"If the occasion offers, you shall reorganize the shops in your own way. I haven't the nerve for this kind of business, though I have seen a great deal of it in the villages, first and last. Strikes are terrible mistakes. Even when they succeed, what pays for the lost time and the money squandered over the tavern-bar? What makes up for the days or weeks when the fire was out on the hearth and the children had no bread? That is what happens, you know." "There is no remedy for such calamities," Richard answered. "Yet I can imagine occasions when it would be better to let the fire go out and the children want for bread." "You are not advocating strikes!" exclaimed Mr. Slocum. "Why not?" "I thought you were for fighting them." "So I am, in this instance; but the question has two sides. Every man has the right to set a price on his own labor, and to refuse to work for less; the wisdom of it is another matter. He puts himself in the wrong only when he menaces the person or the property of the man who has an equal right not to employ him. That is the blunder strikers usually make in the end, and one by which they lose public sympathy even when they are fighting an injustice. Now, sometimes it _is_ an injustice that is being fought, and then it is right to fight it with the only weapon a poor man has to wield against a power which possesses a hundred weapons,--and that's a strike. For example, the smelters and casters in the Miantowona Iron Works are meanly underpaid." "What, have they struck?" "There's a general strike threatened in the village; foundry-men, spinners, and all." "So much the worse for everybody! I did not suppose it was as bad as that. What has become of Torrini?" "The day after he left us he was taken on as forgeman at Dana's." "I am glad Dana has got him!" "At the meeting, last night, Torrini gave in his resignation as secretary of the Association; being no longer a marble worker, he was not qualified to serve." "We unhorsed him, then?" "Rather. I am half sorry, too." "Richard," said Mr. Slocum, halting in one of his nervous walks up and down the room, "you are the oddest composition of hardness and softness I ever saw." "Am I?" "One moment you stand braced like a lion to fight the whole yard, and the next moment you are pitying a miscreant who would have laid your head open without the slightest compunction." "Oh, I forgive him," said Richard. "I was a trifle hasty myself. Margaret thinks so too." "Much Margaret knows about it!" "I was inconsiderate, to say the least. When a man picks up a tool by the wrong end he must expect to get cut." "You didn't have a choice."