at have come down to us details are wanting, but we know
that, little by little, this amazing project was accomplished. Wages rose
to incredible rates. The cost of living rose with them, for
employers--their new allies wielding in their service the weapons
previously used against them, intimidation, the boycott, and so
forth--more than recouped themselves from the general public. Their
employees got rebates on the prices of products, but for consumers who
were neither laborers nor capitalists there was no mercy. Strikes were a
thing of the past; strike-breakers threw themselves gratefully into the
arms of the unions; "industrial discontent" vanished, in the words of a
contemporary poet, "as by the stroke of an enchanter's wand." All was
peace, tranquillity and order! Then the storm broke.

A man in St. Louis purchased a sheep's kidney for seven-and-a-half
dollars. In his rage at the price he exclaimed: "As a public man I have
given twenty of the best years of my life to bringing about a friendly
understanding between capital and labor. I have succeeded, and may God
have mercy on my meddlesome soul!"

The remark was resented, a riot ensued, and when the sun went down that
evening his last beams fell upon a city reeking with the blood of a
hundred millionaires and twenty thousand citizens and sons of toil!

Students of the history of those troublous times need not to be told what
other and more awful events followed that bloody reprisal. Within
forty-eight hours the country was ablaze with insurrection, followed by
intestinal wars which lasted three hundred and seventy years and were
marked by such hideous barbarities as the modern historian can hardly
bring himself to relate. The entire stupendous edifice of popular
government, temple and citadel of fallacies and abuses, had crashed to
ruin. For centuries its fallen columns and scattered stones sheltered an
ever diminishing number of skulking anarchists, succeeded by hordes of
skin-clad savages subsisting on offal and raw flesh--the race-remnant of
an extinct civilization. All finally vanished from history into a darkness
impenetrable to conjecture.

* * * * *

In concluding this hasty and imperfect sketch I cannot forbear to relate
an episode of the destructive and unnatural contest between labor and
capital, which I find recorded in the almost forgotten work of Antrolius,
who was an eye-witness to the incident.

At a time when the p