freedom. At appalling costs they were striking politically. Today the strike is consciously upon the field of industry. It is still the old rebelling against autocratic usages that have come first under criticism and suspicion, then under direct attack. The political uprisings that crowd the first half of the nineteenth century were full of havoc, waste and lawlessness, precisely like our own strikes. There was much vanity and self-seeking in many of the leaders then as now. But upon the whole, the political strikers of those days had the valor and disinterestedness which those must have, who break the hardened conventions of their time and open the ways of growth to larger and freer life.
In those earlier days, the enemy at which the political strikers aimed was arbitrary authority. It was an authority always justifying itself by whatever traditional sanctity had power over the imagination of the time;—religion, patriotism, and existing "law and order," as interpreted by those in office. Within these symbols, property interests and social proprieties solemnly cloaked themselves as they do today. They were not necessarily hypocrites. There is a terrible French utterance which most of us should learn by heart, "Why be a hypocrite, when it is so easy to deceive yourself?"
Whatever is precious in our private belongings leads readily to much deceiving and neither the defenders of the existing system nor those who rise against it will escape the danger in these hypocrisies. Few social groups have more frailties than political or industrial strikers. They are forever the easy butt of ridicule
