ody. Anxiety gnaws the soul. Men go about
pale, gloomy, and despairing; women sit at home suffering even more
acutely; until at last the situation becomes absolutely intolerable; and
the strikers are fortunate indeed if they secure a small portion of the
advance which they claimed.

Terrible as all this is, I am afraid we must admit that to just such
miseries, sometimes rashly encountered, often heroically endured, the
workingman owes a great part of the improvement in his condition which
has taken place during the last seventy-five years. A strike is like
war. It should be the last resort. It should never be undertaken except
after long deliberation, and when every possible effort has been made to
secure justice by other means. In many instances it is better to submit
to a certain degree of injustice than resort to a means of redress which
brings most suffering upon the least guilty.

Does the reader know how the industrial classes were treated in former
times? Mr. George Adcroft, president of an important cooeperative
organization in England, began life as a coal miner. He has recently
given to Mr. Holyoake, author of the "History of Cooeperation," some
information about the habits and treatment of English miners only forty
years ago:--

"They worked absolutely naked, and their daughters worked by their side.
He and others were commonly compelled to work sixteen hours a day; and,
from week's end to week's end, they never washed either hands or face.
One Saturday night (he was then a lad of fifteen) he and others had
worked till midnight, when there were still wagons at the pit's mouth.
They had at last refused to work any later. The foreman told the
employer, who waited till they were drawn up to the mouth, and beat them
with a stout whip as they came to the surface."

So reports Mr. Holyoake, who could produce, if necessary, from the
records of parliamentary investigations, many a ream of similar
testimony. In truth, workingmen were scarcely regarded--nay, they were
_not_ regarded--as members of the human family. We find proof of this in
the ancient laws of every country in Europe. In the reign of Edward VI.
there was a law against idle workmen which shows how they were regarded.
Any laboring man or servant loitering or living idly for the space of
three days could be branded on the breast with the latter V (vagabond)
and sentenced to be the slave of the person who arrested him for two
years; and that person coul