railroads along the river front, so that in the last week of January the
number of strikers in New York, Brooklyn, and New Jersey, reached
approximately 28,000; 13,000 longshoremen, 1000 boatmen, 6000 grain
handlers, 7500 coal-handlers, and 400 bag-sewers.

On February 11, August Corbin, president and receiver of the
Philadelphia & Reading Railroad Company, fearing a strike by the miners
working in the coal mines operated by that road, settled the strike by
restoring to the eighty-five coal-handlers, the original strikers, their
former rate of wages. The Knights of Labor felt impelled to accept such
a trivial settlement for two reasons. The coal-handlers' strike, which
drove up the price of coal to the consumer, was very unpopular, and the
strike itself had begun to weaken when the brewers and stationary
engineers, who for some obscure reason had been ordered to strike in
sympathy, refused to come out. The situation was left unchanged, as far
as the coal-handlers employed by the other companies, the longshoremen,
and the many thousands of men who went out on sympathetic strike were
concerned. The men began to return to work by the thousands and the
entire strike collapsed.

The determined attack and stubborn resistance of the employers'
associations after the strikes of May 1886, coupled with the obvious
incompetence displayed by the leaders, caused the turn of the tide in
the labor movement in the first half of 1887. This, however, manifested
itself during 1887 exclusively in the large cities, where the movement
had borne in the purest form the character of an uprising by the class
of the unskilled and where the hardest battles were fought with the
employers. District Assembly 49, New York, fell from its membership of
60,809 in June 1886, to 32,826 in July 1887. During the same interval,
District Assembly 1, Philadelphia, decreased from 51,557 to 11,294, and