tell them that it costs. But in the face of it all, in dreary succession, it still goes on. Of a strike at this moment wearing itself out among English dockers, a London reporter thus speaks:
The suffering of the strikers' families has become so dreadful that the public is fairly paralyzed with horror. The streets in the dockyards districts are filled with hollow-eyed women and children, reduced almost to skeletons and so weak that they are hardly able to stand.
Many have died almost wholly of starvation. The number of the victims is so great that the authorities and private charitable organizations are unable to cope with the situation.
The official explanation that the rivalries of a few leaders give us all the answer we need is pitiable. Of the strike movement as a whole, it does not contain even a paltry half-truth. I have a fairly close personal record of eighteen strikes. Of two of them, conceivably three, the cause may be attributed to conscienceless or imperilled leadership. But in the majority of strikes the world over the leaders are forced to the fighting line by the workers behind them. For the most part this leadership is a symptom and result, not a cause.
On the surface of a serious strike are conspicuous and frisky gaieties. Youth and the irresponsible are so much in evidence that the public does not see the background with its silences and distress. To stagger on, decade after decade, under a self-imposed immolation like this, must have a cause not accounted for by petulant phrases. The unexplained obstinacy with which this costly warfare goes on is the more strange because for half a century in several countries elaborate mechanisms have been devised to check and
