This formulation was referred to the strike committee. It was accepted by
the strike committee, and went into force on September 8.

The _Vorwaerts_ posted the news as a great Union victory. At the first
bulletin, the news ran like wildfire over the East Side. Multitudes
assembled; men, women, and children ran around Rutgers Square, in tumult
and rejoicing. The workers seized London, the unionists' lawyer, and
carried him around the square on their shoulders, and they even made him
stand on their shoulders and address the crowd from them. People sobbed
and wept and laughed and cheered; and Roman Catholic Italians and Russian
Jews, who had before sneered at each other as "dagoes" and "sheenies,"
seized each other in their arms and called each other brother.

Now that the men and women have returned to their shops, it remains for
all the people involved--the manufacturers, the workers, the retailers,
and the interested public--to make a dispassionate estimate of this new
arrangement. Is the preferential shop so delicate a fabric as to prove
futile? Has it sustaining power? Will the final agreement prove, at last,
to be a Union victory? Will both sides act in good faith--the
manufacturers always honestly preferring Union men, the Union leaders
always maintaining a democratic and an inclusive Union, without autocracy
or bureaucratic exclusion? Undoubtedly there will be failures on both
sides. But the New York cloak makers' strike may be historical, not only
for its results in the cloak industry, but for its contribution to the
industrial problems of the country.

No outsider can read the statement of the terms of the manufacturers'
preference without feeling that a joint agreement committee should have
been established to consider cases of alleged unfair discrimination
against Union workers. On the other hand, no outsider can hear without a
feeling of uneasiness such an assertion as was made to one of the
writers--that strike breakers had been obliged to pay an initiation fee
of one hundred dollars to enter the Cloak Makers' Union.

There is undoubtedly, on both sides, need of patience and a long
educational process to change the attitude of hostility and bitterness
engendered by over twenty years of a false policy of antagonism. But
never before, in the cloak makers' history, have the men and women gone
back to work after a strike holding their heads as high as they do
to-day.[32] It can be reasonably believed that their