present strain and turbulence between capital and labor, I should submit as the first question this: Why does the word "scab" carry with it an indignity so poignant? To justify the scab or to condemn him has no part in the question. It is only sought to explain him and the savage animosities he excites. An engineer upon one of our great structures had a strike. He crushed it with strike-breakers within a week. When the work was done, I asked him about the men who took the places of those who left. "A few of them," he said, "were good fellows, but the bulk of them were skunks." I tried to learn why this impression had been made upon him, but could not get beyond this fact of explosive contempt.
In a sharp labor disturbance, I have seen a man wholly unruffled under such words as liar, coward and thief, but the monosyllable "scab" had an instantaneous effect like a dash of vitriol in the face. During the recent strike at Lawrence a generous and active friend of the strikers asked a trade union official if her organization was not really scabbing against the large body of men and women who had left the mills. I saw the woman to whom the question was put flush hot as if insulted. A little later, the tears in her eyes, she left her office saying, "I cannot stand it, I cannot stand it."
These instances are neither exceptional nor do they exaggerate by a tittle the mordant power of this word. Really to answer this question; really to see what the maddened protest implies of guilt and treachery to one's own, is a good first step in understanding what is before us of impending tasks.
