this -- the place was a seething caldron of passion, and the
"scab" who ventured into it fared badly. There were
one or two of these incidents each day, the newspapers
detailing them, and always blaming them upon the unions.
Yet ten years before, when there were no unions in Pack~
ingtown, there was a strike, and national troops had to be
called, and there were pitched battles fought at night, by
the light of blazing freight-trains. Packingtown was al~
ways a center of violence; in "Whisky Point," where
there were a hundred saloons and one glue-factory, there
was always fighting, and always more of it in hot weather.
Any one who had taken the trouble to consult the station-
house blotter would have found that there was less vio~
lence that summer than ever before -- and this while
twenty thousand men were out of work, and with nothing
to do all day but brood upon bitter wrongs. There was
no one to picture the battle the union leaders were fight~
ing -- to hold this huge army in rank, to keep it from
straggling and pillaging, to cheer and encourage and
guide a hundred thousand people, of a dozen different
tongues, through six long weeks of hunger and disap~
pointment and despair.

Meantime the packers had set themselves definitely to
the task of making a new labor force. A thousand or
two of strike-breakers were brought in every night, and
distributed among the various plants. Some of them were
experienced workers, -- butchers, salesmen, and managers
from the packers' branch stores, and a few union men
who had deserted from other cities; but the vast major~
ity were "green" Negroes from the cotton districts of the
far South, and they were herded into the packing-plants
like sheep. There was a law forbidding the use of build~
ings as lodging-houses unless they were licensed for the
purpose, and provided with proper windows, stairways,
and fire-escapes; but here, in a "paint room," reached
only by an enclosed "chute," a room without a single
window and only one door, a hundred men were crowded
upon mattresses on the floor. Up on the third story of the
"hog house" of Jones's was a store-room, without a win~

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