to ride I would have to walk, or that I would have to poke dismally
about in a 'bus, or worm my way through under the ground. As I
understood it, there was something that they wanted and something that
they were going to get; and while of course in a way, they recognized
that there might be something that I wanted too, I would have to wait
till they got theirs.

I could not think of anything I had ever done to them, nor could I see
what the thousands of other good people in London that I saw walking and
puddling about, or watched waiting twenty minutes or so with long,
hopeful, dogged whistles for cabs, had done to them.

A few days more, and my morning paper tells me suddenly of some more men
who wanted something--this time up in Lancashire. They had decided that
they wouldn't let some two or three hundred thousand other men go to
their work until they got it. They hushed cities to have their own way.
Day by day I watched them throwing the silence of the cities in their
employers' faces, closing shops, closing up railroads, telling the world
it must pay more for the clothes on its back, and all because--a certain
Mr. and Mrs. Riley of Accrington, North Lancashire did not like or did
not think that they liked, the North Lancashire Trades Union. (The
general idea seemed to be to have all the others join in,
everywhere--fifty-four million spindles, and four hundred and forty
thousand looms--and wait and keep perfectly still until Mr. and Mrs.
Riley could make up their minds.)

And now this present week, morning after morning I take up my paper and
read that 500,000 miners want something. I look in my fire dubiously day
by day. I may have to go home to America in a few weeks to get warm.