in your pockets and keep them there," or, as I heard a speaker say, "Why, you've nothing to do but just stand round and look sweet,"—all this does not hide the fact that the machinery of production is stopped and to that extent product (wealth) is destroyed. "Quietly change the address on freight cars filled with perishable foods, so they shall go one or two hundred miles south instead of north to Paris, and then get side-tracked a few days more," was one among many guiding hints to the railway strikers. It sounds as gentle as a friendly salute or as the pretty French name, la grève perlée,[1] for a strike that may be ugly in the extreme.
With time, the sabotier has, like the rest of us, gained civility and inteliigence. He does not burn and wreck every new machine in sight like his English brothers seventy years ago, or Russian peasants a generation later. But his gain in humor and affability does not imply that he is one whit less a destroyer that his ruthless forerunner.
We have not forgotten the advice of the "Grand Master" of the Knights of Labor, that every workman after drinking smash his beer bottle. How much work it would give to labor! How many unemployed could at once be set to work!
Yes, but why stop at beer bottles? Why not also break milk bottles, tea cups, plates and then, when the meal is finished, break up the table and chairs,
- ↑ Of this term la grève perlée, Professor Ernest Dimnet writes me, "It is railway slang. For several months the men just changed the addresses stuck on the cars, so they (the cars) were as hard to find as pearls that had dropped off the string."
