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Updated: June 7, 2025
I saw the work of the harbor go now with an even mightier rush, because of the impending strike. The rumor of its coming had spread far over the country, and shippers were hurrying cargoes in. I saw boxes and barrels by thousands marked "Rush." And they were rushed! On one dock I saw the dockers begin at seven in the morning and when I came back late in the evening the same men were there.
Yet one conceives that not all men, if this particular evil come to pass, will stand packed shoulder to shoulder against all women. One does not feel that the dockers will be very bitter against such women as want to be miners, or the plumbers frown much upon the would-be steeple-jills.
In the same year a great agitation began, led by the most prominent advocate of industrial unionism in Great Britain, the Socialist, Tom Mann, who with John Burns had been one of the organizers of the great dockers' strike in 1886, and who had returned, in 1910, from many years of successful agitation in Australia to preach the new unionism in his home country.
I mean the English dockers' strike and our own maritime strike. But the great Thames strike may be said rather to have given a fillip to Colonial Trades Unionism, apart from politics altogether, than to have created any Party.
But if men who have not enough to eat are so half-dead and so worthless that they can feel calm and reasonable about it, and can always be precisely right and always say precisely the right thing if, with their wives fainting in their arms and their babies crying for food, all that those dockers had character enough to do, up on Tower Hill, was to make a polite, smooth, Anglican prayer to God a prayer like a kind of blessing before not having any meat, and not that awful, fateful, husky cry to Heaven, a roar or rending of their hearts up to the black and empty sky what would such men have been good for?
In the great court-yard of The Working Man building the dockers were assembled to answer the roll. The president of their Union met Pelle in the doorway; he was the very man whom Pelle and Howling Peter had rescued down by the harbor now he was working for the new ideas! "Well, how goes it?" asked Pelle, shaking his hand. "Splendid! A thousand men all but seven!" "But where's the joyful Jacob?
Sampson inquired brusquely if she took him for a fool. She replied calmly: "No; for a very clever, but rather opinionated personage. "Opinionated? So is ivery man who has grounnds for his opinin. D'ye think, because Dockers Short, an' Bist, an' Kinyon, an' Cuckoo, an' Jackdaw, an' Starling, an' Co., don't know the dire effecks of calomel an' drastics on the buddy, I don't know't?
"It was there right enough," he remarked. "I saw it. A letter about steel shipments and the dockers' strike, wasn't it? As there seemed nothing to it, I left it with the other papers for Jeekes, the secretary chap. But what evidence is there that this was blackmail?" "This," said Robin, and showed the detective the sheet of blue paper with its series of slits.
Everywhere civilians were being bullied into obedience at the point of the bayonet: young boys in their teens brandished revolvers in the high roads: rough, brawny dockers walked about endowed apparently with unlimited authority, and in the dark recesses of the General Post Office, beyond the reach of law or argument, the mysterious Republican Brotherhood omnipotent.
Later I learned that his spine had been broken, that he would be paralyzed for life. But what I saw was only a part. From the policemen's books alone I found a record for that week of six dockers killed and eighty-seven injured. I traced about a score of these cases back into their tenement homes, and there I found haggard, crippled men and silent, anxious women, the mothers of small children.
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