Once the fight was on, Sartwell determined to give no quarter. He resolved to fill up the works, if possible, with men from outside, and to take back none of the old employees who did not sign a paper promising to abandon the Union. In the former strike he had been anxious to get his men back in a body, and had made no real attempt to fill their places. He knew in the beginning of the second struggle that he was fighting for his life, and that if he suffered defeat he would resign, and the place that had known him for years would know him no more. He had no fear that the company would discharge him if he lost the battle,--in fact he knew they would use every effort to induce him to remain; but it was his own stubborn pride, as his wife called it, that he felt he could not overcome even if he had wished to do so. Sartwell, like certain swords of finely-tempered steel, would break, but would not bend. Years of unflinching determination in what he thought was right had made him a man over whom he himself had but slight control; and he sometimes recognized with grim humour that while he could persuade all his _confrères_ to take a devious but safe course upon any given problem, he could not induce himself to follow anything but the straight line. He worked night and day at the task of filling the factory with new men. He scoured the country for them, and his telegraph bills alone were enormous; but men were scarce--good men are always scarce, and now even indifferent workers were hard to find. Gibbons had once said that the workingman of modern times suffers from the fact that he is merely a cog in a big wheel, but this truism tells also against the employer who is trying to fill his shops. If a cog is useless by itself it must not be forgotten that the wheel is also useless until the cog is replaced. It is easy for an employer to supply the place of a single cog; but when the whole wheel is cogless, ninety-nine cogs are of no avail if the hundredth necessary to complete the circle cannot be found.