necessity of one man or a group of men. As the man on the box talked, the
workmen in the crowd who were of American birth began to shake their heads.
They went to one side and gathering in groups discussed the stranger's
words. "I tell you what," said a little old workman, pulling nervously at
his graying mustache, "I'm on strike and I'm for sticking out until Steve
Hunter and Tom Butterworth fire Ed Hall, but I don't like this kind of
talk. I'll tell you what that man's doing. He's attacking our Government,
that's what he's doing." The workmen went off to their homes grumbling. The
Government was to them a sacred thing, and they did not fancy having their
demands for a better wage scale confused by the talk of anarchists and
socialists. Many of the laborers of Bidwell were sons and grandsons of
pioneers who had opened up the country where the great sprawling towns were
now growing into cities. They or their fathers had fought in the great
Civil War. During boyhood they had breathed a reverence for government
out of the very air of the towns. The great men of whom the school-books
talked had all been connected with the Government. In Ohio there had been
Garfield, Sherman, McPherson the fighter and others. From Illinois had come
Lincoln and Grant. For a time the very ground of the mid-American country
had seemed to spurt forth great men as now it was spurting forth gas and
oil. Government had justified itself in the men it had produced.

And now there had come among them men who had no reverence for government.
What a speaker for the first time dared say openly on the streets of
Bidwell, had already been talked in the shops. The new men, the foreigners
coming from many lands, had brought with them strange doctrines. They
began to make acquaintances among the American workmen. "Well," they said,
"you've had great men here; no doubt you have; but you're getting a new
kind of great men now. These new men are not born out of people. They're
being born out of capital. What is a great man? He's one who has the
power. Isn't that a fact? Well, you fellows here have got to find out that