ked us. They have made
fools of us. A speaker asked are we mice or men. I ask them are they
rats or men. I want these rats to come out of their holes and stand upon
this floor. Who was the first man that suggested this strike? I want to
see the color of his hair. Stand up, if he's in the hall. If he isn't
here, why isn't he?"

No one answered.

"If this strike was called by outsiders," I cried, "why don't the
outsiders do the striking? Whose jobs will be lost in this strike--our
jobs or the outsiders' jobs? If the man who started this strike has a
job that won't be lost in the strike, then I claim that we have made a
bad mistake. And if we're making a mistake, men, what are we going to do
about it?"

I sat down, exhausted by the first attempt at public pleading I had ever
made. Everything grew dark about me, and I knew that I had done my best
and that I was through. I was quite young, and I went to pieces like an
untrained runner who had overdone himself.

The men were talking to one another, and somebody moved that the meeting
take a recess until after supper. It would give time to think it over
and find out what the men really thought about the strike proposition.

CHAPTER XXXII. LOGIC WINS IN THE STRETCH

At seven o'clock we met again and several men made short talks opposing
the strike. Each fellow, when he got up, seemed to have a lot of ideas,
but when he tried to express them he grew confused, and after stammering
a while he could only put forth the bare opinion, "I don't think we
ought to strike." This meeting was quite different from the other one.
Here every man was thinking for himself but nobody could say anything.
In the previous meeting the speakers had talked passionately, and the
rest had been swept along with them as a unit. In other words, the first
session had become group-minded instead of individual-minded. It is like
the difference between a stampede and a deliberative body. The second
meeting was calmly deliberative and it finally voted a reconsideration,
and the strike resolution was overwhelmingly defeated.

If this were a novel, it would be fine to record in this chapter that
the young orator who at the last moment turned the tide and saved the
day became the hero of the union and was unanimously elected president.
That's the way these things go in fiction. And that is exactly what
happened. In due time I found myself at the head of the Local, and
nearly every man had voted for me