failed to do. The Olivers had big political interests. Possibly public censure might touch them in a tender spot.

Public demonstrations were organized. Parades of strikers filed through the streets of Pittsburgh. The marchers carried crude banners displaying such inscriptions as these: "Lincoln freed the negro slaves! Help us to free Oliver's White Slaves." "We are paid sixty cents a day for twelve hours."

"Well, sah, I callate dat mule gits mo' blame and abuse dan anyt'ing else in dis heah town-an' he done go right ahead havin' his own way jes' de same."

So

It occurred to the strikers that George T. Oliver had many times expressed his sympathy for the working classes. they swallowed their resentment as best they might and tried again. They sent him the following letter: Senator George T. Oliver,

Washington, D. C.

Sir: Over two thousand men and women are striking for a living wage in the Oliver mills. You say your family owns the mills, but that you have no interest in them. You have often avowed your interest in the working class. Will you act as an intermediary in the strike, in an effort to induce your relatives to grant us wages sufficient for our men to support their families and our women to maintain their honor?

(Signed) GENERAL STRIKE COMMITTEE. No answer to this message was re

"Oh, Mr. Oliver, do you know this?" "Our misery means Oliver's wealth." "We want a real white slave investigation."

And an army of ragged children bore aloft the appeal:

"We want more bread, more education, more sunshine."

It would be a numb heart indeed that could withstand the arguments furnished by these parades. It was not the banners and their inscriptions, not the orations of strike leaders at pauses in the march, not even the drawn faces and dragging bodies of the men and women-it was the boys and girls. Some of the older people affected more ills than they really

possessed. But the boys and girls were perfectly natural. They laughed, sang ragtime, played pranks as they marched. It was a holiday occasion for them-a glorious holiday after the incessant grind in the mills.

Simply because they were natural the appeal they made was all the more irresistible. Their faces were old and their little bodies already bent. That children of such tender years were employed in the mills of Pittsburgh came as a shock to the men and women who banked the line of march, even though they had known it before, vaguely. Perhaps they contrasted their own children-in school -with these girls and boys stumbling untaught down the steadily narrowing rear alley of a "dead end" trade.

But

From a purely economic standpoint it seemed unreasonably "bad business". Public Opinion is a stolid thing. it had begun to stir a little. It was aroused still further by a ringing general appeal formulated by the strike leaders and sent throughout the country. This read in part:

"These men and women are striking for more than a better wage. They are striking for the new generation. They are striking to break the chains that bind the children to the machines that have ground out their lives.

"It is a strike for righteousness, youth, education, the honor of women, the future of children, and the manhood of

men.

"We women, we mothers, ask higher wages. We will give our lives to the great god, Industry, but we want our children to be free. We do not want to sacrifice them. Give us more money that the mouths at home may be filled and that baby hands may not know

toil. We want to live by the toil of our hands so that we need not barter our bodies."

Public Opinion was yawning and stretching its arms. In a few weeks more it would probably have been ready to begin to prepare to exert itself on behalf of the strikers!

Then suddenly there was a meeting of the advertisers

em

holding space in the big daily which, for political reasons, had been fighting the fight of the Oliver ployes. These advertisers transmitted a joint request to the newspaper-a request that was a threat. The silence that promptly enveloped the paper was supreme and profound. Not another shot was fired in the direction of the Oliver mill. Public Opinion wondered drowsily for a little what had become of the Oliver strike. There was no comment upon it to be heard from the interestcontrolled press; and now nothing more even from the lusty organ of the people. So Public Opinion, soothing its conscience with the same "I should worry" which had from the start solaced the mill owners, rolled over and went to sleep again.

The strikers lost confidence in the public, in their leaders, and in themselves. All that is possible when one begins to starve! And the starvation point had been reached. Improvised soup kitchens were not able to supply even a poor fraction of the food needed. Suddenly there was a break in the ranks. And then within a day practically the entire army of three thousand Óliver employes, spurred by hunger and fear, had scrambled back to their machines! "I should worry" had won the battle! The story is told.

Today there are the same lofty indifference to human rights, the same brutality, indecency, immorality, overtaxing labor, stinted wage, overlong day absolutely the same conditions that

Not

prevailed before the strike. one concession was made, not one inch was gained.

We are back where we were at the beginning. But on our way around the circle we have come upon a moralperhaps three morals.

The first is that the strike is a clumsy and archaic tool for the settlement of industrial disputes. It is an awkward, backhanded sort of implement, full of surprises, and apt to cut worst the very ones who wield it. It works gross injustices, now

(Continued on page 154)

E

IGHTEEN hundred miles from the gaping mouths of the Amazon, a line of narrow gauge railway creeps up into the heart of the Acré rubber country, into the land of the mythical "White Indians", where the feathermustached Caripunas hunt in the Andean foothills, whose backbone is the roof of the South American Continent.

Trains are running now along the Madeira-Mamoré Railway, the whistles of the queer little engines startling the swarming life of the jungle. Hardly one railroad man in a hundred ever heard of "Estro Ferro Madeira-Mamoré", but this road was built by American engineers at a frightful cost of life and treasure.

CARIPUNA WARRIOR

These Indians were the only human life found in the Mamoré jungles. They carry nine-foot bows and often wear a peculiar mustache of red turkey feathers.

in order that the world might have raw rubber for its automobile tires. When they wish to impress you with the loss of human life in the construction of this railway, the bronzed gaunt men back from the heat-cursed "selvas" tell you that "every tie in the two hundred miles of track cost a life," or as one man very picturesquely put it, "Every tie rests on a human skull." The men who built it fought the equatorial heat, the feverladen water, abysmal quicksands and "sink holes", the lack of transportation, and always the jungle. Poisonous insects, black-water fever, and beri-beri

hung on the flanks of the surveying and construction parties. They were like a military expedition fighting their way through a barren and hostile land. Men, materials, medicine, even timber and food-everything-was brought up the

Amazon.

The record of this great work includes the story of the utter failure of the engineers of three nations; the romance of a railway's creation on one of the world's last frontiers, and the laying of two slender streaks of steel into the "Back of Beyond", where all is a tangle of clutching vines, rank timber, and incredibly savage life. Veteran engineers claim there was never a road that cost more heavily in money, time, and life.

Part of the line was originally surveyed back in the eighties, but nothing came of this for many years. The first of the later surveys was made under the direction of an Illinoisan, John R. Wilbanks, who led an expedition through to Villa Church in 1908 and 1909. This survey was a heartbreaking battle against the fevers, the climate, and the multitudinous rapids in the Madeira and Mamoré Rivers. Step by step the expedition of Barbadian negroes and Bra

TYPE OF LOCOMOTIVE IN USE ON "ESTRO FERRO MADEIRA-MAMORE." AND THEOTONIO FALLS ON THE MADEIRA-ONE OF THE EIGHTEEN RAPIDS ALONG THE TWO RIVERS THE COURSE OF WHICH THE RAILWAY FOLLOWS

21

zilian half-castes fought their way upstream, making but two hundred miles in fifty days. Rapid succeeded rapid. The party went upstream in "batalãos", clumsy, tub-like craft built for dragging over rocky portages. They would be favored with a few miles of fair water and then would encounter a rapid where a corduroy road of green poles had to be laid down and the "batalãos" must be dragged around the foaming waters by sheer strength. Even this was far easier than attempting to cut a road through the jungle.

Wilbanks had but one white companion. For seven months these two faced the jungle without seeing another white face. The Barbadians died of fever or wandered away in the jungle where they perished. Caripuna Indians, armed with nine-foot bows of block palm wood, carrying a handful of arrows dipped in vegetable poison, hung around the camp, silent and menacing. They

But the indomitable pluck of the American engineers finally conquered the jungle, that had beaten back expedtion after, expedition in fifty years past. With the Acré rubber district as the goal, engineers., fmanced by English, Brazilian, and Dutch gold had under

The railroad lies in a trough of the continent between the Geral Mountains of Brazil and the foothills of the Bolivian Andes. Andes. The Madeira and Mamoré Rivers run through this trough in the mountains. The Mamoré empties into the Madeira, the Madeira into the Ama