t to interfere with the worker's
effort to defend what he considers his property--that is, his right of
employment in a business to which he is accustomed. The community
sympathizes with his fear of the hardship which may result when
employers freely utilize idle labor as a means of defeating strikes.
On the other hand, even a local community realizes that much
toleration of force means anarchy. If the violence is not resisted or
repressed, the strikers acquire a monopoly that is not dependent on
the justice of their claims. The whole question of reasonableness in
the terms demanded is forcibly set aside, and the pay that is
established becomes, not whatever a calm verdict of disinterested
persons would approve, but what workers by brute force can get. Even a
local public is unwilling to see the social order completely subverted
and mob rule substituted, and it usually interferes when violence goes
to that length; but in its unwillingness completely to repress
disorder, on the one hand, or to leave it wholly unopposed, on the
other, a local government pursues a wavering policy, now repressing
anarchy and again leaving it to gather headway. It seldom affords full
protection to the non-union men who work during a strike. Moreover, it
is the habit of state governments not to interfere with local affairs
until the public peace is endangered, and therefore not until the
coercion of free laborers has gone to great lengths. The federal
government only intervenes in great emergencies. Non-union men working
during a strike are left largely in the hands of the local community,
which often tolerates enough of violence to give to strikers a
measure of monopolistic power. The wavering policy of the local
community in regard to preserving the peace expresses a corresponding
mental wavering. The public obeys no clear principle of action in this
connection and merely allows some "slugging" when it sympathizes with
strikers, but not, as a rule, when it does not. We have to see whether
this rule has in it any germ of a legitimate policy.

_The Sole Mode of Escape._--The sympathy in the case depends, as we
have seen, on the off-hand impression of the people as to the
reasonableness of the strikers' demands; and for such an impression
there may or may not be an adequate ground. It is evident that no
authoritative verdict has in these cases been pronounced. The only
escape from the intolerable situation which is thus created is by
testing