He was a superior type of English workingman, but as
he stood there, broken and discouraged, believing himself so
black-listed that his skill could never be used again, filled
with sorrow over the loss of his wife who had recently died after
an illness with distressing mental symptoms, realizing keenly the
lack of the respectable way of living he had always until now
been able to maintain, he seemed to me an epitome of the wretched
human waste such a strike implies. I fervently hoped that the
new arbitration law would prohibit in Chicago forever more such
brutal and ineffective methods of settling industrial disputes.
And yet even as early as 1896, we found the greatest difficulty
in applying the arbitration law to the garment workers' strike,
although it was finally accomplished after various mass meetings
had urged it. The cruelty and waste of the strike as an
implement for securing the most reasonable demands came to me at
another time, during the long strike of the clothing cutters.
They had protested, not only against various wrongs of their own,
but against the fact that the tailors employed by the custom
merchants were obliged to furnish their own workshops and thus
bore a burden of rent which belonged to the employer. One of the
leaders in this strike, whom I had known for several years as a
sober, industrious, and unusually intelligent man, I saw
gradually break down during the many trying weeks and at last
suffer a complete moral collapse.
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