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THE SERVICE OF THE AWAKENER
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inexcusable abuses against the weaker and more obscure "help." An old steward with experience in many resorts put it—"these strikers are acting like lunatics but in a lot of the places where they work there is so much outrageous ill-treatment and so much besides which would disgust the public if they only knew about it, that any sort of an uproar if it brings out the facts is a good thing."

No investigator will ask more than that. Socially, we seem thus far to have developed no willingness or capacity to know about abuses or to acknowledge them, except through a catastrophe or the waste and noisy rumpus like that of a strike. These do definitely call attention to ignored evils. It required a devastating strike in England to show an astonished public that 100,000 men upon their railways were receiving scarcely one dollar a day—large numbers of them with families, and at a time when that dollar was shrinking to eighty cents because of rising prices. No one could be made to believe the miseries of the Pas-de-calais mines in the north of France until the long horrors of a strike compelled the public to look and to listen. It is the same dreary tale with our garment industries and with our textile mills down to the Lawrence strike. The Commissioner of Labor very calmly tells his story in a lengthy Report, and, because of the strike, people all over the country send greedy appeals for a copy. Hard by is Lowell made the object of a Survey under the auspices of a department of Harvard University. This study by one long resident in the city develops into a goodly book, without a bitter line from cover to cover. In