This attitude of the foreign workers is a bitter pill for the Steel Trust. For many years it had scoured the countries of Eastern and Southern Europe, and packed its mills with poor, dispirited, ignorant immigrants of three score nationalities, in the hope that it was finally supplanting its original crew of independent American and Western European workmen by a race of submissive, unorganizable slaves. And for a long time this shameful policy worked well. Wages sank to nowhere; conditions became unspeakably wretched; every strike of the old-time, organized workers was smothered by an avalanche of job-hungry immigrants.[20] But now these foreigners are waking up; in consequence of hard economic conditions, a better acquaintance with our language and institutions, an inherent class solidarity, the example of union men in other industries, and the social upheavals in Europe, these men are opening their eyes; and they are fast taking their place in the very front rank of the working class fighters for industrial liberty. And now the Steel Trust, discovering that its hoped-for-scabs are in truth highly rebellious workingmen, is making the welkin ring with inconsistent denunciation of the "revolutionary foreigners," with whom just a short while ago it was so anxious to crowd its plants. The biter has been very badly bitten. For the unions the nationality problem was serious throughout the entire campaign--the employers had worked for years to make it an insoluble one. Something of the situation may be gleaned when it is recalled that the steel industry comprises hundreds of mills, scattered through a dozen states, and employing half a million workers. These speak dozens of widely differing languages, worship through many mutually antagonistic religions, and are moved by numberless racial and national animosities. Yet the National Committee, with the skimped resources it had in hand, had to and did weld together this vast polyglot, heterogeneous mass into a voluntary organization, kept it thinking alike, and held it in strong discipline for months in the face of the bitter opposition of the Steel Trust, which sought in every conceivable way to divide the workers by playing upon their multiplicity of fears and prejudices. In accomplishing this huge task the first requisite was to overcome the language difficulty sufficiently to permit the message of trade unionism to be brought forcefully to the many diverse elements. Because doing so would have rendered the meetings ruinously cumbersome and unwieldy, it was out of the question to utilize all the languages or any considerable number of them; so the plan was followed of using only the predominant ones; the theory being that if the large bodies of workers speaking them could be reached, they in turn would find means to influence the minorities speaking other languages.