Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/197



Some prophets would have confidently gone for an entire cessation of strikes, under the anticipated advanced features of the twentieth century. The working classes, they might have thought, would, by that time, by help of sound economic progress, have managed to arrange their differences in some other way. Nevertheless, a notable strike did occur at the advanced time I have indicated; and its particulars, which I am about to give, are somewhat special and curious, as well as illustrative of that particular time. The illustrious Yellowly had not overlooked strikes in his reforming efforts. He, in fact, entirely approved the principle of strikes, as a last resort. He only disapproved of that lax or hasty procedure which resulted in his class being the losing party, and thus proving that there ought not to have been, for such occasions, the national as well as special loss of a strike. The notable strike, which I am now to record, ended, in Yellowly's justifying way, by the success of the strikers. And yet it had no unpleasant features for either side, and was otherwise quite characteristic of the advanced methods, as well as the larger scale of the business works of those times, as compared with the times preceding them. The thing happened in this way.

The great special trust, which had been created for the embankment and reclamation of the Thames' mouth, was, by this time at full work; and one of its contracts—engaging for a thousand million gross of the extra-sized, everlasting, sea-resisting composite