The employers did what they could to cope with all these shifts. They forbade the merchants and contractors to supply those who worked at home on their own account with materials for their work; and secret agents were despatched all over the country to the small employers and the farmers, in order to prejudice them against the locked-out workers; and the frontier of the country was covered with placards.
Their intention was obvious enough—an iron ring was to be drawn round the workers, and once imprisoned therein they could do nothing but keep starvation at bay until they had had enough, and surrendered. This knowledge increased their resistance. They were lean with wandering through the wilderness, but they were just in the mood for a fight. Many of them had not until now understood the entire bearings of the campaign; the new ideas had been stirring within them, but in a fragmentary and isolated condition—as an expression of a dumb feeling that the promised land was at hand at last. Often it was just one single word that had fixed itself in their minds, and had to serve to express the whole position. Any one might approach them with plausible arguments and strike it from under them, and shatter the theory to which they had clung; but faith itself remained, and the far-reaching concord; deep in their hearts was the dim, immovable knowledge that they were chosen to enter into the time of promise.
And now everything was gradually becoming plain to them. The battle shed light both backward and forward. It illumined their existence in all its harshness. Life was the same as it had always been, but now it was revealed so plainly that all could see it. All the many whips and scorns of life had been bound together in one vast scourge—the scourge of famine—which was to drive them back into the midst of poverty! Want was to be set upon them in its compactest form! This was the last, most extreme weapon; it confirmed them in the certainty that they were now on the right track, and near the goal. The night was always darkest before the break of day!
There were all sorts of things that they could understand now. People used to go about saying that the Germans were the hereditary enemy, and that the Fatherland was taking the lead of all other countries. But now the employers were sending to Germany for troops of hirelings, and were employing them to drive their own countrymen into a state of poverty. All that talk about patriotic feeling had been only fine words! There were only two nations—the oppressors and the oppressed!