That same afternoon President Cleveland ordered Colonel Crofton, in command at Fort Sheridan, to enter Chicago with the entire garrison of infantry, artillery and cavalry. This order was promptly carried out; and on the following morning the troops were in camp upon the lake front. Reenforcements were hurried to them, and General Miles had presently at his disposal a force of several thousand men. A brigade of State militia was also ordered to the city by the Governor at the Mayor's request.

The story of the next few days is one of perpetual disorder, controlled, however, or greatly lessened by the admirable work of the regular troops, whose cool firmness had that indescribable effect which discipline always exercises upon disorder. Yet there was much destruction of railway property, both within the city and near it; while the temper of the soldiers were often severely tried. The spirit of the mob grew more and more dangerous; and at last (on July 7th) General Miles issued an order to all officers in command of troops, directing them to fire upon persons engaged in overt hostile acts. Debs, whose prudence had begun to fail him, made an inflammatory address, in which he said:

"The first shot fired by regular troops at the mobs here will be a signal for civil war. Bloodshed will surely follow."

Events moved quickly. On the following day the President issued a proclamation ordering all persons engaged in unlawful assemblages to disperse "on or before twelve o'clock noon of the ninth day of July instant." Those who disregarded the warning were to be viewed as public enemies. "There will be no vacillation in the decisive punishment of the guilty." On that same day, a mob at Hammond, Indiana, some twenty miles distant from Chicago, set upon several non-strikers, killing one and wounding four. Matters grew still more serious ; and a detachment of regular troops, commanded by Major Hartz, was hurried to the Morton station. Under their protection, several trains were moved. This infuriated the mob, which, after exhausting every form of insult, began to shower the soldiers with missiles. The troops remained unmoved, awaiting orders. Emboldened by this apparent timidity, their assailants, who now numbered fully three thousand, made a wild rush, intending to overwhelm the compact company in blue. Major Hartz gave a sharp command, and the magazine rifles spurted fire into the yelling mob, drilling it through and through with bullets and strewing the ground with dead.

Coincidentally with these events, Judge Grosscup delivered a charge to a special Federal Grand Jury, which at once found indictments against Debs and three of his associates, the charge being one of conspiracy under the Sherman Anti-Trust Law of 1890. On July 10th, the four men were arrested and gave bail in $10,000 each. On July 17th, the same men were brought before Judge Woods and were charged with contempt of court, in having disobeyed the injunction of July 2d. They refused to give bail upon this charge, and were sent to prison under guard.

This swift and stern action of the Federal Government broke the backbone of the strike, as Debs himself afterward admitted. The movement in which the Knights of Labor had also taken part, had spread over twenty-seven States and Territories and had affected the operation of 125,000 miles of railway. But everywhere it was dealt with in the same energetic manner whenever it obstructed the service of the mails; and after the arrest of Debs it died speedily away. On July 20th less than a month after the general strike began the United States troops left Chicago, their presence being no longer needed.

In the opinion of the Governor of Illinois, John P. Altgeld, their presence there had never been required. Altgeld was a Democrat of the Populistic type. In appearance, he resembled a typical German agitator fanatical and intense. He had pardoned the Anarchists who were sentenced to imprisonment at the time of the Haymarket murders in 1886. Many persons regarded him as no better than an Anarchist himself, yet this judgment was too harsh. His sympathies were undoubtedly with the strikers, and he felt, with some reason, that the presence of Federal troops was essentially provocative.

The serious constitutional question which the strike of 1894 brought into prominence concerned the judiciary rather than the executive. "Government by injunction" was a phrase that now came into general use. The Interstate Commerce Law of 1887 and the Sherman Anti-Trust Law of 1890 had both been framed with a view to checking the power of the corporations. Clever lawyers, however, had most ingeniously converted these two acts into instruments to protect the railway corporations against attack. If an engineer left his post, or if the crew of a train deserted it, this was held to be a conspiracy in restraint of commerce. A United States Circuit Court had issued a "blanket" injunction against all the employees of the Northern Pacific Road, forbidding them to strike. As to Debs and his associates, they had been enjoined from inciting men to strike. On December 14th they were brought before judge Woods in Chicago, and sentenced Debs to six months' imprisonment and the others to three months for contempt of court. This extension of the enjoining power was contrary to the whole spirit and practice of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence as hitherto understood. By the new procedure, a judge defined in advance the nature of an offense, and by injunction forbade the commission of it by certain specified persons. If they disobeyed the injunction, they were brought before the judge and fined or imprisoned, not directly for the act itself, but for contempt of court. In this way the judge became also the accuser, and the accused lost the right of a jury trial. Many of the most conservative publicists in the East were alarmed by this alarming stretch of the judicial power.

The action of judge Woods in sentencing Debs was, however, sustained by a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court handed down on May 27, 1895, and he served his term in prison. Yet it is to be noted that the indictments for conspiracy found against him in legal form by a Federal Grand Jury were afterward dismissed.

The report of a commission appointed by President Cleveland to investigate the origin of the great strike was full of deep significance. This commission found in the Railway Managers' Association an example of "the persistent and shrewdly devised plans of corporations to overreach their limitations and to usurp indirectly powers and rights not contemplated in their charters." It found that neither the Railway Union, nor any general combination of railway employees had been planned until the railway managers had set the example.