twenty years and four months," he
said bitterly, "I'd helped in my small way to build it up, make it a big
concern payin' 28 per cent. dividends every year; I'd given part of my
right hand in doin' it--and they threw me out like an old shoe."

He said he would have pulled up and gone away, but he still had the
little home and the garden, and his wife and daughter were still at
work, so he hung on grimly, trying to get some other job. "But what good
is a man for any other sort of work," he said, "when he has been trained
to the mills for thirty-two years!"

It was not very long after that when the "great strike" began--indeed,
it grew out of the organization which he had tried to launched--and
Bill Hahn threw himself into it with all his strength. He was one of
the leaders. I shall not attempt to repeat here his description of the
bitter struggle, the coming of the soldiery, the street riots, the long
lists of arrests ("some," said he, "got into jail on purpose, so
that they could at least have enough to eat!"), the late meetings of
strikers, the wild turmoil and excitement.

Of all this he told me, and then he stopped suddenly, and after a long
pause he said in a low voice:

"Comrade, did ye ever see your wife and your sickly daughter and your
kids sufferin' for bread to eat?"

He paused again with a hard, dry sob in his voice.

"Did ye ever see that?"

"No," said I, very humbly, "I have never seen anything like that."

He turned on me suddenly, and I shall never forget the look on his face,
nor the blaze in his eyes:

"Then what can you know about working-men?"

What could I answer?

A moment passed and then he said, as if a little remorseful at having
turned thus on me:

"Comrade, I tell you, the iron entered my soul--them days."

It seems that the leaders of the strike were mostly old employees like
Bill Hahn, and the company had conceived the idea that if these men
could be eliminated the organization would collapse, and the strikers be
forced back to work. One day Bill Hahn found that proceedings had been
started to turn him out of his home, upon which he had not been able to
keep up his payments, and at the same time the merchant, of whom he had
been a respected customer for years, refused to give him any further
credit.

"But we lived somehow," he said, "we lived and we fought."

It was then that he began to see clearly what it all meant. He said he
made a great discovery: that the "black peop