with looks of hatred, and scarce observed the letter of civility. On the day of the admiral's arrival, Knapp [the German consul in Samoa] failed to call on him, and on the morrow called on him while he was on shore. The slight was remarked and resented, and the two squadrons clung the more obstinately to their dangerous station.

This

On the 15th the barometer fell to 29°.11 by 2 P.M. was a moment when every sail in port should have escaped. Kimberley, who flew the only broad pennant, should certainly have led the way; he clung, instead, to his moorings, and the Germans doggedly followed his example: semibelligerents, daring each other and the violence of heaven. . . . The night closed black, with sheets of rain. By midnight it blew a gale; and by the morning watch, a tempest. . . .

Day came about six, and presented to those on shore a seizing and terrific spectacle. In the pressure of the squalls, the bay was obscured as if by midnight, but between them a great part of it was clearly if darkly visible amid driving mist and rain. The wind blew into the harbor mouth. . . . Seas that might have awakened surprise and terror in the midst of the Atlantic, ranged bodily and (it seemed to observers) almost without diminution into the belly of that flask-shaped harbor; and the war ships were alternately buried from view in the trough, or seen standing on end against the breast of billows.

The Trenton at daylight still maintained her position in the neck of the bottle. But five of the remaining ships tossed, already close to the bottom, in a perilous and helpless crowd; threating to ruin each other as they tossed; threatened with a common and imminent destruction on the reefs. Three had been already in collision; the Olga was injured in the quarter; the Adler had lost her bowsprit; the Nipsic had lost her smokestack, and was making steam with difficulty, maintaining her fire with barrels of pork, and the smoke and sparks pouring along the level of the deck.... The Eber had dragged anchors with the rest; her injured screw disabled her from steaming vigorously up; and a little before day, she had struck the front of the coral, come off, struck again, and gone down stem foremost, oversetting as she went, into the gaping hollow of the

reef. Of her whole complement of nearly eighty, four souls were cast alive on the beach; and the bodies of the remainder were, by the voluminous outpouring of the flooded streams, scoured at last from the harbor, and strewed naked on the seaboard of the island. . . .

Three ships still hung on the next margin of destruction, steaming desperately to their moorings, dashed helplessly together. The Calliope was the nearest in; she had the Vandalia close on her port side and a little ahead, the Olga close a-starboard, the reef under her keel; and steaming and veering on her cables, the unhappy ship fenced with her three dangers. . . . The one possibility of escape was to go out. If the engines should stand, if they should have power to drive the ship against wind and sea, if she should answer the helm, if the wheel, rudder, and gear should hold out, and if they were favored with a clear blink of weather in which to see and avoid the outer reef there, and there only, were safety. Upon this catalogue of "ifs" Kane staked his all. He signalled to the engineer for every pound of steam and at that moment (I am told) much of the machinery was already red hot. . . . For a time the Calliope lay stationary; then gradually drew ahead. The highest speed claimed for her that day is of one sea-mile an hour. . . . As she thus crept seaward, she buried bow and stern alternately under the billows.

In the fairway of the entrance, the flagship Trenton still held on. Her rudder was broken, her wheel carried away; within she was flooded. . . . She had just made the signal "fires extinguished," and lay helpless, awaiting the inevitable end. Between this melancholy hulk and the external reef, Kane must find a path. Steering within fifty yards of the reef. . . and her foreyard passing on the other hand over the Trenton's quarter as she rolled, the Calliope sheered between the rival dangers, came to the wind triumphantly, and was once more pointed for the sea and safety. Not often in naval history was there a moment of more sickening peril, and it was dignified by one of those incidents that reconcile the chronicler with his otherwise abhorrent task. From the doomed flagship, the Americans hailed the success of the English with a cheer. It was led by the old Admiral

in person, rang out over the storm with a holiday vigor, and was answered by the Calliopes with an emotion easily conceived. The ship of their kinsfolk was almost the last external object seen from the Calliope for hours; immediately after, the mists closed about her till the morrow. She was safe at sea again una de multis. . . .

The morning of the 17th displayed a scene of devastation rarely equalled; the Adler high and dry, the Olga and Nipsic beached, the Trenton partly piled on the Vandalia and herself sunk to the gun-deck; no sail afloat; and the beach heaped high with the debris of ships and the wreck of mountain forests. ... Thus, in what seemed the very article of war, and within the duration of a single day, the sword arm of each of the two angry powers was broken; their formidable ships reduced to junk; their disciplined hundreds to a horde of castaways, fed with difficulty, and the fear of whose misconduct marred the sleep of their commanders. Both paused aghast; both had time to recognize that not the whole Samoan Archipelago was worth the loss in men and costly ships already suffered. The so-called hurricane of March 16 made thus a marking epoch in worldhistory; directly, and at once, it brought about the congress and treaty of Berlin; indirectly, and by a process still continuing, it founded the modern navy of the [United] States. Coming years and other historians will declare the influence of that.

Although the "formidable" and "costly" ships wrecked at Apia were only unarmored cruisers of from 1375 to 3900 tons, their loss was sufficient to cripple our navy. Under the title "The Naval Catastrophe " an editorial in the New York Times of March 31, 1889, said:

Another lesson which the Americans may well take to heart is the duty of increasing their navy with all possible dispatch.

1 For the congress see Muzzey, An American History, p. 554. The tripartite government lasted through ten stormy years, until, in December, 1899, the British withdrew entirely from Samoa and left Germany and the United States to divide the islands. We took the island of Tutuila, which contained Pango-Pango, the best harbor in the archipelago.

113. The Chicago strike of

1894

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The Germans can replace their shattered ships without great exertion and with comparatively little delay. . . . The United States will have great difficulty in recruiting its naval forces in Apia and taking off the shipwrecked crews. At Panama a vessel cannot be spared: at San Francisco there is not a ship available for the service. There are three antiquated vessels in the Asiatic squadron, one new dispatch boat, the Dolphin, and the Palos, which is hardly better than a tow-boat. In this emergency the only resource is to send some of these venerable relics from China to Hawaii, and leave those important stations bare. Such a situation is humiliating to American pride. The movement for providing the country with a well-equipped modern navy ought to receive a powerful impulse from the Samoan catastrophe.

PROBLEMS OF CLEVELAND'S SECOND TERM

The most serious industrial struggle in the history of our country, and the only one in which the troops of the United States have been called upon to fire on United States citizens, was the great railroad strike in Chicago in 1894, arising out of the conflict over wages in the Pullman Palace Car Company. On the day set by the American Railway Union for refusing to handle trains to which Pullman cars were attached, unless the Pullman Company agreed to arbitration with its employees 1 (June 26, 1894), the following statement of its position was published by the company in the Chicago Herald:

1 On July 26, 1894, President Cleveland appointed a commission of three men to investigate the causes of the strike. In his testimony before the commission George M. Pullman, president of the company, said: "Of course there are matters which are proper subjects of arbitration... but as to whether a fact which I know to be true, is true or not, I could not agree to submit to arbitration. The question as to whether the shops at Pullman should be continuously operated at a loss or not, is one which it was impossible for the company, as a matter of principle, to submit to the opinion of any third party." W. J. Ashley, The Railroad Strike of 1894, p. 3. Cambridge, 1895.

In view of the proposed attempt of the American Railway Union to interfere with public travel on railway lines using Pullman cars, in consequence of a controversy as to the wages of employes of the manufacturing department of the company, the Pullman company requests the publication of the following statement of the facts, in the face of which the attempt is to be made.

...

In the first week of May last, there were employed in the car manufacturing department at Pullman, Ill., about 3100 persons. On May 7th a committee of the workmen had an interview by arrangement with Mr. Wickes, vice-president, at which the principal subject of discussion related to wages. The absolute necessity of the last reduction in wages, under the existing condition of the business of car manufacturing, had been explained to the committee, and they were insisting upon a restoration of the wage scale of the first half of 1893, when Mr. Pullman entered the room and addressed the committee, speaking in substance as follows:

At the commencement of the very serious depression last year we were employing at Pullman 5816 men, and paying out in wages there $305,000 a month. Negotiations with intending purchasers of railway equipment that were then pending for new work were stopped by them, orders already given by others were canceled, and we were obliged to lay off, as you are aware, a large number of men in every department, so that by November 1, 1893, there were only about 2000 men in all departments. . . . I realized the necessity for the most strenuous exertions to procure work immediately. . . and, with lower prices upon all materials, I personally undertook the work of the lettings of cars, and by making lower bids than other manufacturers, I secured work enough to gradually increase our force from 2000 up to about 4200, the number employed, according to the April pay-rolls, in all capacities at Pullman.

This result has not been accomplished merely by reduction in wages, but the company has borne its full share by eliminating from its estimates the use of capital and machinery, and in many cases going even below that and taking work at considerable loss, notably the fifty-five Long Island cars, which was the first large order of passenger cars let since the great depression, and which was sought for by practically all the leading car-builders in the country. My