A final notice to the old employees was posted in Homestead on July 16. It set forth that "individual" applications for employment would be received by the general superintendent until 6 P. M., Thursday, July 21; that it was the company's desire to retain those of its former workmen who had not taken part in the disturbances, and that the positions of those who failed to comply with this notice would be given to non-union men. The locked-out men treated this manifesto with indifference, letting the prescribed period pass by without any sign of a desire to return to work on Mr. Frick's terms. Their sole reply was embodied in a circular issued July 22, wherein it was set forth that the workingmen of Homestead and the general public had a vested interest in the great industrial establishment built up by the labor of the one and indirectly sustained by tariff taxes paid by the other; that those interests would be asserted and defended in the courts and the halls of legislation and that the men rested their cause--"the cause of American liberty against anarchy on the one hand and despotism on the other, with the courts, the legislatures and the public conscience." On this same day a large force of non-union men reported at the Carnegie offices in Pittsburgh and were shipped to Homestead on the Tide, starting from the Monongahela wharf amid the jeers of a crowd of on-lookers. Similar trips were made every day thereafter, the safe arrival of the first batches of recruits having emboldened others. Once the ball was set rolling, the firm experienced little trouble in securing men. There is always an army of unemployed in the United States, and upon these as well as underpaid workers in various lines--clerks, struggling young professional men and others--who were tempted by the high wages said to be paid at Homestead the firm could and did draw freely. The Homestead leaders contended that it would be impossible to operate the mills without a force of expert steel workers, but Mr. Frick seemed to care little about skill as long as he could secure men able and willing to learn the work entrusted to them. The mills, it appeared, were to be a school in which an entirely new set of artisans were to be instructed, regardless of the losses that must be sustained in the process. [Illustration: BRINGING IN NON-UNIONISTS.]