The shirtwaist-makers’ “general strike,” as it is called, followed an eleven years’ attempt to organize the trade. The union had been unable during this time to affect to any appreciable extent the conditions of work. In its efforts during 1908-9 to maintain the union in the various shops and to prevent the discharge of members who were active union workers, it lost heavily. The effort resolved itself in 1909 into the establishment of the right to organize. The strike in the Triangle Waist Company turned on this issue. The story of the events leading up to the Triangle strike as told by a leading member of the firm practically agrees with the story told by the strikers. The company had undertaken to organize its employes into a club, with benefits attached. The good faith of the company as well as the working-out of the benefit was questioned by the workers. The scheme failed and the workers joined the waist-makers’ union. One day without warning a few weeks later one hundred and fifty of the employes were dropped, the explanation being given by the employers that there was no work. The following day the company advertised for workers. In telling the story later they said that they had received an unexpected order, but admitted their refusal to re-employ the workers discharged the day previous. The union then declared a strike, or acknowledged a lockout, and picketing began. The strike or lockout occurred out of the busy season, with a large supply at hand of workers unorganized and unemployed. Practical trade unionists believed that the manufacturers felt certain of success on account of their ability to draw to an unlimited extent from an unorganized labor market and to employ a guard sufficiently strong to prevent the strikers from reaching the workers with their appeals to join them. But the ninety girls and sixty men strikers were not practical; they were Russian Jews who saw in the lockout an attempt at oppression. In their resistance, which was instinctive, they did not count their chances of winning; they felt that they had been wronged and they rebelled. This quick resentment is characteristic of the Russian Jewish factory worker. The men strikers were intimidated and lost heart, but the women carried on the picketing, suffering arrest and abuse from the police and the guards employed by the manufacturers. At the end of the third week they appealed to the women’s trade union league to protect them, if they could, against false arrest.