did Fulkerson almost as much good as if it had never been used before.
News began to come of fighting between the police and the strikers when
the roads tried to move their cars with men imported from Philadelphia,
and then Fulkerson rejoiced at the splendid courage of the police. At the
same time, he believed what the strikers said, and that the trouble was
not made by them, but by gangs of roughs acting without their approval.
In this juncture he was relieved by the arrival of the State Board of
Arbitration, which took up its quarters, with a great many scare-heads,
at one of the principal hotels, and invited the roads and the strikers to
lay the matter in dispute before them; he said that now we should see the
working of the greatest piece of social machinery in modern times. But it
appeared to work only in the alacrity of the strikers to submit their
grievance. The road; were as one road in declaring that there was nothing
to arbitrate, and that they were merely asserting their right to manage
their own affairs in their own way. One of the presidents was reported to
have told a member of the Board, who personally summoned him, to get out
and to go about his business. Then, to Fulkerson's extreme
disappointment, the august tribunal, acting on behalf of the sovereign
people in the interest of peace, declared itself powerless, and got out,
and would, no doubt, have gone about its business if it had had any.
Fulkerson did not know what to say, perhaps because the extras did not;
but March laughed at this result.

"It's a good deal like the military manoeuvre of the King of France and
his forty thousand men. I suppose somebody told him at the top of the
hill that there was nothing to arbitrate, and to get out and go about his
business, and that was the reason he marched down after he had marched up
with all that ceremony. What amuses me is to find that in an affair of
this kind the roads have rights and the strikers have rights, but the
public has no rights at all. The roads and the strikers are allowed to