By the end of the first week the novelty has passed, and the money of some of the improvident families is running low. All are upon short allowance, the problem being to prolong life at the minimum of expense. The man goes without his meat, the mother without her tea, the children without the trifling, inexpensive luxuries with which parental fondness usually treated them. Before the end of the second week a good many are hungry, and the workers begin to pine for employment. Their muscles are as hungry for exercise as their stomachs are for food. The provision dealers are more and more cautious about giving credit. The bank accounts, representing months or years of self-denying economy, begin to lessen rapidly, and careful fathers see that the bulwarks which they have painfully thrown up to defend their children against the wolf are crumbling away a hundred times faster than they were constructed. If the strike lasts a month, one half the population suffers every hour, and suffers more in mind than in body. Anxiety gnaws the soul. Men go about pale, gloomy, and despairing; women sit at home suffering even more acutely; until at last the situation becomes absolutely intolerable; and the strikers are fortunate indeed if they secure a small portion of the advance which they claimed. Terrible as all this is, I am afraid we must admit that to just such miseries, sometimes rashly encountered, often heroically endured, the workingman owes a great part of the improvement in his condition which has taken place during the last seventy-five years. A strike is like war. It should be the last resort. It should never be undertaken except after long deliberation, and when every possible effort has been made to secure justice by other means. In many instances it is better to submit to a certain degree of injustice than resort to a means of redress which brings most suffering upon the least guilty. Does the reader know how the industrial classes were treated in former times? Mr. George Adcroft, president of an important cooeperative organization in England, began life as a coal miner. He has recently given to Mr. Holyoake, author of the "History of Cooeperation," some information about the habits and treatment of English miners only forty years ago:-- "They worked absolutely naked, and their daughters worked by their side. He and others were commonly compelled to work sixteen hours a day; and, from week's end to week's end, they never washed either hands or face. One Saturday night (he was then a lad of fifteen) he and others had worked till midnight, when there were still wagons at the pit's mouth. They had at last refused to work any later. The foreman told the employer, who waited till they were drawn up to the mouth, and beat them with a stout whip as they came to the surface."