this—the place was a seething caldron of passion, and the "scab" who ventured into it fared badly. There were one or two of these incidents each day, the newspapers detailing them, and always blaming them upon the unions. Yet ten years before, when there were no unions in Packingtown, there was a strike, and national troops had to be called, and there were pitched battles fought at night, by the light of blazing freight-trains. Packingtown was always a centre of violence; in "Whiskey Point," where there were a hundred saloons and one glue-factory, there was always fighting, and always more of it in hot weather. Any one who had taken the trouble to consult the stationhouse blotter would have found that there was less violence that summer than ever before—and this while twenty thousand men were out of work, and with nothing to do all day but brood upon bitter wrongs. There was no one to picture the battle the union leaders were fighting—to hold this huge army in rank, to keep it from straggling and pillaging, to cheer and encourage and guide a hundred thousand people, of a dozen different tongues, through six long weeks of hunger and disappointment and despair.
Meantime the packers had set themselves definitely to the task of making a new labor force. A thousand or two of strike-breakers were brought in every night, and distributed among the various plants. Some of them were experienced workers,—nutchers, salesmen, and managers from the packers' branch stores, and a few union men who had deserted from other cities; but the vast majority were green" negroes from the cotton districts of the far South, and they were herded into the packing-plants like sheep. There was a law forbidding the use of buildings as lodging-houses unless they were licensed for the purpose, and provided with proper windows, stairways, and fire-escapes; but here, in a "paint-room," reached only by an enclosed "chute," a room without a single window and only one door, a hundred men were crowded upon mattresses on the floor. Up on the third story of the "hog-house" of Jones's was a store-room, without a win-
