came to the door. "We all go
back or none of us do!" cried a hundred voices. And the other shook his
fist at them, and shouted, "You went out of here like cattle, and like
cattle you'll come back!"

Then suddenly the big butcher president leaped upon a pile of stones and
yelled: "It's off, boys. We'll all of us quit again!" And so the cattle
butchers declared a new strike on the spot; and gathering their members
from the other plants, where the same trick had been played, they
marched down Packers' Avenue, which was thronged with a dense mass of
workers, cheering wildly. Men who had already got to work on the killing
beds dropped their tools and joined them; some galloped here and there
on horseback, shouting the tidings, and within half an hour the whole of
Packingtown was on strike again, and beside itself with fury.

There was quite a different tone in Packingtown after this--the place
was a seething caldron of passion, and the "scab" who ventured into
it fared badly. There were one or two of these incidents each day, the
newspapers detailing them, and always blaming them upon the unions. Yet
ten years before, when there were no unions in Packingtown, there was
a strike, and national troops had to be called, and there were pitched
battles fought at night, by the light of blazing freight trains.
Packingtown was always a center of violence; in "Whisky Point," where
there were a hundred saloons and one glue factory, there was always
fighting, and always more of it in hot weather. Any one who had taken
the trouble to consult the station house blotter would have found that
there was less violence that summer than ever before--and this while
twenty thousand men were out of work, and with nothing to do all day
but brood upon bitter wrongs. There was no one to picture the battle the
union leaders were fighting--to hold this huge army in rank, to keep
it from straggling and pillaging, to cheer and encourage and guide a
hundred thousand people, of a dozen different tongues, through six long
weeks of hunger and disappointment and despair.

Meantime the packers had set themselves definitely to the task of making
a new labor force. A thousand or two of strikebreakers were brought in
every night, and distributed among the various plants. Some of them were
experienced workers,--butchers, salesmen, and managers from the packers'
branch stores, and a few union men who had deserted from other cities;
but the vast majority were "gre