Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/117

 If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately upon the need or desire he has for it,—and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist's sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbor poor.

Lynggaard & Co.

(Contemporary Danish dramatist, born 1868. The present play deals with the modern industrial struggle. The wife of a great manufacturer has become the victim of melancholia after a strike)

(absorbed in her memories):—I shall never forget the day when the people went back to work. I was watching them from my bedroom window. For four months they had been starving—starving, do you understand?—they and theirs. Then they turned up again one winter morning before daylight, and there they stood and shivered in the yards. They had no over-clothes, of course, and they were shaking both from cold and from weakness. And then their faces were all covered with beards, so that one couldn't recognize them. There they stood and waited a long time, a very long time At last Heymann [the manager] appeared in the doorway and read something from a paper. It was the conditions of surrender, I suppose. None of them looked up. Then, as they were about to walk in and begin working, Heymann stopped them by holding up his hand, and he said something I couldn't hear. But after a little while I saw Olsen [the strike-leader] standing all by himself in a cleared