ips for a principle, men and women who had fought in Russia, who
were revolutionists, willing to make sacrifices, eager to make
sacrifices. Their blind faith was the backbone of the strike.

This furore was continuing when, in the third week in August, the loss of
contracts by the manufacturers and the general stagnation of business due
to the idleness of 40,000 men and women, normally wage-earners, induced a
number of bankers and merchants of the East Side to bring pressure for a
settlement of the strike. Louis Marshall, an attorney well known in New
York in Jewish charities, assembled the lawyers of both sides. They drew
up an agreement in which the preferential union shop again appeared as
the basis of future operations, formulated as in the Brandeis conference.

The _Vorwaerts_ printed the result of the Marshall conference with deep
concern. It maintained a neutral attitude. The editorials urged that the
readers consider the whole document soberly, discuss it freely in local
meetings, and vote for themselves, on their own full understanding, after
mature conviction on each point.

Tremendous crowds surged around the _Vorwaerts_ office. They almost mobbed
the East Side leaders, with their voluble questioning about the
preferential Union shop. Thousands of men and women and children called
out pleas and reproaches and recriminations in an avid personal
demonstration possible only to their race. "Oh, you wouldn't sell us
out?" they cried desperately. "You wouldn't sell us out? You are our
hope."

Imagine what these days of doubt, of an attempt to understand, meant to
these multitudes, knowing no industrial faith but that of the closed shop
which had failed them absolutely, wanderers from a strange country,
turning wildly to their leaders, who could only tell them that they must
determine their own fates, they must decide for themselves. These leaders
have been blamed at once for their autocracy and for not mobilizing and
informing and directing these multitudes more clearly and firmly. Their
critics failed to conceive the remarkably various economic and political
histories of the enormous concourse of human beings engaged in the needle
trades of New York.

However that may be, when the workers and their families surged around
the _Vorwaerts_ office and asked the leaders if they had betrayed them,
Schlesinger, the business manager, and the old strike leaders addressed
them from the windows, and said to the people, w