of feeling that I am regarded by my workmen as a friend. In the security of this feeling, I have never been able, like many of my neighbors in business, to regard the growing power and development of the labor union as a menace. In the words of the poet,—
'Should banded unions persecute
Opinion and induce a time
When single thought is civil crime
And individual freedom mute,'—
my attitude might change; but I have very little fear."
He sketched the history of the Halket Steel Company blandly, describing the original patriarchal nature of the establishment, and expressing the belief that even in the great enlargement of the plant the unity of sentiment animating all connected with it had not been weakened. Then he passed to an account of the first effort of the union to obtain a lodgment. "Organization was in the air; it became epidemic; the contagion extended to the mills at New Rome. The first symptoms were observed during a summer when I was away. Not unnaturally, the management was alarmed. The union had its secret agents and missionaries at work, a fact which seemed no doubt to imply a sinister purpose. With capital everywhere agitated and frightened by the sudden looming up of a new power, the power of labor, it is not surprising that the cool heads in control at New Rome should almost instinctively have accepted the situation as ominous and critical. In that spirit they were prepared to resist the union from the start,—to prevent it from getting a start,—to exterminate it if it had got a start.
"As I have said, I was absent at the time. Possibly it was that fact which gave me a better and truer perspective of the whole matter than that enjoyed by those who were close at hand. Certainly I do not take any special credit to myself for being able to view the issue from a different angle than that of the usually cool but now agitated heads at the works. Finding that a crisis actually
