and
mothers, to say nothing of babies, depending upon them.

"There wasn't a living for a decent family left," he said.

So they struck--and he told me in his dull monotone of the long
bitterness of that strike, the empty cupboards, the approach of winter
with no coal for the stoves and no warm clothing for the children. He
told me that many of the old workers began to leave the town (some bound
for the larger cities, some for the Far West).

"But," said he with a sudden outburst of emotion, "I couldn't leave. I
had the woman and the children!"

And presently the strike collapsed, and the workers rushed helter
skelter back to the mills to get their old jobs. "Begging like whipped
dogs," he said bitterly.

Many of them found their places taken by the eager "black people," and
many had to go to work at lower wages in poorer places--punished for the
fight they had made.

But he got along somehow, he said--"the woman was a good manager"--until
one day he had the misfortune to get his hand caught in the machinery.
It was a place which should have been protected with guards, but was
not. He was laid up for several weeks, and the company, claiming that
the accident was due to his own stupidity and carelessness, refused
even to pay his wages while he was idle. Well, the family had to live
somehow, and the woman and the daughter--"she was a little thing," he
said, "and frail"--the woman and the daughter went into the mill. But
even with this new source of income they began to fall behind. Money
which should have gone toward making the last payments on their home
(already long delayed by the strike) had now to go to the doctor and the
grocer.

"We had to live," said Bill Hahn.

Again and again he used this same phrase, "We had to live!" as a sort of
bedrock explanation for all the woes of life.

After a time, with one finger gone and a frightfully scarred hand--he
held it up for me to see--he went back into the mill.

"But it kept getting worse and worse," said he, "and finally I couldn't
stand it any longer."

He and a group of friends got together secretly and tried to organize a
union, tried to get the workmen together to improve their own condition;
but in some way ("they had spies everywhere," he said) the manager
learned of the attempt and one morning when he reported at the mill he
was handed a slip asking him to call for his wages, that his help was no
longer required.

"I'd been with that one company for