said the foreman, with a laugh, "why don't you join your old 'sisters'
out on the street, then?"

Natalya wondered with interest who these "sisters" were. On making
inquiry, she found that the workers in other shirt-waist factories had
struck, for various reasons of dissatisfaction with the terms of their
trade.

The factories had continued work with strike breakers. Some of the
companies had stationed women of the street and their cadets in front of
the shops to insult and attack the Union members whenever they came to
speak to their fellow-workers and to try to dissuade them from selling
their work on unfair terms. Some had employed special police protection
and thugs against the pickets.

There is, of course, no law against picketing. Every one in the United
States has as clear a legal right to address another person peaceably on
the subject of his belief in selling his work as on the subject of his
belief in the tariff. But on the 19th of October ten girls belonging to
the Union, who had been talking peaceably on the day before with some of
the strike breakers, were suddenly arrested as they were walking quietly
along the street, were charged with disorderly conduct, arraigned in the
Jefferson Market Court, and fined $1 each. The chairman of the strikers
from one shop was set upon by a gang of thugs while he was collecting
funds, and beaten and maimed so that he was confined to his bed for
weeks.

A girl of nineteen, one of the strikers, as she was walking home one
afternoon was attacked in the open daylight by a thug, who struck her in
the side and broke one of her ribs. She was in bed for four weeks, and