Page:Zawis and Kunigunde (1895).djvu/316



The year 1894 will pass into America’s history as a memorable one. Throughout the nation the irrepressible conflict between human rights and “vested rights” has been growing more intense. Upon the town of Pullman all eyes have been focused, for here the national struggle has been reproduced in miniature,—reproduced in a fashion so concrete that the dullest minds have understood. Rarely has so grand a theme been found ready to the artist’s hand, and never has the artist appeared so promptly.

Mrs. Nico Bech-Meyer is an American by adoption and loyalty, though a Norsewoman by birth. She has acquired a mastery of the English language that most of our native authors might well envy. But she does not often let the reader stop to think of her style,— the movement of her story is too rapid.

Very artistically yet simply she discloses, as her story proceeds, the insufferable oppressions of the Pullman company; she interprets the mental struggle of the more intelligent of the working people; she closes her book with their final decision to begin the strike, and every reader who has followed the story from the beginning will feel that as free men and women they could not have done otherwise.

This book is full of inspiration for those who are tempted to think of the strike as onlya failure: “Never yet have great changes been effected without birthpains. There are walls which must be torn down, and old stuff which must be thrown out. Better to lie down on the street and die than to live a slave’s life and leave it as an inheritance to their children.”