Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/323

 By prejudice, or perversity, or constitutionally, I considered men of more value than factories. I had perhaps never heard of a strike, for instance, in which my sympathies were not impulsively with the strikers. I could always see that poor foreigner, whose body had lain there on the cold damp rocks at Lemont so many years before, and somehow I could not get out of my mind's eye the figures of the workmen on strike, many of them hungry and desperate as their wives and children were; they seemed to me to be in straits more dire than their harried and harassed and worried employers, though I could feel sorry for them, too, since even if they were not hungry, they, too, were the victims of the anarchy of our industrial system. They had of course no social conscience whatever, but perhaps they could not help that. But there they were, bringing their troubles to the mayor, whom perhaps they did not wholly regard as their mayor, since they had some prescience of the fact that in that mayor's mind was always the memory of those throngs of workingmen who had looked up to him with some of the emotions of confidence and hope. There was alas little enough that he could do for those workingmen, but, especially in such an hour, he must at least not forget them. Of the relative rights of their present quarrel he had little knowledge; but he had envisaged enough of life to know, without too much sentimentalizing them, that, while they were often wrong, they were somehow right when they were wrong. That is, their eternal cause was right.