Chicago (Ill.) -- Fiction; City and town life -- Fiction; Coal mines and mining -- Pennsylvania -- Fiction; Labor leaders -- Fiction
All through the early months of that year in Chicago, rumours of a new
and not understandable movement among labourers ran about among men of
affairs. In a way the labourers understood the undercurrent of terror
their marching together had inspired and like the advertising man
dancing on the sidewalk before the grocery were made happy by it. Grim
satisfaction dwelt in their hearts. Remembering their boyhoods and
the creeping terror that invaded their fathers' houses in times of
depression they were glad to spread terror among the homes of the rich
and the well-to-do. For years they had been going through life blindly,
striving to forget age and poverty. Now they felt that life had a
purpose, that they were marching toward some end. When in the past they
had been told that power dwelt in them they had not believed. “He is
not to be trusted,” thought the man at the machine looking at the man at
work at the next machine. “I have heard him talk and at bottom he is a
fool.”
Now the man at the machine did not think of his brother at the next
machine. In his dreams at night he was beginning to have a new vision.
Power had breathed its message into his brain. Of a sudden he saw
himself as a part of a giant walking in the world. “I am like a drop of
blood running through the veins of labour,” he whispered to himself. “In
my own way I am adding strength to the heart and the brain of labour. I
have become a part of this thing that has begun to move. I will not talk
but will wait. If this marching is the thing then I will march. Though I
am weary at the end of the day that shall not stop me. Many times I
have been weary and was alone. Now I am a part of something vast. This I
know, that a consciousness of power has crept into my brain and although
I be persecuted I shall not surrender what I have gained.”
In the offices of the plough trust a meeting of men of affairs was
called. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the movement going
on among the workers. At the plough works it had broken out. No more at
evening did the men shuffle along, like a disorderly mob but marched in
companies along the brick-paved street that ran by the factory door.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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