They were often hired muscle during labor strikes.

the limit of a walk, of a town, or of a country

The barber man was small and flash, as barbers mostly are, He wore a strike-your-fancy sash, he smoked a huge cigar;

In the second volume of his autobiography, he writes of a journey up the Padma by paddle steamer (built, as it happens, on the river outside my window), where the dry season had exposed many sandbanks...