“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 fight out a private war in our midst—as thoroughly and precisely a private war as any we despise the Middle Ages for having tolerated—as any street war in Florence or Verona—and to fight it out at our pains and expense, and we stand by like sheep and wait till they get tired. It’s a funny attitude for a city of fifteen hundred thousand inhabitants.”
“What would you do?” asked Fulkerson, a good deal daunted by this view of the case.
“Do? Nothing. Hasn’t the State Board of Arbitration declared itself powerless? We have no hold upon the strikers; and we’re so used to being snubbed and disobliged by common carriers that we have forgotten our hold on the roads and always allow them to manage their own affairs in their own way, quite as if we had nothing to do with them and they owed us no services in return for their privileges.”
“That’s a good deal so,” said Fulkerson, disordering his hair. “Well, it’s nuts for the colonel nowadays. He says if he was boss of this town he would seize the roads on behalf of the people, and man ’em with policemen, and run ’em till the managers had come to terms with the strikers; and he’d do that every time there was a strike.”
“Doesn’t that rather savor of the paternalism he condemned in Lindau?” asked March.
“I don’t know. It savors of horse sense.”
“You are pretty far gone, Fulkerson. I thought you were the most engaged man I ever saw; but I guess you’re more father-in-lawed. And before you’re married, too.”
“Well, the colonel’s a glorious old fellow, March. I wish he had the power to do that thing, just for the fun of looking on while he waltzed in. He’s on the keen jump from morning till night, and he’s up late and early to see the row. I’m afraid he’ll get shot at some of the fights; he sees them all; I can’t get any show at them: haven’t seen a brickbat shied or a club swung yet. Have you?”
“No, I find I can philosophize the situation about as well from the papers, and that’s what I really want to do, I suppose. Besides, I’m solemnly pledged by Mrs. March not to go near any sort of crowd, under penalty of having her bring the children and go with me. Her theory is that we must all die together; the children haven’t been at school since the strike began. There’s no precaution that Mrs. March hasn’t used. She watches me whenever I go out, and sees that I start straight for this office.”
Fulkerson laughed and said: “Well, it’s probably the only thing that’s saved your life. Have you seen anything of Beaton lately?”
“No. You don’t mean to say he’s killed!”
“Not if he knows it. But I don’t know—What do you say, March? What’s the reason you couldn’t get us up a paper on the strike?”
“I knew it would fetch round to Every Other Week, somehow.”
“No, but seriously. There’ll be plenty of newspaper accounts. But you could treat it in the historical spirit—like something that happened several centuries ago; Defoe’s Plague of London style. Heigh? What made me think of it was Beaton. If I could get hold of him, you two could go round together and take down its aesthetic aspects. It’s a big thing, March, this strike is. I tell you it’s imposing to have a private war, as you say, fought out this way, in the heart of New York, and New York not minding it a bit. See? Might take that view of it. With your descriptions and Beaton’s sketches—well, it would just be the greatest card! Come! What do you say?”
“Will you undertake to make it right with Mrs. March if I’m killed and she and the children are not killed with me?”
“Well, it would be difficult. I wonder how it would do to get Kendricks to do the literary part?”
“I’ve no doubt he’d jump at the chance. I’ve yet to see the form of literature that Kendricks wouldn’t lay down his life for.”
“Say!” March perceived that Fulkerson was about to vent another inspiration, and smiled patiently. “Look here! What’s the reason we couldn’t get one of the strikers to write it up for us?”
“Might have a symposium of strikers and presidents,” March suggested.
“No; I’m in earnest. They say some of those fellows—especially the foreigners—are educated men. I know one fellow—a Bohemian—that used to edit a Bohemian newspaper here. He could write it out in his kind of Dutch, and we could get Lindau to translate it.”
“I guess not,” said March, dryly.
“Why not? He’d do it for the cause, wouldn’t he? Suppose you put it up on
