m's feelings, Kirby laid the paper aside and undertook to
simplify the matter.

"It's like this," said he. "We'll say a gang of men aren't satisfied
with the pay or the hours they are getting. They asked for more money or
for shorter hours; or for both. If the demand is refused, they stop
working. They won't go back to their jobs till they get the cash and the
hours they want. That is known as 'going on strike.' When a number of
concerns are involved in it, it's sometimes called 'a general strike.'
This paper says a general strike is threatened. That means--"

"I apperceive it, howadji!" exclaimed Najib. "I am onward to it, now. I
might have known the printed page cannot lie. But, oh, my heart berends
itself when I think of the sad fate of those poor folk who do the
stroking! Of an assuredly, Allah hath deprived them of wisdom!

"Not necessarily," argued Kirby, wondering at his henchman's outburst of
sympathy for union labourers so many thousand miles away. "They may win,
you know; or, at least, get a compromise. And their unions will support
them while they are out of work. Of course, they may lose. And then--"

"But when they make refusal to do their work," urged Najib, "will not
the soldiers of the pasha cut them to ribbons with the kourbash and
drive them back to their toil? Or if the pasha of that pashalik is a
brutesome man, will not he cast those poor fellaheen into the prison and
beseize their goods? And I answer, howadji, he will. Wherefore my eyes
are tearing, for the men who have so unlucklessly--"

"Hold on!" exhorted Kirby; albeit despairing of opening the mind of a
man whose forebears for thousands of years had lived in a land where the
_corvee_--forced labour--was a hallowed institution; and where the money
of employers could always enlist the aid of government soldiery to keep
the fellaheen at their tasks. "Hold on! That sort of thing is dead and
done with. Even in the East. Chinese Gordon stamped out the last of it,
in Egypt, years ago. If a man doesn't want to work, he can't be forced
to. All his boss can do is to fire him and try to get some one in his
place. When a whole factory of men strike--especially if there are any
big contract orders to fill in a rush--the employers sometimes find it
cheaper to give them what they want than to call in untrained
strikebreakers. On the other hand, sometimes, the boss can bring the men
to terms. It all depends."

Yielding to the human joy of imparting instru