Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/108

 have become so current, since for a while we made a national institution of the very thing it connotes.

There was, however, then and always, the labor question, and we were beginning to discover that that is fundamental, perhaps the one great fundamental,—aside from the complication of evil and good that is inherent and implicit in humanity itself,—since the burning question is and always will be how the work of the world is to be got done, and, what is a much more embarrassing problem, who is to do it. Many of the men who had been doing that work, or the heaviest of it, were striking in Illinois in those years.

The shots the Pinkertons had fired at Homestead echoed in the state; Senator Palmer had made a great speech about it in the Senate; and perhaps the tariff had something to do with that, since tariffs on steel have not been unknown. But there were shots fired nearer home, first in the strike among the men who were digging the drainage canal, then among the miners in the soft coal fields of the state, then the strike in the model town of Pullman, and the great railroad strike that grew out of it.

They called it the Debs Rebellion, and for a while it assumed some of the proportions of a rebellion, or at least it frightened many people in Illinois as much as a rebellion might have done. We were in the midst of all its alarms during that whole spring and summer, and down in the adjutant-general's office at the State House there was the stir almost of war itself, with troops being ordered here and there about the state, and the Governor harried