al and
Conservative sheets only lies about them. A deputation of twelve miners
who went to London received a sum from the proletariat there, but this,
too, availed little among the mass who needed support. Yet, in spite of
all this, the miners remained steadfast, and what is even more
significant, were quiet and peaceable in the face of all the hostilities
and provocation of the mine owners and their faithful servants. No act
of revenge was carried out, not a renegade was maltreated, not one single
theft committed. Thus the strike had continued well on towards four
months, and the mine owners still had no prospect of getting the upper
hand. One way was, however, still open to them. They remembered the
cottage system; it occurred to them that the houses of the rebellious
spirits were THEIR property. In July, notice to quit was served the
workers, and, in a week, the whole forty thousand were put out of doors.
This measure was carried out with revolting cruelty. The sick, the
feeble, old men and little children, even women in childbirth, were
mercilessly turned from their beds and cast into the roadside ditches.
One agent dragged by the hair from her bed, and into the street, a woman
in the pangs of childbirth. Soldiers and police in crowds were present,
ready to fire at the first symptom of resistance, on the slightest hint
of the Justices of the Peace, who had brought about the whole brutal
procedure. This, too, the working-men endured without resistance. The
hope had been that the men would use violence; they were spurred on with
all force to infringements of the laws, to furnish an excuse for making
an end of the strike by the intervention of the military. The homeless
miners, remembering the warnings of their Attorney General, remained
unmoved, set up their household goods upon the moors or the harvested
fields, and held out. Some, who had no other place, encamped on the
roadsides and in ditches, others upon land belonging to other people,
whereupon they were prosecuted, and, having caused "damage of the value
of a halfpenny," were fined a pound, and, being unable to pay it, worked
it out on the treadmill. Thus they lived eight weeks and more of the wet
fag-end of last summer under the open sky with their families, with no
further shelter for themselves and their little ones than the calico
curtains of their beds; with no other help than the scanty allowances of
their Union and the fast shrinking credit w