Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/328

 holes and guards and cowering mystery within. And I could urge upon him too a belated recognition of the immutable and unwritten law by which such an invitation to trouble is sure to be accepted. I almost felt, I told him, like heaving a stone after it myself to see what would happen. He finally agreed with me, dismissed his guards, and dismantled his rolling arsenal, and not long afterward was using its gear to haul the commodities they were soon manufacturing in those shops again.

And the strikes in the other plants were settled or compromised, or wore themselves out, or in some way got themselves ended, though not the largest and most ominous of them, that in the automobile works, until my friend Mr. Marshall Sheppey and I had worked seventy-two hours continuously to get the leaders of the opposing sides together. It was an illuminating experience for both of us, and not without its penalties, since thereafter we were called upon to arbitrate a dozen other strikes. We found both sides rather alike in their humanness, and one as unreasonable as the other, but we found too that if we could keep them together long enough, their own reason somehow prevailed and they reached those fragile compromises which are the most we may expect in the present status of productive industry in this world.

The old shop of Golden Rule Jones had its strike with the rest of them, and yet a strange and significant fate befell it. Alone of all the other shops and factories in the city involved in that strike, it was not picketed by the strikers, they did not