But in Huddersfield and in all the wildly beautiful district around, nor for master nor man, was there any hope that night of that ideal, beatific peace. The strike, the great Weavers’ Strike, as it came to be known, was well under weigh, and both masters and men had settled down with the grim resolve of the northern character to see which side could starve the other into submission. For, after all, with all the talk and all the writing about good trade and bad trade, about high profits and losses, about scales and rates of wages, after all the conferences and deputations and talk of arbitration and Boards of Conciliation, to a trial of brute strength, of sheer endurance, of staying power, not to a determination of which side was right and which was wrong, must the contest surely come. It was a very pretty quarrel, as quarrels go, a quarrel to make the cynic hug himself in glee, a quarrel to make angels weep. The masters had agreed upon a new scale of wages to be adopted and enforced in every mill in the district, a scale that would determine not only the plus and minus of the employers’ balance-sheets, but that perhaps negligible affair, the plus or minus of thousands of humble homes for miles around. The masters declared, _ore rotundo_, with swelling voices and in good round phrase that the new scale of wages was not a reduction, but a readjustment; the weavers swore by all their gods that any readjustment the scale would effect would be a transference of so many weekly shillings from the earnings of each craftsman to the pockets of his master. A question, surely, this, to be settled in three minutes by a penny ready reckoner, where and when Reason has sway. But in Huddersfield and in the villages converging therein Reason had unfurled her glittering wings and had fled affrighted from the scene of strife, to return only when Passion, and Hatred, and Ignorance, and all evil imaginings and utterings had wrought their fill of ill.