roughly handled that more than once it was necessary to
call out the police reserves.

History was making fast. The air was vibrant with things happening and
impending. The country was on the verge of hard times,* caused by a
series of prosperous years wherein the difficulty of disposing abroad
of the unconsumed surplus had become increasingly difficult. Industries
were working short time; many great factories were standing idle against
the time when the surplus should be gone; and wages were being cut right
and left.

* Under the capitalist regime these periods of hard times
were as inevitable as they were absurd. Prosperity always
brought calamity. This, of course, was due to the excess of
unconsumed profits that was piled up.

Also, the great machinist strike had been broken. Two hundred thousand
machinists, along with their five hundred thousand allies in the
metalworking trades, had been defeated in as bloody a strike as had ever
marred the United States. Pitched battles had been fought with the small
armies of armed strike-breakers* put in the field by the employers'
associations; the Black Hundreds, appearing in scores of wide-scattered
places, had destroyed property; and, in consequence, a hundred thousand
regular soldiers of the United States has been called out to put a
frightful end to the whole affair. A number of the labor leaders had
been executed; many others had been sentenced to prison, while thousands
of the rank and file of the strikers had been herded into bull-pens**
and abominably treated by the soldiers.

* Strike-breakers--these were, in purpose and practice and
everything except name, the private soldiers of the
capitalists. They were thoroughly organized and well armed,
and they were held in readiness to be hurled in special
trains to any part of the country where labor went on strike
or was locked out by the employers. Only those curious
times could have given rise to the amazing spectacle of one,
Farley, a notorious commander of strike-breakers, who, in
1906, swept across the United States in special trains from
New York to San Francisco with an army of twenty-five
hundred men, fully armed and equipped, to break a strike of
the San Francisco street-car men. Such an act was in direct
violation of the laws of the land. The fact that this act,
and thousands of similar acts, went unpunished, goes t