Who will ever forget that Labour Day in Chicago? How they
marched!--thousands and thousands and more thousands! They filled the
streets. The cars stopped. Men trembled with the import of the impending
hour.
Here they come! How the ground trembles! The chant chant chant of that
song! It must have been thus that Grant felt at the great review of the
veterans in Washington when all day long they marched past him, the men
of the Civil War, the whites of their eyes showing in the tan of their
faces. McGregor stood on the stone curbing above the tracks in Grant
Park. As the men marched they massed in there about him, thousands of
them, steel workers and iron workers and great red-necked butchers and
teamsters.
And in the air wailed the marching song of the workers.
All of the world that was not marching jammed into the buildings facing
Michigan Boulevard and waited. Margaret Ormsby was there. She sat
with her father in a carriage near where Van Buren Street ends at the
Boulevard. As the men kept crowding in about them she clutched nervously
at the sleeve of David Ormsby's coat. “He is going to speak,” she
whispered and pointed. Her tense air of expectancy expressed much of the
feeling of the crowd. “See, listen, he is going to speak out.”
It must have been five in the afternoon when the men got through
marching. They were massed in there clear down to the Twelfth Street
Station of the Illinois Central. McGregor lifted his hands. In the hush
his harsh voice carried far. “We are at the beginning,” he shouted and
silence fell upon the people. In the stillness one standing near her
might have heard Margaret Ormsby weeping softly. There was the gentle
murmur that always prevails where many people stand at attention. The
weeping of the woman was scarcely audible but it persisted like the
sound of little waves on a beach at the end of the day.