expression. He even smiled a little. "In the meantime--"

"What can your committee do?" demanded one of the strike leaders,
passionately--it was Findley. "If you find one party wrong, can your
state force it to do right? Can you legislators be impartial when you
have not lived the bitter life of the workers? Would you arbitrate a
question of life and death? And are the worst wages paid in these mills
anything short of death? Do you investigate because conditions are bad?
or because the workers broke loose and struck? Why did you not come
before the strike?"

This drew more approval from the rear. Why, indeed? The Chairman was
adroit, he had pulled himself out of many tight places in the Assembly
Chamber, but now he began to perspire, to fumble in his coat tails for a
handkerchief. The Legislature, he maintained, could not undertake to
investigate such matters until called to its attention....

Later on a tall gentleman, whom heaven had not blessed with tact, saw fit
to deplore the violence that had occurred; he had no doubt the leaders of
the strike regretted it as much as he, he was confident it would be
stopped, when public opinion would be wholly and unreservedly on the side
of the strikers.

"Public opinion!" savagely cried Lindtzki, who spoke English with only a
slight accent. "If your little boy, if your little girl come to you and
ask for shoes, for bread, and you say, `I have no shoes, I have no bread,
but public opinion is with us,' would that satisfy you?"

This drew so much applause that the tall law-maker sat down again with a
look of disgust on his face.... The Committee withdrew, and for many