They called it the Debs Rebellion, and for a while it assumed some of the proportions of a rebellion, or at least it frightened many people in Illinois as much as a rebellion might have done. We were in the midst of all its alarms during that whole spring and summer, and down in the adjutant-general’s office at the State House there was the stir almost of war itself, with troops being ordered here and there about the state, and the Governor harried and worried by a situation that presented to him the abhorrent necessity of using armed force. I was reading over the other day the report made to the War Department by my friend Major Jewett Baker, then a lieutenant in the Twelfth U. S. Infantry, detailed with the National Guard of Illinois; and in his clear and excellent account of all those confused events the scenes of those times came back: the long lines of idle freight cars, charred by incendiary flames; the little groups of men standing about wearing the white ribbons of the strike sympathizers, and the colonel of the regular army, in his cups at his club, who wished he might order a whole regiment to shoot them, “each man to take aim at a dirty white ribbon”; the regulars encamped on the lake front, their sentinels pacing their posts at the quickstep in the rain; and then that morning conference in the mayor’s office in Chicago, at which I was permitted to look on--what an interesting life it is to look on at!--when there appeared Eugene V. Debs, tall, lithe, nervous, leader of the strikers, his hair, what there was of it, sandy, but his head mostly bald, his eyes flashing, his mouth ready to smile, soon to go to Woodstock Jail, to emerge a Socialist, and become the leader of that party. Major Baker’s report shows, indirectly and by inference, that much of the criticism which the Governor endured was not justified, since he turned out all his troops as fast as local authorities asked for them. At any rate, he acted according to his democratic principles and to his conception of his duty. His principles were in a sense different from those of President Cleveland, with whom he disagreed in that notable instance when the President in his vigorous, practical way sent federal troops into Chicago; the Governor protested, as one of his predecessors in the governor’s office, Senator Palmer, had protested when President Grant sent federal troops under Phil Sheridan into Chicago at the time of the great fire. Almost everybody who had any way of making his voice heard sided with President Cleveland, and the end of the strike was accredited to him. Doubtless the grim presence of those regular troops did overawe the hoodlums who had taken advantage of the strike to create disorder, but if the credit must go to armed force, the report by Major, or, as he was in those days, Lieutenant, Baker shows that that little company of the Illinois National Guard which ruthlessly fired into the mob at Loomis Street one night virtually ended the disorder.