Like most working people he had never lived in the twentieth
century at all. He was still in the feudal age, and his whole
life had been a blind and ceaseless struggle for the bare
necessaries of life, broken from time to time by fierce irregular
wars called strikes. He had never known anything of a real
self-governing commonwealth, and such progress as he and his kind
had made was never the result of their citizenship, of their
powers as voters, but grew out of the explosive and ragged
upheavals, of their own half-organized societies and unions.
It was against the "black people" he said, that he was first on
strike back in the early nineties. He told me all about it, how
he had been working in the mills pretty comfortably--he was young
and strong then; with a fine growing family and a small home of
his own.
"It was as pretty a place as you would want to see," he said; "we
grew cabbages and onions and turnips--everything grew fine!--in
the garden behind the house."
And then the "black people" began to come in, little by little at
first, and then by the carload. By the "black people" he meant
the people from Southern Europe, he called them "hordes"--"hordes
and hordes of 'em"--Italians mostly, and they began getting into
the mills and underbidding for the jobs, so that wages slowly
went down and at the same time the machines were speeded up.
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