Page:Autobiography of Mother Jones (1925).djvu/236

Rh them. A young man put his hands on my shoulders.

"Mother," he sobbed. "It's over."

A red glare from the mills lighted the sky. It made me think of Hell.

"Lad," said I, "It is not over. There's a fiercer light than those hell fires over yonder! It is the white light of freedom burning in men's hearts!"

Back to the mills trudged the men, accepting the terms of the despot, Gary; accepting hours that made them old, old men at forty; that threw them on the scrap heap, along with the slag from the mills, at early middle age; that made of them nothing but brutes that slept and worked, that worked and slept. The sound of their feet marching back into the mills was the sound of a funeral procession, and the corpse they followed was part of their selves. It was their hope.

Gary and his gang celebrated the victory with banquets and rejoicing. Three hundred thousand workers, living below the living wage, ate the bread of bitterness.

I say, as I said in the town of Gary, it is the damn gang of robbers and their band of political thieves who will start the next American Revolution; just as it was they who started this strike. Fifty thousand American lads died on the battle fields of Europe that the world might be more democratic. Their buddies came home