Very slowly Stringer chewed up his mouthful of cheese sandwich.
"Vell. Ve must send a delegate to der komität von education. Nowadays they meet three times a veek. That vill be a start. Und alzo ve commence soon mit the hauz to hauz mit tracts--for the campaign. That is much vork. Poor leetle girl. I guess ve can most kill her. Vork is gut medicine."
And Isadore, having stolen half a morning from his regular work, rushed downtown to the office.
Yetta found the strike of the paper-box makers more serious than she had expected. The conditions of the trade were appalling. The half dozen factories were only the centre of a widespread sweating system. More than half of the work was done in the tenements of the districts where the Child Labor Law could be evaded and where women could be driven to work incredibly long hours beyond the reach of the Factory Inspectors.
The strikers were not only isolated--lost in a backwater district of Brooklyn, out of touch with labor organizations, ignorant of the laws and of their rights--they were also weakened by the division of languages. All were "greenhorn" immigrants, who had not yet learned English. They belonged to diverse and hostile races--a disunited medley of Slovaks, Poles, Italians, and Jews. The bosses have been quick to discover how serious an impediment to organization is a mixture of races.
Yetta came to them in the same way that Mabel, three and a half years before, had come to the striking vest-makers--bringing detailed, practical knowledge of how to manage a strike. As soon as she had telephoned in a first story to _The Clarion_, she took up the work of bringing order and hope into the despairing chaos of the struggle. She called on the police captain, and her threat of publicity made him change his mind in regard to the right of the strikers to hold meetings. Before supper-time the effect of the _Clarion_ story was evident. Half a dozen labor organizers and Socialist speakers turned up. With this outside help the paper-box makers were able to organize their picket, arrange meetings, and start plans for money-raising. A Socialist lawyer took up the cases of the dozen odd strikers who had been arrested.
By ten o'clock the situation was immensely improved. Yetta escaped to a typewriter to get out her big "follow-up" for the next day's paper. She went at it with a peculiar thrill. She was realizing for the first time what a power in the fight a working-man's paper might be.