

There were enough hard-thinking, sensible men in the audience that night
to see the force of his argument. The majority, however, were in favor
of a general strike to gain their point in regard to the scale of wages.
When Philip went home he carried with him the conviction that a general
strike in the mills was pending. In spite of the fact that it was the
worst possible season of the year for such action, and in spite of the
fact that the difference demanded by the men was a trifle, compared with
their loss of wages the very first day of idleness, there was a
determination among the leaders that the fifteen thousand men in the
mills should all go out in the course of a few days if the demands of
the men in the Ocean Mill were not grante