436 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
thoroughly relaxed, and the policemen in charge of the yards, while there ostensibly to enforce law and order, were obliged every night to connive at prize-fighting, at open gambling, and at the most flagrant disregard of decency. They were there, not to enforce law and order as it defines itself in the minds of the bulk of healthy-minded citizens, but only to keep the strikers from molesting the nonunion workers, which was certainly commend- able, but after all only part of their real duty. They were shocked by the law-breaking which they were ordered to protect, and much drawn in sympathy to those whom they were supposed to regard as public enemies. An investigator who interviewed one hundred policemen found only one who did not frankly extol the restraint of the strikers as over against the laxity of the imported men. This, of. course, was an extreme case, brought about by the unusual and peculiar type of the imported strike-breakers, of which there is much trustworthy evidence, incorporated in affida- vits submitted to the mayor of Chicago.
It was hard for a patriot not to feel jealous of the trades unions and of the enthusiasm of. those newly arrived citizens. They poured out their gratitude and affection upon this first big, friendly force which had offered them help in their desperate struggle in a new world. This devotion, this comradeship and fine esprit de corps, should have been won by the government itself from these scared and untrained citizens. The union was that which had concerned itself with real life, shelter, a chance to work, and bread for their children. It had come to them in a language they could understand, and through men with interests akin to their own, and it gave them their first chance to express themselves through a democratic vote, to register by a ballot their real opinion upon a very important matter.
They used the referendum vote, the latest and perhaps most clever device of democratic government, and yet they were using it to decide a question which the government presupposed to be quite outside its realm. When they left the old country, the gov- ernment of America held their deepest hopes and represented that which they believed would obtain for them an opportunity for
