And thus it came about that long letters signed “Edward Beaumont” began to appear in one of the local papers, bearing upon the one topic that engrossed the thoughts and speech of nearly every man and woman in Huddersfield, and in the valleys converging on that town, be those men and women of what class, of what degree they might. For the Weavers’ Strike, as it was called, though strike it was not, if by a strike is meant a refusal to work for the wages current at its commencement, had assumed proportions so portentous that there was in all that great and populous district scarce a household that was not seriously affected by it. The combatants drawn up in conflict, of course; but not they alone. And yet they alone, and the children of their loins, were numbered by their thousands. But upon the textile industry of that great area depended dozens of auxiliary trades, and every trade, wholesale and retail, was hit and hit hard. All gloomed under this heavy pall except, at first, the publican, and he, for a few glad weeks, felt that the normal condition of every industry should be one of strike or lock-out; felt it so intensely that in the exuberance of his disinterested sympathy he placed upon his beer-stained tables hot luncheons of fried tripe with onions, and savoury dishes of liver and bacon. And as the men consumed these delicacies and quaffed their measures of “Timmy,” by which fond name the brew of a local firm was widely and appreciatively known, of what should they read, and of Edward Beaumont. It is to be feared that these contributions to the dialectics of the great contest were more relished by the workers than by their employers. The letters took it for granted in the outset that the masters were sincere in their protestations that nothing was further from their thoughts, in insisting on the acceptance of the new scale, than the reduction of current wages. The writer declined to believe, with the men, that the masters’ insistence on this point was but a Machiavellian device for a considerable lowering of rates. The masters were, of course, honourable men, all honourable men, and they must know how the scale of their own devising would work out. But if the men were so obtuse that they could not see that a raising rather than a lowering at all events and certainly no lowering, would result; why not put the whole question to the arbitrament of one or two competent men conversant with the intricacies of the textile trade, men able to unravel the somewhat tangled and bewildering skein of the new scale—and let them say, aye or nay, would it be, as the weavers so passionately persisted, a grievous weekly diminution, not of their earnings, not of their work and output, but of the guerdon of their toil. Never in the whole history of industrial conflicts, the writer exclaimed, had there before been known a case of employers being driven to lock-out their men to dragoon them into accepting higher wages, or of men striking in resentment of