“You would do well to think three or four times,” replied French, “before exercising any such power as that. You workingmen are overstepping the bounds not only of moderation, but of common justice and common sense. Suppose you should do what you threaten, what do you suppose the capitalists would do in turn? You don’t know? Well, I can tell you. We would say that we were weary of your exactions, your interference, and your airs. We would say to you: ‘You have stopped the wheels; very well, we will not start them. You have extinguished the furnace fires, we will not rekindle them. You have disabled the engines, we will not repair them. With the downward stab of your vicious knife you have cut our surface veins, but you have received the force of the blow in your own vitals—bleed to death at your leisure. We will retire for a while and nurse our scratches.’ “You don’t know what you are talking about,” continued the old man. “You don’t conceive the misery and ruin that would result from sixty days’ stoppage of labor in the fields and foundries and factories and furnaces, and sixty days’ suspension of traffic over the railroads of our land. With the disabled engines in the roundhouses, and the cars covered with dust in the deserted yards; with ships and steamers lying idle at the wharves or sailed away to trade between the ports of other lands, whose governments, wiser or more powerful than ours, would not suffer the moral law to be violated by either individuals or societies; with moss gathered upon the turbines; with chimneys towering smokeless to the skies; with the music of forge and anvil hushed; with almshouses crowded, asylums filled, and jails overflowing; with men suffering and women growing gaunt from hunger, and little children sobbing themselves to the fevered sleep of famine; with the furniture in the auction room, trinkets and clothing in the pawn shop, and families once comfortable wandering shelterless under the stars; with even disease welcomed as a friend who should pilot the sufferer to the deliverance of death, would you find consolation for it all in the reflection that you had, maybe, carried your point and prevented non-union men, who are as good as yourselves in every way, from working alongside you at the same wages you demanded for yourselves?” “Mr. French,” said the Chairman, “what do you wish us to do?” “I don’t care what you do,” was the response, “but if you have any sense, you will go home and repeal your fool resolution to strike if non-union workers are employed.” “That, Mr. French,” said the spokesman, “we cannot and will not do.” “No?” replied the millionaire. “Well, you must go to destruction then in your own way. Goodmorning.”