To preserve law and order is obviously the function of government everywhere; and yet in our complicated modern society, especially as thousands of varied peoples are crowded into cities, it is not always easy to see just where real social order lies. The officials themselves are sometimes perplexed, and at other times deliberately use the devices of government for their own ends. We may take once more in illustration the great strike in the Chicago stock-yards. The immediate object of the strike was the protection of the wages of the unskilled men from a cut of one cent per hour, although, of course, the unions of skilled men felt that this first invasion of the wages increased through the efforts of the union, would be but the entering wedge of an attempt to cut wages in all the trades represented in the stock-yards. Owing to the refusal on the part of the unions to accept arbitration offered by the packers at an embarrassing moment, and because of the failure of the unions to carry out the terms of a contract, the strike in its early stages completely lost the sympathy of that large part of the public dominated by ideals of business honor and fair dealing. It lost, too, the sympathy of that growing body of organized labor which is steadily advancing in a regard for the validity of the contract, and is faithfully cherishing the hope that in time the trades unions may universally attain an accredited business standing. The leaders after the first ten days were, therefore, forced to make the most of the purely human appeal which lay in the situation itself, that 30,000 men, including the allied trades, were losing weeks of wages, with a possible chance of the destruction of their unions on behalf of the unskilled who were the newly arrived Poles and Lithuanians, unable as yet to look out for themselves. Owing to the irregular and limited hours of work--a condition quite like that prevailing on the London docks before the great strike of the dockers--the weekly wage of these unskilled men was exceptionally low, and the plea of the strikers was based upon the duty of the strong to the weak. A chivalric call was issued that the standard of life might be raised to that designated as American, and that this mass of unskilled men might secure an education for their children. Of course no appeal could have been so strong as this purely human one which united for weeks thousands of men of a score of nationalities into that solidarity which only comes through a self-sacrificing devotion to an absorbing cause.