not with the varying fortune of the State. “The old order changeth,
yielding place to new,” one epoch of society merges into another, and
the lives of men are lived on other planes; but there is a constant
quantity in it all at the point where the pressure upon the limits of
subsistence is the strongest, and the weakest, driven to the wall, live
from hand to mouth in squalid wretchedness.

How familiar to our day has the picture come to be of children who
breathe moral death with every breath they draw, and grow up to certain
crime and shamelessness from out the haggard struggle for daily bread
in sordid attics where disease is born in reeking filth and in warrens
of beastly incest! Familiarity with it breeds no contempt, but rather
a wondering recognition of the touch of better nature which reveals
itself--the shouts of true delight from children hard at play; their
rapt absorption in the game, an ecstasy in which all the hidden
beauty of their faces is disclosed; the loving tending of a plant
that grows in the fetid air of a working-chamber; and, more than all,
the unfailing miracle of ministry, wherein the poor, out of cramping
penury, relieve the grimmer needs of yet poorer brethren.

Once through the belt, and over a narrow river which flows black with
the noisome sewage of the city, and past the region of unceasing
railway traffic, and through the chilling gloom of streets which are
like sunless caverns between sheer walls of stone, almost a single
step in an eastward walk brought to sudden view the revelation of new
order. A long, wide avenue, bathed in winter sunlight, lay radiant
from polished windows and the garnished pavements of all its length.
Glimpses were had of an inland sea which reflected, as from clearest
crystal, the infinite serenity of unclouded skies. Down the far extent
of the thoroughfare, blending into indistinguishable unity in distant,
gleaming haze, were homes where, in quiet and comfort, some in high
refinement and some in barbaric splendor, live the strong of their
generation, working out life’s fateful ends.

It was down this avenue that I passed on the way to church. An outward
calm, as of perfect peace, possessed it. There was no hint of hunger
there, nor of the cruel need which eats into the living souls of men
until it devours them or leaves them maimed and stunted of their
rightful growth. Plethora here took the place of want. Then quickly
came the sense of excess, with its end in sad satiety, and hard upon
the sight of lavish luxury followed the impression of a world of men
seeking at any cost to hedge themselves with unstinted plenty from all
sight and knowledge of their kindred who know but little relief from
pangs of plague and famine.

Among the first to enter it, I walked up the steps of a large stone
church and into an inviting vestibule. Several young men were grouped
in conversation between the inner doors, and the one who first marked
my entrance stepped out at once to meet me. A little painfully
regardful of his dress, he yet was frank and cordial, and the ease
with which he greeted me could not have become him better had he spent
his life in leading workingmen up the aisles of rich churches.

“I have a seat well up on this side, where you can hear perfectly,” he
suggested, looking me full in the eyes, as we stood for a moment at the
door. “May I show you to that?”

“I should like to sit here if I may,” I said, and I pointed to the
corner of the first seat from the wall.

“I am sorry,” he answered, “but that seat is reserved for an old
gentleman who has occupied it for years, and who always prefers to sit
there. Would you mind taking the seat just in front of it?”

“Certainly not,” I said. “That will suit me quite as well,” and I sat
myself down in the place in question.

Not half a dozen persons were in the building, and its restful quiet
was unbroken even by the prelude from the organ. Two ladies in
deep mourning entered now, in the company of the church treasurer.
It appeared, from their conversation, that they had met him by
appointment; and, although they were speaking in low tones, yet they
stood so near me that I could not help overhearing what they said.

The point in discussion among them related to a pew, and the treasurer
politely pointed out a small one not far from where I sat, which was
at their service for two hundred dollars a year, and also two sittings
farther to the front, which they might have on the same terms. There
was much considering of the _pros_ and _cons_ of this alternative, and,
incidentally, the treasurer indicated the range of prices in the pews,
from two hundred dollars near the door to sixteen hundred where seats
were most in demand.

In growing numbers the congregation was assembling, and above the
gentle breathing of the organ, which began to spread in soothing waves
of prayerful music through the church, rose the soft rustle of rich
dress, and the air, glowing with deep colors from stained glass, took
on a subtle perfume.

When the pews were dense with worshippers, scarcely a vacant seat
remaining, and my closest watchfulness had failed to note the presence
of a single other person of my class, there broke faintly on the
waiting company the clear, uplifting sweetness of a rare contralto
voice. Vague and lightly stirring at the first, as when some deeply
buried feeling, recalled to life, gives utterance to new being in “the
language of a cry,” it rose to ever fuller power, unfaltering and pure
in every tone, until it smote with the touch of truth each silent chord
of life and waked them all to perfect harmony, wherein they sing the
mystic unity of things, where the senses mix and whence they radiate,
and where,

    ... in the midmost heart of grief
    Our passions clasp a secret joy.

I was not present, however, merely as a worshipper, but also as a
member of my chosen order. I tried to see with their eyes, and then
to think their thoughts and feel their emotions. When I held myself
honestly to this task, with the aid of what I had learned directly from
the men and caught of their ways of thinking, it was another revulsion
of feeling which set in.

I thought of my nine dollars a week, and of the meagre pittance which
resulted from utmost care in saving, even when my own support was the
only claim upon me, and how far beyond my reach was all possibility of
a seat in the pews which were held for barter. The image of Mrs. Schulz
rose up to me, worn, and wan, and almost ill, yet always cheerful, and
I remembered the patient, unflinching courage with which she faced the
obligations of her life, and the heart-breaking economies by which she
must meet many of its duties. On that very day, the two older children
had gone at different hours to church, because there was but one pair
of shoes and stockings between them, and Mrs. Schulz herself went out
to mass, through the tingling cold of the early morning, in clothing
which would have been light for summer.

While here, on every hand, was dress whose cost, as indicating
not warmth and comfort but mere conformity to changing fashion,
represented, in scores of cases, more of annual individual expenditure
than the whole net income of many a workman’s family. And even more
poignant to a mind made sensitive by this train of thought was the
impression which weighed upon it of a company well-fed to a degree of
comfort beyond the sense of sympathy with hunger that rarely learns the
meaning of enough. The mere suggestion of a breakfast of rich food in
wide variety, and served often at great cost in almost wasteful plenty,
to be followed soon after the hour of worship by another meal yet more
varied, and abundant, and rich, seemed the very pitch of heartless
mockery, in the full presence almost of hundreds of men and women to
whom bare day’s bread is an agony of anxious seeking, and of multitudes
of little children to whom, not nourishing food alone but even food
enough to stay the pangs of hunger, is a luxury.

These familiar feelings, roused, as always, by the common contrasts
of life, which one follows in close study through the bewildering
complexities of casual relations, were dominant, from the new point of
view, as the outcome of patent facts. Superficial and undiscriminating,
and yet most real and living, is the thought of the actual workman, as
his mind responds to the obvious leading of the things he sees. I was
glad at this point that Albert was not with me. A few minutes later I
deeply regretted his absence.

The minister had begun his sermon. I scarcely heard the opening
sentences, so oppressed was my mind with the workman’s sense of the
ruthless Philistinism of this phase of modern Christianity. It was the
preacher’s tone which first attracted me. There was quiet in it and a
great reserve, and he spoke as a pastor who holds earnest conversation
with his flock. I was all attention in a moment, and I saw that I
listened to a man who knew his fellow-men, and whose words made strong
appeal to their intelligence.

It was as though he spoke from a heart well-nigh broken with personal
grief, but chastened to new love and truth, and tenderness, by the
sorrow which it had borne.

He was speaking of the needs of men, and through his thoughts there
breathed a knowledge of the _Weltschmerz_ of to-day, and deep sympathy
with it. There was no weak ignoring of the difficulties of honest
doubt, and no false claims for the basis of belief; and, when he spoke
of the awful suffering of our time, his words were true to the high
dignity of man through the infinite consequences of free choice in his
life upon the earth. His appeal was no emotional blending of the false
and true, wherewith to blind men’s eyes to the eternal verities, and
to cause to rest lightly upon comfortable consciences the sense of
personal responsibility for one’s fellows, but rather the sure claim of
clear conviction which comes from out the facts of daily life seen in
the light of their true meaning.

The effect upon his hearers was unmistakable. I was unaware of it
for a time, so engrossed was I in the speaker’s words, and in the
strongly human personality of the man, but by degrees I awoke to
the fact that all about me were listeners as eagerly intent as I.
The sense of hardened, pampered, Philistinism gave way before the
overwhelming consciousness of a sympathetic unity of thought and
feeling. Indifferent to the vital needs of the world and to the
pressing problems of its life? No emotion could have been farther from
these men and women, the intensity of whose interest could be felt in
almost an agony of breathless attention to the sober truthfulness
of the minister. The very stillness was charged with mute appeal for
guidance from hearts wrung with the hurt of the world and pleading for
some useful outlet to the tide of generous feeling. It was as though
distress had ceased to be for them the visible sufferings of the poor,
and had grown, through the deepening sense of brotherhood, into an
anguish of their own, which must find healing in forms of effective
helpfulness. Very clearly dawned the conviction that, if one could but
point out to the members of this waiting company some “way,” “something
to do,” which would square well with their practical business sense
of things, instant and unmeasured would be their response for the
furthering of an end which would work them such glad relief!

From the church my destination was the meeting of the Socialists. But
not immediately, for I stopped on the way at the well-known haunt in
Madison Street for the usual Sunday dinner.

By this time I had attended several of the Socialists’ meetings, and
had come to know personally a number of the members of the order,
and I was not surprised, upon taking a seat in the restaurant, to
catch sight of three Socialists who were nodding pleasantly to me
from a neighboring table. One was the broad-minded Pedler, whose
good impression made in the first speech of his which I had heard
was heightened by all my later knowledge of him. Another I had
learned to know as a near approach to my original preconception of a
revolutionary. He was a Communistic Anarchist, and just what peculiar
variation of individual belief it was which led him to ally himself
with the Socialists I could never make clearly out.

It puzzled me not a little; for, by this time I had thoroughly in mind
the fundamental fact that Socialism and Anarchy, as two schools of
social doctrine, are at the very poles of hostile opposition to each
other. And, if I may judge from the little that I have seen and heard
between them, the vituperative heat of their controversies is equalled
only by the warmth and malignancy which has marked the history of
theological debate.

I soon learned that Socialist and Anarchist are not interchangeable
terms, to be used with light indifference in describing the general
advocate of revolution against established order. Indeed, to my great
surprise, I found that a policy of active, aggressive revolution among
these men had almost no adherents. Certainly none among the Socialists,
for they repudiated the bare suggestion of violence as being wholly
inadequate and absurd, and pinned their faith instead to what they
called the “natural processes of evolution.” These, to their belief,
would, in any case, work out the appointed ends with men, but their
operation could be stimulated by education, they said, and helped on
by organized effort toward the achievement of manifest destiny in the
highly centralized and perfected order which is to result from the
common ownership and administration by all the people of all land and
capital used in production and distribution, for the common good of all.

And even among the Anarchists the upholders of a policy of bloody
revolt against social order were rare. Most of those whom I came to
know were distinctly of a metaphysical turn of mind. It was easy to
trace their intellectual kinship with the Physiocrats of the last
century, in their implicit confidence in the universal efficacy of
_laissez faire_. Their views, reduced to simplest terms, seemed to take
the form of the epigram--that “the cure for the evils of freedom is
more freedom.” The removal of all artificial restraint in the form of
man-made laws would result eventually, to their thinking, in a society
as natural and as wholesome as is all physical order, which is the
exact resultant of the free play of natural law.

It was the Socialist’s conception of a highly centralized
administration which drove the Anarchist into a frenzy of vehement
antagonism. And it was the Anarchist’s _laissez faire_ ideal which
roused the latent fighting-spirit of the Socialist. The Anarchist would
maintain with stout conviction that centralized administration is
already the core of the malady of the world, and that our need is for
freedom in the absence of artificial limitations wherein natural forces
can work their rightful ends. And the Socialist would retort, with
rising anger, that it is from anarchy--the absence of wisely regulated
system--that the world even now suffers most, and that the hope of men
lies in the orderly management of their own affairs in the interests of
all, and in the light of the revelations of science. They were heartily
at one in their dislike for what they were fond of calling the present
“_bourgeois_ society,” and for the existing rights of private property,
which they regarded as its chiefest bulwark, but they parted company at
once, and with sharp recriminations, on the grounds of their dislike,
and of their purposes and hopes for a regenerated state of things.

Such Anarchists were of the “Individualistic” type. Not all of those
I met were so philosophical, however. The Communistic one, who was
nodding at me in a friendly manner from a near table, notably was not.
Very much the reverse. He was for open revolution to the death, and
he made no secret of it. He had little patience for the slow pace of
evolution believed in by the Socialists, but he had less, apparently,
for the _laissez faire_ conception of his brother Anarchists. At all
events, I found him most commonly in the meetings of the former sect,
where his revolutionary views were frowned down, but his invectives
against society were tolerated in a spirit of free speech, and as being
warranted by the evils of the existing state.

He was a German, of tall, muscular frame, erect, square-shouldered,
well-poised, as a result of long service, most bitterly against
his will, in the Prussian Army, and he hated kings and potentates
and all governmental authority, with a burning hatred. His was the
broad-featured likeness of his race, and his stiff, fair hair was
brushed back in straight lines from a well-shaped forehead, while his
beard, brown and streaked with white, bristled from his lower face like
the bayonets of a square in full formation. He was a mechanic by trade,
and a good one, as I had happened to learn.

[Illustration: HE HATED KINGS AND POTENTATES AND ALL GOVERNMENTAL
AUTHORITY.]

The last of the three, like the Pedler, was a Socialist, but was
very unlike his two companions as a man. My acquaintance among
the Socialists had not gone far before I began to observe that I was
meeting men who, whatever their mental vagaries, were craftsmen of no
mean order. They were machinists and skilled workmen mostly, and some
were workers in sweat-shops. All of them had known the full stress of
the struggle for bread, but they were decidedly not the inefficients of
their class, having fought their way to positions of some advantage in
the general fight.

Here, however, was an exception in this third “comrade,” and I
marvelled at the rarity of his type. Incompetence was stamped on every
feature. His long, lank, flabby figure, with its disjointed movements,
suggested no virility. The hair grew thin and blonde from his head and
from his colorless face, and his large, pale-blue eyes flitted in their
movements, as though there were behind them not intelligence enough
to hold them in fixed attention. The man’s emotions were boundless.
He had, moreover, a gift of utterance, and, when he spoke in meeting,
it was sheer feeling that expressed itself in words which were
marvellously void of any sane concatenation. It was a psychological
phenomenon, this public speech of his. We had premonitory warnings
of it, for we could see him writhing in his seat when his emotions
were aroused, and starting nervously until he had gained the floor,
when a half-suppressed, general groan would greet the torrent of his
sentences, which flowed directly from chaotic feeling which had never
reached his mind.

We four left the restaurant together, and walked on to Waverley Hall. I
fell in with the Pedler, and from him I was glad to learn that the Poet
was to read that afternoon his long-deferred paper on the “Opening of
the Exposition Grounds on Sunday.”

It was a little before the appointed hour when we reached the hall,
but already there was promise of an uncommon meeting. The audience was
larger than usual, the benches on both sides of the central aisle being
well filled nearly to the door. The Pedler and I had some difficulty in
finding seats near the front. More than ever marked was the atmosphere
of keen alertness, which, from the first, had so attracted me in the
gatherings of the Socialists. They might be futile, but their meetings
were never dull. And, while they could not have been more orderly, they
might easily have proved far less engaging than they were, had a saving
sense of humor been more conspicuously a characteristic of the members.

There was a sense of pleasurable excitement in sinking back into my
seat, whence, by turning a little to the right, I could command the
hall. The afternoon sun was streaming through the two large windows
in the south end. The heavy draperies, looped up to admit the light,
were in perfect keeping with the carpet on the daïs and the pulpit
chairs upholstered with plush, on one of which sat the Leader, behind a
reading-desk. There were other paraphernalia of the Masonic lodge which
habitually held its meetings there, and among the life-sized portraits
on the walls was one of Washington in the full regalia of a Mason. At
small wooden tables, resting on the floor at the Leader’s right, sat a
few young reporters, sharpening their pencils in preparation for any
points which could be turned to good account as “copy.”

To the pleasure of excited interest was added the ease of some
familiarity, for, besides the heads of meeting, I recognized among
the gathering company the faces of _habitués_. In a seat across the
aisle the Poet sat in earnest conversation with the Citizeness,
holding fast a roll of manuscript in both hands. And at the end of
the bench behind them was a young man who interested me far more
than any of the Socialists whom I had met. A long black overcoat of
cheap material concealed his work-worn garments to the knees, and his
hands, dark with the dye of clothing, lay folded in his lap. His face
showed faintly the marks of Jewish origin, and, although he was full
three-and-twenty, he bore a strange resemblance to the Christ-child in
Hoffmann’s picture of “Jesus among the Doctors in the Temple.”

Quite oblivious to what was passing about him, he sat in his usual
mood, with an expression of much serenity on his pale face, and his
great, dark, luminous eyes glowing with the ardor of his thought.

I have never lost the first impression which he made upon me; it was
in one of these meetings, when an idle slur had been cast upon his
race and the Leader had given him an opportunity to reply. He rose
modestly to his feet, and from the first my attention was riveted by
the convincing quality in his rich, deep voice. Without a word of cheap
rejoinder, he simply restated the issues of debate in clear, incisive
sentences, which seemed to gather force from their broken English,
until he had shown the entire irrelevance of the insulting charge, even
had it been true.

I had waited for him on that afternoon at the meeting’s end, and we
began an acquaintance which to me has been of great value. It is easy
to predict for such a man an eventual escape from the bondage of a
sweat-shop, but, inasmuch as he has been held in slavery to that work
from his earliest infant memories of a crowded den in Poland, where he
was born, I feel some measure of justice in naming him “The Victim.”

Promptly on the hour the Leader called the meeting to order, and
introduced the Poet, whose paper presented the topic of the day’s
debate. In a few moments we were all following in close attention the
ready flow of the Poet’s voice as it passed with clear articulation
over the well-chosen words of his introductory sentences. There was
admirable precision in the statement of the case at issue, and we were
bracing ourselves with pleasure for the logical sequences of detailed
discussion, when, to our surprise, the Poet broke abruptly from all
judicial treatment of his theme. At a single leap, he took the ground
that certainly the Exposition should be accessible every day--that its
opening on Sundays was not a subject for debate.

Then there followed a storm of hot invective. Christianity was assailed
as the giant superstition of historic civilization, still, daring, to
the shame of high intelligence, to hold its fetich head aloft in the
light of modern science. Its ministers were attacked as sycophantic
parasites, whose only motive, in urging the closing of the Fair on
Sundays, was the fear of the spread among working people of that
enlightenment which will achieve the overthrow of capitalistic society
and with it the tottering structure of the Church. Most of all, his
bitterness spent itself upon these “blind leaders of the blind,” as he
called them, who will not themselves enter into a knowledge of a better
state nor suffer others to enter it, and who grievously break the law
of rest on Sundays in befooling their fellow-men, and then live through
the remaining days in luxurious unproductiveness upon the labor of
their dupes.

What was coming next we could not guess, and it seemed a long cry to
any shout of exultation from all this, but he accomplished it with
facility, for his paper closed with a peroration, wherein he rose to
fervid panegyric upon the increasing intellectual emancipation of
workingmen. The Romish Church, he said, keeps many of them in bondage
yet, but the Protestant organizations have all but lost their hold upon
them; and the widening gulf between the two great classes in society
has left these churches in the nakedness of their true character, as
mere centres of the social life of the very rich and of the upper
_bourgeoisie_, and as a prop to the social order from which these idle
classes so richly profit, at the merciless cost of the wage-earners.

Instantly this was accepted as the dominant note of the meeting. The
applause which greeted it was genuine and prolonged. With light-hearted
disregard of the subject appointed for debate, men began ardently to
speak to this new theme: Modern Christianity a vast hypocrisy--a cloak
made use of by vested interest to conceal from the common people the
real nature of the grounds on which it stands.

But for the masterly qualities of the Leader, who held the meeting to
strict parliamentary order, it might have degenerated into a mob. Men
were crowding one another in their desire to gain the floor, but not
for a moment was the peaceful conduct of the gathering disturbed. With
accurate knowledge of the shades of social belief there represented and
of the personalities of the men, the Leader chose for recognition with
discriminating justice.

At one moment an American workman was speaking, a Socialist of the
general school of Social Democracy. There was self-respecting dignity
about him and a calm reserve as he began.

The Christian Church served as well as any institution of the
capitalistic order, he said, to measure the growing cleavage between
the classes in society. But, to his mind, the paper of the afternoon
had emphasized unnecessarily the existence of the _bourgeoisie_;
for, economically considered, there is no longer a middle-class to be
reckoned with in vital questions. There remain simply the capitalists
and the proletarians. The old middle-class, which had made its living
by individual enterprise, was fast being forced (by the play of
natural laws, which showed themselves in the increasing centralization
of capital) out of the possibility of successful competition with
aggregated wealth, and down, for the most part, to the level of those
who can bring to production, not land nor capital, but merely their
native qualities of physical strength, or manual skill, or mental
ability--proletarians, all of them, whether manual or intellectual, and
coming surely, in the slow development of evolution, to a conscious
knowledge of their community of interest as against the vested “rights”
of monopoly in the material instruments of production. But athwart this
path of progress rose the hardened structure of the Christian Church,
bringing to bear against it all her temporal power and the full force
of her accumulated superstitions.

But now the speaker’s calm deserted him, and, with fist uplifted in
threatening gesture, and his strong, bronzed face working with the
fervor of his hate, he cried out against the ministers of Christ, who
preach to the wronged and downtrodden poor the duty of patience with
their “divinely appointed lot,” and who try to soothe them to blind
submission with promises of an endless future of ecstatic blessedness,
when the rich of this world shall burn in the unquenchable fires of
hell.

[Illustration: THE SOCIALIST MEETING.]

“Oh! the fiendishness of these men,” he shouted, “who hide from
ignorant minds the truth, which they themselves know full well, that
for no mortal man is there any heaven or hell which he does not realize
in the span of his earthly history, and if he misses here the happiness
to which he was rightly born, he misses it forever! And the miserable
paltriness of their motive in working this cruel wrong--merely that
they may exempt themselves from toil and live in comfort upon the labor
of others, instead of being, where most of them belong, out in the open
fields hoeing corn!”

In another moment a man of widely different cult was speaking. For
some time he had been trying to gain the floor, and now the Leader
recognized him. He was a Christian Socialist, chief spokesman of
the little band of his persuasion, who were very regular in their
attendance upon these meetings. An insignificant Englishman he was,
whose h’s transposed themselves with consistent perversity, and whose
general qualities of physique, and tone, and manner reminded one
strongly of the type of parson with weak lungs and a large family who
is incumbent in out-of-the-way English churches on the Continent. He
was not wanting in pluck nor in a certain strength of conviction, but
the gentleness of the dove was his without the wisdom of the serpent,
and the words he spoke, in weak voice and apologetic manner, while they
would have met with sympathy in a company of believers whose emotions
were already stirred, served here only to inflame the antagonisms of
men whose views were stoutly materialistic.

The Communistic Anarchist was the first to rise when the Christian
Socialist sat down, and the Leader gave to him the privilege of the
floor. There was the power of primal force in the suppressed passion
of the man, and joined to this the exciting struggle of a human will
in keeping rage in bounds. His heavy frame heaved with paroxysms of
volcanic wrath, and the sibilants of English speech, augmented by
the z’s in Teutonic struggle with the sound of th, came hissing and
sputtering through his teeth from a tongue which could not frame words
fast enough for his impatience.

I have no power to reproduce his actual sentences, and at best I can
but suggest the purport of his talk, which was in full sympathy with
most of what had gone before:

“God a decaying myth, and the Bible a silly legend, and Jesus a good
man seeing some human truth, but gone mad in the credulous ignorance of
his age, and dead these two thousand years, and Christianity a hoary
superstition, made use of in its last days by _bourgeois_ civilization
to stave off a little longer its own fateful day of reckoning! And here
is a man, who calls himself a Socialist, who dares to bring before us
this enfeebled monster of worn-out faith, which has been the tyrant of
the poor from the moment of gaining temporal power, trying to hide its
oppressions under a guise of so-called charity! It has been, too, from
the beginning the stubbornest foe of scientific knowledge, and even
now, in the last hour of its heartless cruelties, employs its utmost
craft to put off the manifest dawn of freedom to the workers.”

Breaking through the forced restraint of the beginning, his feelings
bore him in resistless course until, in the full sweep of his long
arms, his fingers were clutching wildly at the empty air, and his
blood-shot eyes were rolling in a frenzy, and his hair stood straight
on end, while his voice rose to its highest pitch in fierce scorn and
denunciation.

The hall was still echoing to the roar, when a scattered number of
us were on our feet, straining forward in our efforts to catch the
Leader’s eye. The Victim was recognized, and almost immediately the
meeting began to feel the calming effect of a cool, conciliatory mind.
Clearness was highly characteristic of the Victim’s mental processes,
and, as his ideas slowly framed themselves, in translation to English
from the native language in which he thought, they took on a charming
piquancy and precision, in the oddest mixtures of strange idioms and
bookish phrases and the current coin of common slang.

“The assigned subject for debate this afternoon,” he was saying (in a
paraphrase which wholly lacks his strongly individual character), “is
one which opens up questions of great economic value and importance.
It is a pity, it seems to me, that the time has been consumed in a
discussion of side issues, rather than of the fundamental question of
the observance of Sunday as an economic institution, and the relation
borne to that great issue by the present agitation over the opening of
the Exposition grounds on Sundays. It is well to remember that this
is a meeting of Socialists. Freedom of speech is one of our cardinal
beliefs. But a freedom of speech which ignores the subject appointed
for debate would make better use of its liberty by asking for a
particular afternoon to be devoted to the theme which it wishes to
discuss.

“Not only has the talk of to-day been wide of the mark, but it has
been out of harmony with the genius of Socialism. I am proud to own
myself a Scientific Socialist, and a disciple of Karl Marx. To my way
of thinking, there can be no verified truth which the mind of man can
accept as such aside from the established results of naturalistic
science. I, therefore, attach no more value to Christianity, as an
authoritative source of truth, than I do to the sacred writings of my
race. Both are merely historical facts, to be dealt with precisely as
are all the facts of history. This afternoon, however, they have been
dealt with in a spirit of intolerance, as malignant and uncompromising
as the spirit which is charged against historic Christianity. It will
be well for us who profess Socialism to be on our guard, lest there
grow up among us an intolerance bred of dogmatic science, which may
prove in the future as destructive of free thought and of true progress
as has proved in the past the bigotry of dogmatic theology.”

It was now well past the ordinary time for adjourning. The Leader
announced the fact, and I feared that he meant to call for a motion to
adjourn without making his usual closing speech. It was his habit to
sum up the discussion, and we always looked forward to that address,
for the Leader had the gift of speech and a liking for it, and a
knowledge, moreover, of the minds of Socialists which was by no means
common. There was little of the declamatory in his habitual speaking,
and he lacked the analytical skill of some of the other members, but he
had a shrewd perception of the dramatic, and he could make use of it to
striking purpose. He had been born and bred a workingman, and was an
artisan of much ability, and he knew thoroughly the workmen’s point of
view. I have watched him play upon their feelings with the skill of a
native orator.

He spoke now in high commendation of what The Victim had said, and
deplored the fact that the afternoon had passed without discussion of
the appointed theme. As a Socialist, he regretted, he said, that the
talk had taken the form of an attack upon Christianity. Such a spirit
was directly counter to the tolerance of Socialism. For his own part,
although he had been brought up under the influence of the Protestant
religion, he found himself very little in sympathy with modern
Christianity. Supernaturalism he was willing to regard as a question
apart, and as being entitled to fair, dispassionate discussion, but
the Christian Church, as a practical embodiment of the teachings of its
founder, he felt justified in judging in the light of every-day facts,
and in their light he was free to say that Christianity was a failure.

“Let us take an illustration,” he went on. “A very urgent problem
in our city just now is that of ‘the unemployed.’ Certain of the
newspapers have made a careful investigation in the last few weeks, and
the result of their inquiry shows that, within the city limits to-day,
there are at least thirty thousand men out of work. There may be fifty
thousand, but the first estimate is well within the truth.

“It is a matter primarily of supply and demand. Among these idle men
there may be many inefficients and many chronic loafers, and many who,
from one cause and another, are incapable of effective work. But the
nature of the present status is unaffected by these considerations. It
means, in its last analysis, that the local labor market is overstocked
to the extent of thirty thousand men. However willing to work, and
however efficient as workmen they might be, these men, or their
equivalent in number, under existing conditions, would invariably find
themselves unemployed.

“And how does the Christian Church among us hold itself in relation to
this problem? Its members profess themselves the disciples of ‘the meek
and lowly Jesus,’ whom they call ‘divine.’ He said of Himself that ‘He
had not where to lay His head,’ and He was the first Socialist in His
teaching of universal brotherhood.

“His followers build gorgeous temples to His worship in our city, and
out of the fear, apparently, that some of the shelterless waifs, whom
He taught them to know as brothers and who are in the very plight their
Master was, should lay their weary heads upon the cushioned seats,
they keep the churches tight locked through six days of the week, and
then open them on one day for the exclusive purpose of praising that
Master’s name!

“Nor is this condition truer of Chicago than it is of any large
industrial centre in this country, or even in all Christendom,” he
went on, warming to his theme as the intently listening company
hailed vociferously the name of the Redeemer as the first teacher of
Socialism. “Only last week news came from London that the unemployed
there had grown to an army of one hundred thousand men. Picture the
horror of it, and the suffering, and the awful degradation, not in
these men alone, but among the women and children whom they represent!
Cold, and hunger, and the ravages of disease were bad enough, in
the ferocity of this inclement winter; but imagine, if you can, the
pitiless despair which is eating the hearts out of these our brothers,
and then tell me whether we have not here a fairly good imitation of
the hell where ‘the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.’

“Suppose, for a moment, that the Christ were to appear in the heart
of that ‘Christian’ city. Most certainly He would be found among the
poor, ministering to their needs, and comforting them in their sorrows,
and bringing life and hope among them. I can imagine His perplexity at
sight of the man-inflicted suffering and degradation, and the Godless
tyranny of men over their brother men, in the very stronghold of
Christianity and two thousand years after He had taught that, under the
Fatherhood of God, to love our neighbor as ourselves is the fulfilling
of the law to all who have need of our sympathy and help.

“I hear Him ask in His amazement for some authoritative head of the
brotherhood which He established upon earth. I hear men tell Him that
He must see the Archbishop of Canterbury. I watch Him as He walks to
the palace of the Archbishop, along narrow streets which thunder to the
din of mammon-worship and which are blackened with the smoke from off
its countless altars, seeing everywhere the hideous contrasts between
rich and poor, and the lives of His toiling ones worn out in ceaseless
labor.

“Weighed down with the heartless misery of the world, I see Him stand
patiently at the palace-gate. A footman in rich livery answers to His
knock.

“‘I would see the Archbishop,’ says the Christ.

“‘And who shall I say wishes to see his Lordship?’ asks the flunky.

“‘Tell him that his Master is at the gate.’

“‘Oh,’ replies the servant, ‘but his Lordship has no “master”; he is
the primate of all England!’”

Here the speaker abruptly ceased, but for that gathered company the
picture was complete, and the cheers with which the hall had rung at
the mention of Christ, the social teacher, were changed to hisses
against the church which calls itself by His name.

On the crowded stairs, as we descended to the street, I found myself
beside a young German mechanic whose acquaintance I had made in these
meetings. My knowledge of him was limited to the fact that he was a
Socialist and was employed in a large factory on the North Side.

“What are you going to do, this evening?” he asked, after our exchange
of greetings.

“I have no definite plan,” I said.

“Then come home with me,” he suggested, and I assented gladly.

We were a long time getting there, but when, at last, we reached his
door, the journey was quickly forgotten.

As flat as the untroubled sea, the open prairie lay about us, browned
and seared by frosts and gleaming faintly under the winter stars. Long
parallels of street-lamps, cutting one another at right angles, marked
the outlines of city “blocks,” and threw into stronger relief the deep
black of clustered trees and the forms of lonely cottages with lights
glancing dimly from their windows.

When my friend opened the door of his house, there was nothing in the
domestic scene which met us to suggest the home of a revolutionary.
It was the typical home, rather, of the prosperous American workman.
The living-room, which we entered, was aglow with light, and redolent
of dry, unwholesome, excessive heat from a closed iron stove, and
it seemed at first to be already crowded by occupants. The wife was
standing over a cradle, in which she softly rocked her baby, whose
sleep was undisturbed by the conversation between two young men of
the family. An old couple, seated in easy chairs, were reading to
themselves, and formed a feature of the picture that fitted well with
the books which stood ranged in swinging brackets on the wall. There
was the usual floral paper, with a border sad enough to move one to
tears, and the worsted tidies, and the prints wherein sentimentality
has so long and so often posed as sentiment. But the plain, rough
furniture was redeemed by the marks of long usefulness, and the room,
as a whole, had all the cosey homeliness of fitness to those whom it
served.

[Illustration: THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE DOMESTIC SCENE WHICH MET US TO
SUGGEST THE HOME OF A REVOLUTIONARY.]

Soon we were seated at supper, and the family, accustomed, apparently,
to the presence of a stranger brought home from the meeting, left my
friend and me to our own discussion of Socialistic themes. I found
this deeply interesting, for my host was finely representative of the
views of the majority of the Socialists whom I saw at Waverley Hall.
In the main he was a Social Democrat. His economic views were drawn,
I found, entirely from Karl Marx. “_Das Kapital_” was his Bible, and
he seemed to know it by heart. To question Marx’s theory of value or
his treatment of labor in relation to production was blasphemy akin to
casting doubt before a devout believer upon the plenary inspiration of
the Scriptures.

He was a Socialist of serene temperament, with boundless faith in the
silent processes of development. Propaganda was hysterical from his
point of view.

“There could be no propaganda in behalf of Socialism,” he said to me,
“one hundredth part so effective as the unchecked activity of men who
imagine themselves the bulwarks of social order and the bitterest foes
of Socialism. We have no quarrel with the increasing centralization
of capital. The opposition to ‘trusts’ and the like comes mainly from
the _bourgeoisie_, who feel themselves being forced out of independent
business. We Socialists are already of the proletariat, and we see
clearly that all trusts and syndicates are the inevitable forerunners
of still greater centralization. The men who are employing their rare
abilities in eliminating the useless wastes of competitive production,
by unifying its administration and control, and so reducing greatly the
cost of the finished article, and who are perfecting the machinery of
transportation and distribution by like unity of administration, are
doing far more in a year to bring about a co-operative organization of
society than we could do, by preaching the theory of collectivism, in a
hundred years.

“The collectivist order of society may be distant, but, at least, we
have this comfort--that the day of the old individualist, anarchical
order is past. We can never return to it. The centralization of
capital has proved the inadequacy of all that, in the present stage of
progress. We have no choice but to go on to further centralization, and
the logical outcome must be eventually, not the monopoly of everything
by a few, but the common ownership of all land and capital by all the
people.”

It was in the middle of the next morning that I chanced to meet, in
the thick of a sweat-shop region of the West Side, an old acquaintance
of the Socialist meetings. “The Unionist” I shall call him, for
he had much to do with organizing the workers in sweat-shops into
labor-unions. A victim of the sweaters himself, earning his living at a
sewing-machine in a densely crowded shop, he yet managed to get about
among the other victims and further their organization. More than once
he had taken me with him on his rounds, and I had grown familiar with
the sight of rooms, in all the poorer sections of the city where the
rent is relatively low, turned into factories on a small scale for the
manufacture of ready-made garments.

And this idea of miniature factories is really the key to the
situation. The industry of ready-made clothing is an enormous one,
involving millions of dollars of invested capital, and competition
among the merchants is very keen. The difference of a fraction of
a cent in the cost of production, by the piece, of a given garment
may mean the difference between profit and loss in the whole output.
Cheapness of production is, therefore, of the first necessity.

Merchants of the greatest executive ability and highest efficiency are
able to secure the maximum of cheap production through the legitimate
factory system. Men of less business ability, in order to compete
successfully, avoid the factory system of production and make use of
the sweat-shops instead. The sweat-shop is, therefore, in a single
word, an evasion, under the stress of competition, of the factory
system of production.

[Illustration: AN EVASION OF THE FACTORY SYSTEM OF PRODUCTION.]

There are few industries which could profit any longer by this system
as opposed to that of the factory, but the manufacture of ready-made
clothing is an exception; and, in it, the less fit to survive are sure
to take advantage of the sweat-shops, until they have been driven
out of the business altogether by those whose superior abilities
enable them to undersell the product of the shops with the product of
legitimate factories.

The manufacturer who makes use of the factory system at once subjects
himself to certain regulations. His work-rooms must show a certain
cubic area to every operative employed; certain sanitary provisions
must be regarded; children under a certain age must not be set to work,
and a prescribed number of hours must be accepted as the limit of the
working day.

But the manufacture of ready-made clothing lends itself to an easy
escape from all this. Instead of having his work done in a factory,
subject to wholesome but costly restrictions, a merchant may give it
out to the lowest bidders among the sweaters. These men take it to
their homes, and secure there the services of their wives and children,
and employ the families of their neighbors. Thousands of rooms are
thus closely packed with workers who have underbid one another in the
struggle for existence, until, in the cheapest quarters available,
without regard to light and air, and decent sanitation, the work is
hurried forward at feverish haste by human wretches whose utmost toil
through excessive hours can often earn them little more than the means
of bare subsistence.

The Unionist was leading me in a brisk walk through a labyrinth of city
squalor. Over unswept wooden pavements we passed, along uncleaned,
wooden streets, in whose broken surfaces lay heaps of decaying
garbage. Wooden houses for the most part flanked the way, hideous,
blackened shanties which leaned grotesquely on insecure foundations,
with rickety flights of broken steps clinging to the buildings’ sides,
where, on warmer days, the teeming population can be seen overflowing
from work-rooms and sewing ceaselessly, even in their search for fresh
air.

Opening directly upon the black rot of crumbling pavements were the
steep descents to dark cellars which undermine these reeking hovels.
From many of them, as we passed, came the hot breath of furnaces laden
with the wholesome smell of baking bread. These were the underground
bakeries of the region, and down their wooden steps, whose surfaces
were buried under layers of hardened filth, were ranged the great round
loaves of dark bread on which this population largely lives. While
through the open doors, which admitted freely the floating germs from
off the putrid streets, we caught glimpses of baking-tins full of soft
muffins ready for the oven, and bakers in white dress who moved about
in the gloomy, fetid air over floors strewn with ashes and the crumpled
shells of eggs and crumbs of unbaked dough.

Mingling in the squalid crowds upon the streets were other figures
peculiar to the scene. Women they were for the most part, with ragged,
faded shawls tied round their heads and falling over their shoulders,
and limp skirts, dangling about their legs and brushing the surface
slime of the pavements. Some upon their shoulders, and others in
Oriental fashion upon their heads, they bore large bundles of clothing
which had been cut at the great dealers’ shops, and which they were
taking now to be made up in the sweaters’ dens.

[Illustration: RETURNING WORK FROM SWEAT SHOPS.]

The Unionist was talking rapidly, almost vehemently, at my side, with
the swift, nervous gesticulation of his race, for he was a young
Polish Jew, of short, sturdy figure, with wiry black hair, and eyes
which were like burnished coals. The scenes about us, which were far
more interesting to me, concerned him not at all in contrast with the
delight he felt in picturing the outcome of political change. Like
so many of the Socialists whom I met, he was an admirable workman,
and thoroughly practical in his views of life, and hugely energetic
and efficient in the organization of his trades-union; but yet he
was possessed, as most of them are, of a strange faculty of living
intensely at times in dreams of a fulfilment of preconceptions of
another social order. He was hard at it now, and was completely blind
to the significant facts about us. With an amazing acquaintance
with contemporaneous political history, he had been sketching for me
what he regarded as a great economic revolution in America. The drift
of what he said was simply that in this country, from colonial days to
the present, the middle-class, who are the small owners of land and
capital, have been the main support of the society in which we have
lived, and that the chief strength of the middle-class has been the
farmer.

In every movement in this country wherein the wage-earners have
sought for separate political action in their own interests, they
have invariably found the farming classes in opposition to them and
supporters of conservatism. But there are marked indications of a
change, he went on. The farming classes are no longer economically
independent, in the sense of owning their land and capital, but
are tenants of the capitalists who hold their mortgages. And, with
this change in economic standing, they have begun to find that
their interests lie, not in maintaining rights of private property,
which have robbed them of their own, but in joining forces with all
wage-earners to bring about a state of things wherein property shall be
a monopoly of all.

And having touched once more in prophetic spirit the beatific vision of
the Socialist, he waxed eloquent in high praise of it, and then turned
to me with an impatient:

“Can’t you see it, Comrade Vikoff--can’t you see it?”

He sympathized with me as one of the countless seekers for employment
in the city, and he had cultivated me because of my interest in the
meetings. Really admirable in their sincerity were his patient efforts
to convert me to Socialism; and when, at last, he gave me up, I am
sure that it was from the conviction that he was dealing with a mind
hopelessly Philistine, whose constant appeal to dry facts marked it
as wholly incapable of appreciation of the charming theory of human
perfectability.

We turned now and passed down a flight of wooden steps to the basement
of a small, brick building. I knew that we were going into a sweater’s
den, for I had visited many of them under the lead of the Unionist, and
many of them on my own account in futile search for work.

There was nothing exceptional in this one beyond the fact that, more
commonly than in the cellar, I had found the shops on the ground floor,
and oftener still in the upper stories of tenements.

As we neared the door, there was the usual sound of the clattering
rush of sewing-machines going at high speed--starting and stopping
abruptly, at uneven intervals, and giving you the impression, in the
meantime, of racing furiously with one another.

The opened door revealed the customary sight of a room perhaps twenty
feet square, with daylight entering faintly through two unwashed
windows, which looked out upon the level of the street. The dampness
showed itself in dew-like beads along the walls and on the ceiling,
which I could easily reach as I stood erect. In spite of its being
winter, the dingy walls were dotted with black flies, which swarmed
most about a cooking-stove, over which, stirring a steaming pot, stood
a ragged, dishevelled woman, who looked as though she could never
have known any but extreme old age. In the remaining floor-space
were crowded a dozen machines or more, over which, in the thick,
unventilated atmosphere, were the bending figures of the workers.
Oil-lamps lit up the inner recesses of the room, and seemed to lend
consistency to the heavy air. From an eye here and there, which caught
his in a single movement, the Unionist received a look of recognition,
but not a head was turned to see who had entered, and the whir of
feverish work went on, unchecked for an instant by our coming.

While the Unionist was talking to the sweater, I walked between the
close lines of machines over a floor covered with deep accumulations of
dirt, and shreds of cloth, and broken threads, to where, in a corner, a
group of girls were sewing. The oldest among them may have been twelve,
and the youngest could have been a little over eight, and their wages
averaged about seventy-five cents a week for hours that varied widely
according to the stress of work.

Near the corner was a passage, and through it I could see into a small
room which had no window, nor any opening but the door; there, in
perpetual darkness lit up by one oil-lamp, was a man who, for twelve
(and sometimes fifteen) hours a day, pressed the new-made clothing for
a living.

It was ladies’ cloaks that the sewers were making; of course, they
worked by the piece, and the best among them could earn a dollar in
the day, and sometimes more by working over-time. They were very
smart-looking garments, and their air of jaunty stylishness was a
most incongruous intrusion upon their surroundings. When I asked the
Unionist for whose trade they were being made, he seemed to think
nothing of the fact that he mentioned, in answer, one of the foremost
merchant-citizens of the town.

We were on the point of leaving, when a heavy foot-fall sounded on
the wooden steps, and the door opened to the touch of an inspecting
officer, whose glowing health and neat, warm uniform were as though a
prosperous breeze were sweeping the stagnant room. The work, however,
was as unaffected by his coming as it had been by ours. Not a sewer
noticed him, and the stitching of machines went racing on with unabated
swiftness. Only “the old man” watched nervously the movements of the
officer, as he walked about the shop, making note of the bad air, and
the filth upon the floors, and the group of little girls, and the dark,
unventilated chamber beyond.

The Unionist had caught me by the arm.

“We’ll wait,” he said; and we stood together in the shadow of the open
door.

Returning finally to the side of the old sweater, the officer handed
him a printed form.

“You must make out this blank,” he said, “and have it ready for me when
I call again.” And without another word he started for the stairs. But
on the way some evidence of unsanitary condition more shocking than
any met with yet--a heap of offal on the floor, or a fouler gust of
poisoned air--checked him, and he turned, indignantly, to the nearest
worker.

“Look here,” I could hear him say, “you’ve got to clean up here, and
right away. The first thing you know you’ll start a fever that will
sweep the city before we can stop it.”

The young Hebrew had stopped his work and turned half round in his
chair until he faced the officer. There were deep lines in his haggard,
beardless face, and his wolfish eyes were ablaze with the sense of
sharp injustice.

“You tell us we’ve got to keep clean,” he answered, in broken English,
lifting his voice to a shout above the clatter of machines. “What time
have we to keep clean when it’s all we can do to get bread? Don’t talk
to us about disease; it’s _bread_ we’re after, _bread_!” And there
sounded in the voice of the boy the cry of the hungry for food, which
no man hears and can ever forget.

[Illustration: “DON’T TALK TO US ABOUT DISEASE;
IT’S _BREAD_ WE’RE AFTER, _BREAD_!”]

The officer passed, speechless, up the steps, and we followed into the
clean, pure air, under the boundless blue of smiling skies.

CHAPTER VI

A ROAD BUILDER ON THE WORLD’S FAIR GROUNDS

               COLUMBIAN ANNIVERSARY HOTEL--No. 1., CHICAGO, ILL.,
                                  Wednesday, April 27, 1892.

From the time that I began work on the Exposition grounds, early
in this month, it has grown increasingly difficult to hark back in
imagination to the unemployed _régime_ of the winter. The change is
a revolution of condition. Hundreds of us live all together within
this vast enclosure, and have rare occasion to go out except on
Sundays, and then only if we choose. We get up in the morning to an
eight-hour day of wholesome labor in the open air, and return in the
late afternoon with healthy appetites to our temporary “hotel,” which
is fragrant of clean, raw pine, and stands commandingly on the site
of the future “court of honor” near the quiet waters of the lake.
About four hundred of us are housed and fed in this one building; men
of half a score of nationalities and of as many trades, ranging from
expert carpenters and joiners and staff-moulders and steel-workers to
the unskilled laborers who work in gangs, under the direction of the
landscape-gardeners or, as in my case, on the temporary plank roads
which are built for the heavy carting.

Guarded by sentries and high barriers from unsought contact with all
beyond, great gangs of us, healthy, robust men, live and labor in
a marvellous artificial world. No sight of misery disturbs us, nor
of despairing poverty out in vain search for employment. Work is
everywhere abundant and well paid and directed with highest skill. And
here, amid delicate, web-like frames of steel which are being clothed
upon with forms of exquisite beauty, and among broad, dreary wastes of
arid dunes and marshy pools which are being transformed by our labor
into gardens of flowers and velvet lawns joined by graceful bridges
over wide lagoons, we work our eight hours a day in peaceful security
and in absolute confidence of our pay.

Complete as the revolution is, it is yet in perfect keeping, in some
strange way, with the general change wrought by the coming of the
spring. This spring, in its effect upon the labor market in Chicago,
was like the heralding of peace and plenty after war.

There was no longer any real difficulty in securing work. The
employment bureaus offered it in abundance in the country, and there
was some revival of demand even within the city limits. This by no
means solved the problem of the unemployed, however. Many of the men
were so weakened by the want and hardship of the winter that they were
no longer in condition for effective labor. Some of the bosses who were
in need of added hands were obliged to turn men off because of physical
incapacity. One instance of this I shall not soon forget. It was when I
overheard, early one morning, at a factory-gate, an interview between
a would-be laborer and the boss. I knew the applicant for a Russian
Jew who had at home an old mother and a wife and two young children to
support. He had had intermittent employment throughout the winter in
a sweater’s den, barely enough to keep them all alive, and, after the
hardships of the cold season, he was again in desperate straits for
work.

The boss had all but agreed to take him on for some sort of unskilled
labor, when, struck evidently by the cadaverous look of the man, he
told him to bare his arm. Up went the sleeve of his coat and of his
ragged flannel shirt, exposing a naked arm with the muscles nearly
gone, and the blue-white, transparent skin stretched over sinews and
the outlines of the bones. Pitiful beyond words was his effort to give
a semblance of strength to the biceps which rose faintly to the upward
movement of the forearm. But the boss sent him off with an oath and
a contemptuous laugh, and I watched the fellow as he turned down the
street, facing the fact of his starving family with a despair at his
heart which only mortal men can feel and no mortal tongue can speak.

Other men there were in large numbers who during the winter had swelled
the ranks of the unemployed, but who now, in the reviving warmth and
the growing demand for labor, drifted out upon the open country to
their congenial life of vagrancy. There still remained, however, and
apparently in full force, the shrewd gentry who stop pedestrians on
the street with apologetic explanations of hard luck and with begging
appeals for a small sum wherewith to satisfy immediate wants. Clark and
I had soon come to know this as a recognized occupation among the men
with whom we were thrown. A highly profitable trade it often proved,
for a dollar a day is a gleaning not at all uncommon to these men, and
the more skilful among them can average a dollar and a half. They are
rather the sporting spirits among the professionally idle; gambling is
their chief diversion, and their contempt for honest work is as genuine
as that of a snob.

But within this chaotic maelstrom of the unemployed, which in every
industrial centre seethes with infinite menace to social safety, is
always a large element which is not easily classified. It was still
to be found on the streets and in the lodging-houses of Chicago
when the winter was gone, in seemingly undiminished numbers and in
much its accustomed thriftlessness. The class has to be defined in
negative terms. The men are not physically incapable of work, nor
are they habitual tramps, nor yet the beggars of the pavements, and
they lack utterly the grit for crime. If they have a distinctive,
positive characteristic as a class, it is that they are victims
of the gregarious instinct. By an attraction which is apparently
irresistible to them, they are drawn to congested labor markets, and
there they cling, preferring instinctively a life of want and squalor
in fellowship with their kind to one of comparative plenty in the
intolerable loneliness of the country.

There is a semblance of sincerity in their search for work, but they
are cursed with the rudiments of imagination which makes cowards of
them all, and their incapacity is a weakness of will rather than of
brawn. Shrinkingly they walk the narrow ledge which in many planes of
life separates from tramphood and crime, while lacking the wit for the
latter and the courage for both lives, and looking ever for something
to turn up instead of resolutely turning something up. Civilization is
hard on such men, and their sufferings are none the less real because
chiefly due to their incapacity for the struggle for existence. And not
only their own misery must be reckoned with in any fair estimate of the
case, but far more the misery of their women and children, for these
men are proletarians in the literalest meaning of the word.

Finding now that I could not only get work, but that I could actually
be eclectic in the matter, I gladly took advantage of an opportunity of
employment among the unskilled laborers on the Exposition grounds.

A sharp-eyed, energetic American, who superintends the gangs of
unskilled laborers, took me on, and at once assigned me to duty
under an Irish sub-boss by the name of O’Shea. When I became one
of its number, Mr. O’Shea’s gang of eight or ten men had torn up
a considerable section of the plank road near the Transportation
Building, for the purpose of altering the level. Most of us were put in
charge of wheel-barrows. These we filled with sand at a neighboring
pile and then emptied it in heaps on the road-bed, while the remaining
members of the gang spread the sand with shovels to the desired depth
before replacing the planks. It was a cloudy morning early in April,
with a cold, raw wind blowing in from the lake, and the work, not
very fatiguing in itself, kept one comfortably warm until noon. We
had a free hour for dinner then, and I simply accompanied the other
gang-men to “Hotel No. 1,” where my employment ticket, issued by the
general superintendent of construction, procured for me without delay a
meal-and-lodging ticket on trust.

A large, zinc-lined trough half full of water stood against the wall
in an ante-chamber. Here men by the score were washing their hands and
faces and drying them near by on roller towels. They then passed singly
through the wicket at the dining-room door, where stood a man who
punched each boarder’s ticket as he entered.

Long wooden tables, heaped with dishes and lined with round-bottom
stools, ran the great length of the room. The men took places in the
order of their coming, until they had filled one table, when they would
begin upon another, and there arose a deafening clatter of knives and
forks and dishes and a tumult of mingled speech.

That dinner serves as a good illustration of our fare, both in what it
offered and in what it lacked. A bowl of hot soup was at each man’s
place when he sat down, and, after finishing this, he was given a
choice between roast beef and Irish stew. There were potatoes boiled
in their jackets, and pork-and-beans, and bread in wide variety and in
enormous quantity, and a choice of tea or coffee, and finally a pudding
for dessert. Some of this was good, but all of it smacked of wholesale
preparation, and appetites nicer than those of workingmen would have
found difficulties with the dinner. Even ours were not proof against it
all. I was struggling with a slice of tough roast beef out of which the
virtue had been cooked, when suddenly I caught an expression of comical
dismay stealing over the ruddy, bristling face of the man opposite me.
He was eating a piece of meat from a plate of Irish stew, and he spat
it out upon the floor with a deep-drawn oath, and a frank assurance to
his neighbors that “the meat was rotten,” while his facial muscles were
contorted with strong disgust. And the pudding was of such uncertain
nature as to recall vividly the oft-repeated saying of a classmate at
a college eating-club, that “flies in a pudding are quite as good as
currants.” Still the pork-and-beans were excellent and the bread and
potatoes fine, and the coffee, which was served in large cups with
the roast, was not impossible; certainly it was a well-fed crowd which
sat smoking for a quarter of an hour or more on the rough embankments
overlooking the Agricultural Building before going back to work.

[Illustration: IT WAS A WELL-FED CROWD WHICH SAT SMOKING FOR A QUARTER
OF AN HOUR OR MORE ON THE ROUGH EMBANKMENTS.]

Our gang was divided in the afternoon, and Mr. O’Shea left three of
us, a German, an Irishman, and me, to open up a way for the teamsters
through two long piles of paving-stones, which obstructed the road
near the Fisheries Building. His parting word to us was that the stint
was an afternoon’s job, and we could easily have finished it in the
four hours from one o’clock until five, had we worked with moderate
swiftness.

The German and the Irishman fell to lifting stones to one side of the
desired opening and I to the other. Every condition favored us. We had
a definite task and not a difficult one, and no one to watch us at our
work, nor drive us in its doing. The clouds had disappeared, and in
the soft spring sunshine, with the bushes blossoming about us and the
air full of the sounds of multiform labor, there was every stimulus to
energetic effort for four hours. Not that the hours seemed short--they
never do, I am convinced, even to well-seasoned unskilled workmen--but
the difference between four hours of manual labor at a stretch and
five is enormous, and to see my _confrères_ quite as impatient of their
flight, even under these most favoring conditions, and to mark that the
sober business of their lives was still an abhorrent drudgery to be
shirked if possible, led the way to very sad reflection.

Neither of them paid any attention to me until, late in the afternoon,
there came a lull in their talk and I heard the Irishman’s call.

“Hey, John!”

“Hello,” I said.

“Was you going to shave off them whiskers for Easter?”

I told him that I had not thought of it.

“Well,” he went on, “I hear the boys as have whiskers say as how they
must go on Easter morning, and I thought maybe it was the same wid you.”

“What are you after doing, getting yourself into a sweat?” he
continued, for he had drawn off from the German and was making my way.
“You be a fool to kill yourself; you don’t earn the more by it, and
they don’t think any the better of you. Take it easy, man, take it
easy; there’s time enough.”

He was an authority on the time, for every few minutes he would walk
slowly over to where his coat and waistcoat lay on a heap of stones,
and drawing out a great silver watch, would critically examine it,
and then announce the hour in a loud call to the German and me. At a
quarter to five the two picked up their coats and went off, dodging
behind shrubs and piles of building materials, until they made their
exit at the gate, leaving a good third of the job unfinished.

That was on a Saturday. On Monday morning Mr. O’Shea singled out us
three for as stiff a cursing as a boat’s crew often gets, but to little
purpose, apparently, in its effect upon the other men. On that very day
I was again a member of a gang, a gang of four this time, which was
left without an overseer. We were ordered to unload a car of timber
and pile the boards near the mammoth framework on the east side of the
Manufactures Building. Besides native inertia there was unusual cause
for idling in the fact that one of our number, a young Englishman,
Rosedale by name, proved to be uncommonly interesting. He was rather a
trim fellow, of the adventurous, jack-of-all-trades kind, that roam the
world widely, and that always appear in numbers at great celebrations
and in new regions. How they live and secure the means of extensive
travel is a secret which no member of the fraternity ever tells. There
was no mystery about Rosedale just then, for he was a fellow-lodger in
Hotel No. 1, and was No. ---- in the gang of laborers in which I, for
example, was No. 472, and he fell into as natural association with the
men as though he had lived with us always.

He was just up from South Africa, where he had been in the diamond
fields, he said. Seventeen thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds was the
loot he was bringing with him to Canada, when he was shipwrecked off
the coast of Labrador and escaped with only his life. Not one of us, I
suppose, was anything but sceptical of much of Rosedale’s story, but
the man told his tale of free, reckless, vicious living on the diamond
fields, with a vividness of narrative and a rough wealth of local
color that charmed us into most attentive listeners, and that sped the
morning hours with little regard to our job. Questions began to crowd
in upon Rosedale as to the location of South Africa and the means of
getting there, and great disappointment was evident in the discovery
that it was not contiguous to any familiar point.

Noon found us with a pitiful showing for the morning’s work. In the
afternoon I secured the post inside the car, and passed the boards out
to the three other men, who piled them near the building. By hastening
the work at that end, I hoped to quicken the pace at which the job was
being done. To be caught a second time in a delinquent gang I feared
would endanger my position, and I was anxious to remain on the grounds,
and even more anxious to secure a promotion if I could. It was easy to
keep ahead of the men, but it was impossible, apparently, to urge them
beyond the languid deliberation with which they shouldered the timber
and carried it to the piles.

“Let up on that, John,” they were shouting at me presently. “Go easy
with that; there ain’t no rush, and you’ll make nothing by your pains.”

It was the view which I had heard again and again in gangs of unskilled
laborers. One could understand it in a measure among the older men,
who could hope at the best only to eke out an existence free from the
poor-house to the end. But these and many others from whom it came were
relatively young men, with every chance, one would suppose, of winning
some preferment through effective, energetic work.

At five o’clock, the end of the afternoon’s labor, we had an hour in
which to make leisurely preparation for a supper which consisted of
cold meats in unstinted plenty, and potatoes, and bread, and tea and
coffee, and often some stewed fruit with a little cake. After this
most of the men loafed in the lobby until bedtime. This sitting-room
includes the entire upper floor of a large wing of the building. An
enormous base-burner heats it, and serves to render it stifling in the
evening, when the men are smoking with every window closed. Games and
newspapers strew the tables, and the room is well lighted with electric
lamps.

On the same level is the upper section of the main building, where are
the sleeping-quarters for the men. The provision here is similar in
design to that of a cheap lodging-house; only this is almost immaculate
in its cleanliness, and the cabins are large and well ventilated,
and the ceilings high and airy, and the berths are supplied with new
wire and clean corn-husk mattresses, and with sheets and pillow-cases
fragrant from the wash.

Mine is a middle, lower berth in a cabin for six men, but it lodges at
present only two besides myself.

In a bunk nearest the door sleeps an Irishman, whose acquaintance I
made while getting ready for bed on the first night of my stay. Opening
the door that evening and seeing me seated in the middle bunk, he
stood eyeing me for a time with obvious displeasure. He was evidently
not in the best of humors, and although but two of the six berths in
the large cabin were occupied, he plainly regarded my coming as an
intrusion. Neatly dressed in dark blue, and with an old felt hat on the
back of his head, he cut a fine figure of a workman as he stood in the
open door, a man of five-and-thirty, with a massive frame bent slightly
forward and with a frown wrinkling the low forehead, from which the
thick hair grew in tawny masses.

“Who let you in here?” was his first remark.

“The proprietor,” I answered.

“Did he say you could have that bunk?”

“Yes.”

“Well, ---- it, is he going to flood the place?”

I knew no answer to that question, and so I ventured to ask after the
occupant of the bunk nearest the window.

“He’s an Englishman; works in the landscape gang wid me,” replied the
Irishman, laconically.

By this time he had seated himself on his bed with his elbows on his
knees and his head bowed with an air of weariness. The change of
subject had, fortunately, been effective, for he no longer objected
to my presence, and for some time he sat talking freely in a droning,
disjointed way.

I gathered that he was thoroughly dissatisfied with his work and wages
and his boarding-place and with life in general. He did not enter into
details of his personal history; his mood spent itself in anathemas
against his present lot: “Work, ceaseless, unprofitable, joyless work.
Eat and work; eat more and work; eat again and sleep and eat and work.
This and nothing more; body and soul sold at a dollar and a half a day.
And nothing else to look forward to, with chances only of a steadily
hardening lot, throughout the on-coming of old age to death.”

I had never heard a workman in pessimistic mood so coherent, and I felt
sure that the Irishman was ill; for commonly with our class, a full
meal and a pipeful at the end of a day’s labor are enough to banish
care and to tinge living with a glow of satisfaction. The suspicion
proved true enough, for the man soon began to shake with a malarial
chill in our cheerless barrack, and he told me that the ague laid hold
of him regularly on alternate days.

It was the loneliness of the fellow that impressed one as he lay
shivering in his bunk. There were hundreds of men in the house, but
not one of them was charged with any responsibility for him, and there
was no provision for illness. On his bad days he would force himself
through the usual routine, but, when the day was done, there was
nothing for him but to lie in lonely misery in his bed. Not that he
whined in the least. I gathered these facts by inference. It was the
barrenness of his life that he cursed, not its hardness, for this he
accepted as a matter of course.

And yet one could not fail to see where finer feeling inflicted a
sharper pain in his suffering. I had marked at once the neatness of
his dress, and especially the cleanliness of person by which one
distinguishes instantly between a workman and a tramp.

There are interesting degrees of cleanness in workingmen. One sees it
at its best, I think, among those of the building trades. The stains
of their labor are clean in themselves, and the men partake of the
wholesomeness of their employment. The workers at rougher jobs must
show the marks of soiling labor, but there is infinite difference
between the earth stains of a common laborer and the ingrained,
begrimed uncleanness of an unwashed vagrant. Having in the house,
however, so many men, and just at the end of the long period of
unemployment, it is inevitable, perhaps, that there should be a few of
the number whose status as between workingmen and tramps is not clearly
defined. And some of the consequences are unpleasant.

It was this that the Irishman had in mind as he looked me over
critically and was somewhat slow in welcoming me to the cabin.

The same concern showed itself again when he presently told me that the
Englishman and he always made up their berths themselves, instead of
leaving them for the regular bed-makers, who might communicate vermin
from other bunks. The hint was sufficient, and I hastened to set his
mind at rest by assuring him that I heartily endorsed the plan and
would follow it faithfully.

The Englishman I did not see until the next morning. Upon getting up
to the six o’clock call, I found that he had turned in without waking
me. We sprang out of bed at the same moment, and almost at a glance I
knew him for the ex-Tommy Atkins that he is. I shall call him Brown.
A wooden chest, studded with brass nails and made fast with a heavy
padlock, stood near the foot of his berth. On it lay his working
clothes, not thrown down in confusion, but neatly folded and lying in
the order of dress. He himself was as trim and straight and as clean
as a sapling, and when he returned from his wash he fairly sparkled
with the afterglow. Back went the sheets with a single movement of his
hand the moment that he was dressed, and over went the mattress, and
the pillows began rollicking in the shaking which he gave them. In
marvellously short time the bed was remade and the sheets turned back
over the foot of the bunk to admit of proper airing.

We have been thrown together by reason of the fact that neither of
us is proof against the lobby for long in the evening. It is usually
dark by the time I have finished supper, and I go first of all to the
sitting-room. It is ablaze with light, and the huge stove is going
under full head and all the windows are closed and some scores of men
are smoking old pipes. I have known nights when such a place would have
been a most welcome escape from exposure, but having now a choice it
is never long before I leave the lobby for the cabin. Here I generally
find Brown seated on the box at the foot of his berth, playing an old
fife which is singularly pliant to his touch. Throwing myself in my
bunk I have lain there by the hour together listening to his music and
watching him as he beat time to the “British Grenadiers” and the “Blue
Bells of Scotland,” and to tunes of no end of barrack-room ballads,
wondering the while what vision it was of India or of Burmah, perhaps,
or of the Soudan, or possibly of the Afghan frontier that brought that
look of longing to his eyes.

He is the soul of soldier-like precision; he never misses a day at work
except the one which immediately follows pay-day, and that because he
never misses his spree. The Irishman and I have come to count with
perfect regularity upon Brown’s not turning up on the evening when he
is paid. About three or four o’clock on the next morning we hear him
open the cabin door softly, and, supporting himself with a hand on
the upper berths, move slowly across the floor until he has reached
his bed, where he throws himself on his face as he is and sleeps for
twenty-four hours.

I was not long a member of Mr. O’Shea’s gang, for at the end of the
first week another laborer and I were singled out for special duty on
the roads. But on Wednesday afternoon of that week two men joined the
force of unskilled laborers who filled us all with curious interest.
There is another gang of about the same number as Mr. O’Shea’s, with
which we are often thrown in our work and which is under the command of
a Mr. Russell.

At one o’clock on Wednesday afternoon I went as usual to report with
the other men at the superintendent’s office where we receive our
orders. Mr. Dutton, the superintendent, always comes out and looks us
over and consults for a few minutes with the sub-bosses, and then
orders the various gangs to different sections of the grounds.

Two young men were standing near his office-door on that Wednesday
afternoon when I came up at a few minutes before one. I did not give
them a second glance at first, for I took for granted that they were
tourists who had entered the grounds by special permission and were
now waiting for a guide. But in another moment I happened to see Mr.
Dutton’s clerk beckon them within the office where he took their names
and gave to each a metallic disk upon which a number was stamped. Then
they came out again and, taking off their coats, stepped in among the
gathering company of workmen and waited to be assigned.

By this time we were all staring at them agape, but they stood the
ordeal with a frank unconsciousness which filled me with admiration.
They were about of age, two clean-cut, well-groomed, clear-eyed
English boys, who looked as though they might be public-school bred,
and I noticed that their coats bore the name of a London tailor. One,
a brown-haired lad, with large, sober, brown eyes and a manner of
considerable reserve, was exceedingly good-looking, and the other, a
fair-haired, fair-skinned, alert-looking boy, plainly the spokesman
for the two, had a face of unusually fine drawing.

Mr. Dutton hesitated a moment in their case, but finally ordered
them to join Mr. Russell’s gang, and in a few minutes we were widely
separated. Repeatedly in the early afternoon I found myself thinking
about them and wondering why it was that they must earn their bread by
unskilled labor. Two hours of the afternoon remained when there came
an order from Mr. Dutton to our gang to repair to the Transportation
Building. We found, upon getting there, that we had been summoned to
reinforce Mr. Russell’s men, who were unloading from a car two large
steam-rollers. Again I saw the young Englishmen, and I had a chance to
watch them at work.

By this time the gang-men had sated their curiosity in staring, and now
ignored the lads as being anything but laborers with themselves, which
was much the best-bred thing that they could have done.

As a preliminary to unloading, we had to carry to the car some heavy
wooden blocks to serve as supports to an inclined plane by which the
machines could be slid to the ground. It sometimes required four and
even six men together to lift these blocks, and repeatedly I found
myself next in line to the new-comers. Their linen collars were wilting
with the sweat of labor, and it had apparently not occurred to them
to take them off. Their shirts, of delicate color, were turned up
above their elbows with gold link-buttons dangling from the cuffs. The
rough wood was fretting their bare white arms cruelly. I had a chance
presently to speak to one of them, and I showed him how he could get a
hold which would not be so chafing. In a moment of leisure he came up
and thanked me frankly, and volunteered the information that his friend
and he were but a week over from England and, having failed utterly to
find other work in Chicago where they had supposed that employment was
plentiful, they were glad enough in an extremity to accept this means
of living.

Most pluckily have they stuck at it. I have never again been associated
with them in a job, but, I see them almost every day, and through rain
and shine they have been the steadiest members of their gang. Places
better suited to them will be found, no doubt, as the general work
progresses; and that will not be long, I hope, for just now the boys
are at a considerable disadvantage. It was only two or three mornings
ago that I happened to meet them again near Mr. Dutton’s office, where
they had been sent to fetch some tools. The fairer boy wore a bandage
which covered his left forearm and most of the hand. I asked him what
had happened, and he explained to me how that in handling some old
sleepers he had missed his hold in one case, and, with the fall of the
heavy timber, a rusty iron nail tore down through his arm and the palm
of his hand, leaving a ragged wound open nearly to the bone. He had had
it dressed promptly by a good surgeon, who reassured him as to danger
of complications. But it had taken all his companion’s savings and his
own to pay the original fee, and they were in arrears for the daily
dressing. Luckily, however, he was still able to work, and Mr. Russell
kept him employed, he told me, in ways which brought his injured arm
very little into play.

Those of us who belong permanently to gangs such as Mr. O’Shea’s and
Mr. Russell’s are known as “regulars,” to distinguish us from the hands
who are taken on, a day at a time, for some particular need. Quite the
most efficient “regular” in my gang is a certain Henry Jerkener, who is
that rare exception, so far as my experience goes, a native American
in a company of unskilled laborers. “Harry,” as he is called, and I
were early assigned to special duty. Mr. Dutton beckoned us aside
one afternoon and ordered us to report to him at ten o’clock the next
morning, telling us that our day, beginning henceforth at ten, would
last until seven in the evening instead of five o’clock. And our wages
would be raised from $1.50 to $1.75 a day.

Our work was to be the general care of all the plank roads on the
grounds. They had been put in fairly good condition, but they received
hard usage, and constant repairs were necessary. We were, therefore, to
give our attention, up to five o’clock in the afternoon, to particular
sections of the road which were most in need of mending, and after
five, when the work for the day had ceased, our duty was to go over all
the roads and see that they were in condition for the beginning of the
carting in the morning.

Harry appeared delighted with the arrangement. Not that he took any
special stock in me as an assistant, but because, however indifferent a
workman, at least I was an American, and he would be free of the gang
of Irish regulars and himself in charge of the work, instead of being
under the orders of Mr. O’Shea.

Harry’s good-humor is proof against anything, apparently, his
temperament being that of a sunny May morning. But if there is
anything which bores him, it is to be ordered about by an Irish
sub-boss.

I did not discover this until after we had left the gang. So long
as he was one of their number he was the life of the crew, jolly,
high-spirited, with a ready flow of banter that was never delicate and
never ill-tempered, always foremost in the work, having at command
a fund of resourceful ingenuity which made him the real leader and
director of the men while the boss looked on in silence. But after we
had been assigned to special duty he bloomed into new jollity, which is
at its best whenever in our work we heave in sight of the old gang. It
is deliciously funny at such times to watch Harry. The men are probably
fretting and straining over some heavy lifting or other difficult task.
He first lets fly some irritating raillery in which he addresses them
as “terriers;” and then, taking up a position within ear-shot, he
begins to sing with a capital Irish brogue:

    “Oh, ye work all day for Paddy O’Shea,
        Dhrrrill, ye terriers, dhrrrill!”

Human nature cannot endure this for long, and presently a shower of
sticks and tufts of turf drive Harry from his position and put an end
for the time to his song.

Our place is by no means a sinecure. The roads are constantly falling
into unrepair and a deal of hard work is necessary to keep them in
order. Pick and shovel work, that most heart-breaking of manual toil so
far as my experience goes, is mostly in demand, for the old trenches
must be kept open and new ones dug, and sometimes the sides of long
sections of the road must be buried under a layer of earth to prevent
the bare planks from warping in the sun. After six hours of such labor
there remain two in the early evening in which we go over every foot
of roadway on the grounds and make whatever immediate repairs are
necessary. At seven o’clock, Harry reports to the fire department, and
then we are free.

It is not altogether easy to account for Harry as a common laborer.
A well-set-up, muscular American of about fifty, with a singularly
intelligent, shrewd face and the merriest of blue eyes, he might be,
from his appearance, a well-to-do contractor. Only once with me has he
touched upon the general subject of his past, and then he intimated
that formerly he was well off, but that in his business relations he
had always passed as a “good fellow.” “And that means, you know,” he
said, turning upon me with a significant look, “that means a ‘damn
fool!’”

Among the workmen on the grounds whom I have come to know, none has
interested me more as a type than an American carpenter with whom I
sometimes spend an evening. The man is lonely and uncomfortable in
his new surroundings. The novel conditions which here beset him as a
workingman are quite as disturbing to him as the unfamiliar setting of
his daily life. He clings tenaciously to his individuality, and the new
order of things which confronts him here lightly makes strange havoc of
all that.

We had not been talking many minutes on the embankment, where one day
after dinner we first met, when the man’s case shone clear as day. He
is a master-carpenter from a village home in Ohio, and the certainty of
steady work for many months at four dollars a day was tempting enough
to induce him to leave his family behind and come here. He had arrived
a few days before and had found instant employment.

Seeing the man, a tall, fine-looking, self-respecting American
mechanic, and hearing him speak, and learning even this little of his
history, you had direct vision of his past. You could almost see a
comfortable, wooden cottage, of his own building, with a garden-plot
about it and flower-beds in front, standing on a well-shaded village
street. He owns the cottage and the plot of land, and his children
were born there, and he is an officer in the village church, and has
been justice of the peace, and more than once has served as “school
trustee.” Social inequality, as applying to himself, is a new idea, and
it gives him a hitherto unexperienced sense of self-consciousness. In
his native village his family meet the families of all his neighbors
on the same footing, except that they recognize in the minister, and
the doctor, and the village lawyer, and the schoolmaster, a distinction
which attaches to special education. His children study and play at
school with the children of all his neighbors, and mingle freely with
them at church and in their other social relations.

But here is something new and strange. He is no longer a man with a
name to distinguish him, but has become a “hand,” having a number
which he wears conspicuous on his jacket. He goes to his work as an
integer in an army of ten thousand numerals. Home has changed to a
barrack, where he, a number, sleeps in a numbered bunk, and eats, never
twice at the same place, as one of half a thousand men. His comfort
and convenience are never consulted, and his views have no smallest
bearing upon the course of things. The superintendent of the building
upon which he works, whose energy and skill he admires hugely, shifts
him about with scores of other men, with as little regard to him as
an individual as though he were a piece of timber. Once he spoke to
his superintendent about some detail of the work and found him a
most appreciative listener. Then he ventured, in conversation, upon
a subject of general interest, only to find that by some mysterious
change he was speaking to a stone wall.

And now there confronts him what he regards as another sacrifice of
individuality, which he is urged to make, and which gives him no little
concern. He had scarcely known of the existence of Trades Unions, and
now he is thronged with appeals to join one.

No discrimination is made by the management as between union and
non-union men in employing workers on the Exposition; but many of the
union men here are making the most of the present opportunity for
the propaganda of their principles, and for bringing the desirable
non-union men within their organization. My carpenter friend, whom I
shall call Mr. Ford, comes in for a large share of attention, and is,
as I have intimated, not a little perplexed by the situation.

Two or three times he has asked me to go with him in the evening to
meetings which are held near the Fair Grounds, and which are addressed
by delegates from the Central Labor Union. These we have not found
very enlightening. There has been a good deal of beer-drinking and
much aimless speech, which has grown heated at times in the stress of
hostile discussion; and now and then a plain, matter-of-fact workingman
has given us an admirable talk on the history of Trades-Unionism
and its beneficent results, and the imperative need of organization
among workers as the only means of safe-guarding their interests and
of meeting, on any approach to equal terms, the peculiar economic
relations which exist between labor and organized capital.

Mr. Ford, much bewildered, has listened to all this, and we have talked
it over together on the way back to our lodgings, and sometimes late
into the night. I have tried to explain to him, as well as I understand
it, the idea of organization, and the necessity of organization which
has grown out of the great industrial change since the middle of the
last century. But Mr. Ford, for all practical purposes, belongs to the
pre-revolutionary period; the industrial change has little affected
him. He served his apprenticeship, and was then a journeyman and then a
master-carpenter in due course. In his experience, work has always had
its basis in a personal relation, as, for example, between himself as a
contractor and the man whose job he undertook and to whom he looked for
payment. A like personal relation has always existed between himself
and the men whom he has employed.

This new relation between a workman and an impersonal, soulless
corporation which hires him, is one that he does not readily grasp.
And, for the sake of meeting the new relation, this “fusing all the
skirts of self” and merging individuality into an organization which
attempts to regulate the hours of labor, and its wages, and for whom
one shall work, and for whom not, is a thing abhorrent to him.

“Why,” he said to me, “I give up my independence, and I’m no better
than the worst carpenter of the lot. We all get union-wages alike.
There’s no incentive for a man to do his best. He ain’t a man any more,
anyway; he’s only a part of a machine. Why, such work as some I see
done here, I’d be ashamed to do by moonlight, with my eyes shut. But it
don’t make no difference in the union, you’re all on the same level, as
near as I can make out.”

Finally I proposed to him that we should go together, on some Sunday
afternoon, to the meeting of the Central Labor Union, where he could
become acquainted with some of the members and learn at first hand the
objects and ends of organization and something of its actual working.
The members whom I particularly wished him to know were some of the
Socialists there, who seemed to me to have a considerable knowledge of
Trades-Unionism, and who took, I thought, a judicial view of it.

As an unskilled laborer I was not eligible to membership in any
union, but I was admitted freely to the central meetings, to which I
sometimes went in company with Socialists who were delegates of their
respective orders. Under their tutelage, I was shown the operation of
an exceedingly complex system, which, seen without guidance, would have
appeared to me hopelessly chaotic. I was seeing it, I realized, from
the point of view of the Socialists, and I was interested immediately
in learning their attitude.

They are, I found, most ardent supporters of the principle of
organization among workingmen. They regard the fact of the organization
of wage-earners as among the most significant developments in the
evolution of a socialistic state. But they are very impatient of the
slow rate of progress in Trades-Unionism. The ignorance of the great
mass of workers of how to further their own interests is, to the
Socialist, the most discouraging feature in labor-organization. “Why,”
they ask, “when we working people already have so strong a nucleus of
organization for economic ends, do we not direct it at once into the
field of politics, and secure immediately, by our overwhelming numbers,
the legislation which we need, and so inaugurate a co-operative
commonwealth?”

Nowhere have the walking-delegates and the general agitators of their
class sincerer foes than among the Socialists who, more than to any
other active cause, attribute the comparative ineffectualness of
unionism to the influence of these men. Very readily they believe them
purchasable, and that often they are little else than the paid agents
of the capitalists. Their great influence over workingmen is used,
the Socialists seem to believe, chiefly in their own interests and
particularly for selfish political ends.

This habit of mind serves to illustrate what eventually appeared to me
to be highly characteristic of the general attitude of Socialists. The
key to their mental processes in considering things social, lies, I am
quite sure, in the idea of existing conditions as being maintained by
a vast capitalistic conspiracy. At all events this clew has cleared up
for me the mystery which at first I found in many of their ways of
thinking.

However natural may have been the social order in some of its historic
phases, they evidently regard it at the present as largely artificial.
There is no real vitality, they contend, in the political issues upon
which the great national parties are divided. The party cries of “free
trade” and “protection” and the like, are manufactured by professional
politicians who are in the employ of the capitalists. The purpose is to
divert the minds of the working classes by these sham contentions and
so keep them about evenly divided politically, and thus prevent their
coalescing in overwhelming force in political action for their own
interests. Nothing seems to anger a Socialist more than the spectacle
of workingmen roused to enthusiasm by the crowds and speeches and
processions and brass bands of the usual political campaign. They
see in them then only the ridiculous dupes of the capitalists, who
have contributed to the campaign funds for the very purpose of thus
befooling their employees, and who look with about equal indifference
upon the momentary triumph of one party or the other so long as no
labor party is in the ascendant.

However free in the past the play of purely natural evolutionary forces
may have been in determining social development, and however free
may be their course again in moulding a future state, their operation
is checked for the present to the Socialists’ vision by the active
intervention of the capitalists, who, in some way, have succeeded in
effecting a social structure which is highly favorable to themselves,
and for whose undisturbed continuance they unscrupulously employ
all the resources of wealth and craft and dark conspiracy. The idea
appeared at its plainest, perhaps, in their more vindictive speeches,
where the strong undercurrent of feeling was--“There is cruel injustice
and wrong in society as it is, and someone is to blame for it, and
unhesitatingly we charge the blame against the capitalists.”

It was with this interpretation in mind that I took Mr. Ford with me
one afternoon to the meeting of the Central Labor Union. I was curious
to see the effect of the gathering upon him. A child of another age in
his experience of certain economic relations, he was an interesting
phenomenon in the sudden contact with modern industrialism.

When we reached the building, in the upper floor of which in a large
hall are held the weekly meetings of the Central Labor Union, numbers
of workingmen in their Sunday clothes were passing in and out of
the neighboring saloons or loafing about the doors. The intersecting
streets were strewn with small handbills, which we found covering the
wide staircase leading to the hall and scattered over the seats and
floor of the room itself. They were printed notices instructing the
members to boycott the beer of certain breweries which were accused
of employing non-union men, and also the products of this and that
manufacturer, against whom similar charges were made.

We were a little early, but we chanced upon a Socialistic acquaintance
of mine, who took us in with him and seated us well to the front. As
the members entered I had a chance to point out to Mr. Ford those among
them who had been pointed out to me as the officers of their various
unions. He was deeply interested from the first, and much impressed
apparently by the size of the gathering and the enormous numbers of
organized workers which were represented there.

The stage of “new business” was barely reached that afternoon when
matters were well beyond the control of the president. Motions and
amendments and questions of privilege and points of order were fast
driving him mad, when in despair he called upon a fellow-member to take
charge of the meeting and become its temporary chairman. By this time
there was a good deal of confusion; men in many parts of the hall were
clamoring for the floor, and trying to drown one another’s voices. But
there was immediate recognition of a change of generalship. The man who
had taken the chair was a member of a union of musicians, a person of
excellent address and well-appearing, and, as it proved eventually, a
masterly parliamentarian. To reduce to quiet an assembly so excited was
beyond his power, but he did unravel the skein of its tangled business,
and through all the uproar and confusion he kept his temper perfectly,
and secured some actual disposition of the affairs in hand.

The intricacies of intermingling interests there represented were
beyond measure bewildering. The Cigarmakers’ Union had a grievance,
which its representatives insisted upon presenting and having righted
at once. But the Waiters’ Union claimed an antecedent right to the
presentation of a question with reference to admitting certain men to
their organization. And the Bricklayers’ Union demanded an immediate
investigation of the account of expenditure for a certain recent Union
picnic, charging directly, meanwhile, a flagrant misappropriation of
funds.

Passions were running high. The lie direct was passed repeatedly, and
men were all but shaking fists in one another’s faces. The shouting
rose sometimes to such a pitch that the chairman’s voice could not be
heard. But the passion was that of strong vitality. The Union, to its
members, was an intensely living thing, and its issues, touching them
so closely, most naturally roused comparatively untutored men to strong
emotion.

I watched Mr. Ford with curious interest. Instead of showing any
impatience or disgust at the show of temper and the loud disorder, he
sat through the long session deeply, intently absorbed. Every question
for debate, and every phase of discussion, and all the progress of
the business, and the varying claims of the many organizations, and
the widely differing personalities of the members, each won his vital
interest, and, with amazing discrimination, he seemed to follow them
with intelligent understanding. And when there came a report of
progress in a strike among certain workers in shoe factories, and a
statement of the causes of the strike and the measures which were being
taken to carry it to a successful issue, I could see that he was more
than ever roused.

“That’s the most interesting meeting I ever was to,” he said to me, as
we walked down the street together. “I ain’t never realized before how
mixed up things can be when there’s so many working people, and the
men that hire them are mostly all organized in big companies. Why, the
working people ain’t got nothing else they can do but organize too, to
get their just rights. They have a pretty hot time in their meetings,
if that’s a sample, but I guess they’ll know what they’re about. I
guess I’ll join.”

In a very few days I must leave Chicago. I own to a longing to go
and launch out upon the great farming regions between the Lakes and
the Rocky Mountains, which I hope to cover in my journey before the
autumn is far spent. I have been watching the coming of the spring
in the Exposition grounds and in the charming parks of the city and
along its beautiful boulevards, and I feel its subtle drawings to the
country, to a life once more of labor in the fields. But I am very
far from being prepared to go. Some little of a phase of life which
in all large centres of population accompanies the swift industrial
changes of the present I have seen here in Chicago, where it differs
but slightly from similar conditions in every congested labor market.
And under the play of the modern gregarious instinct there surely are
few centralized markets which are not congested. But of the real city
as a great positive force and a world-wide commercial power, whose
unfaltering energies have built a huge metropolis in a generation,
and are fast crowning their labors with splendid achievements in
education and in art, I have been able to see little, and I have given
no impression whatever. This much I have seen on the grounds where I
am now a workman: I have watched something of the slow emerging from a
scene of utter chaos of a co-ordinated scheme of landscape-gardening
and of architecture, which has long passed the experimental stage, and
is unfolding to the world, by a miracle of creative and constructive
genius, a real vision of beauty and power and grace, which certainly
holds for the living generation of civilized men a promise of rich
blessings.

CHAPTER VII

FROM CHICAGO TO DENVER

                                THE BARTON FARM, FARIBAULT COUNTY,
                                    MINNESOTA, July 6, 1892.

For a week past I have been Mr. Barton’s hired man, but in the early
morning I must take leave of the family and renew the long journey.
More than once during the past year I have found it hard to say good-by
to an employer, but that is altogether apart from the real sadness of
the present farewell.

It might have been months ago, so strong has my attachment to Mr.
Barton’s family grown and so well do I feel that I know them, that Mr.
Barton stopped me on the wayside as I was leaving Blue Earth City and
offered me work on his farm. I hesitated, but finally agreed to accept
his offer for a week. I am staggered now at realizing how near I came
to missing an experience which will always be a cherished memory of my
life.

With utmost hospitality I, a mere chance workman, picked up on
the public highway, was taken in by the Bartons and made one of
themselves; and during the days since I have shared their life of
summer industry with hard work for all of us from five in the morning
until nightfall, but healthful, worth-while work, and with it a home
most daintily neat, and having an atmosphere of true refinement and of
simple, genuine religion.

My pain at leaving is precisely that which one feels in the farewells
which end the rare, halfborn friendships of life. A voyage, perhaps, or
a short sojourn in a foreign country proves the chance occasion of a
meeting, and kindred hearts awaken to quick recognition of one another,
and then their roads diverge and from the parting of the ways each
bears a sorrow which is of the tragedy of existence. Who has not felt
that sadness and seen its shadow fall over the face of nature and far
over the coming days?

There is, in my mind, no smallest fear of fresh encounter with an
untried world. I have long since lost all such feeling, and can set
forth of a morning as light of heart, as free from anxious care as are
the birds which share my early start, and with a sense of pure animal
enjoyment which is, I sometimes dream, not far removed from their own.

And with small wonder can I be so careless, for ever since I left
Chicago work has ceased to be a difficult thing to find and has grown
to be an increasingly difficult matter to avoid. It has come to be a
positive embarrassment, for every day I am stopped by the way and urged
to go to work, and it is not easy to refuse men who are most evidently
short-handed. I shall set out in the morning with six dollars--five
earned from Mr. Barton and one remaining from my last employment--and
I shall try to cover a wide strip of country before settling down to
another job; but, upon the basis of my past experience, I am sure that
on an average of at least once a day in the coming march some farmer
will ask me to help him at his work. All through Illinois and from
Minneapolis to this point, which is near the Iowa border, this has been
my uniform experience.

It was late in the spring when I left Chicago. Almost continuous rains
compelled me to defer my start from day to day until the month of May
was far advanced, and then I stopped at Joliet and joined for a week a
gang of laborers in the works of the Illinois Steel Company. So that
it was the first of June before I found myself in the open country
once more, after six months as a city workman. Even then the skies
continued threatening, and frequent rains forced me from the soft loam
of the country roads to a firmer footing on the line of the Rock Island
Railway for most of the journey to the Mississippi. I was relatively
flush with wages earned at Joliet, and so was under no necessity to
stop. But the chance of work never failed me, for not only in the
rich farming region about Morris but also in the brick-kilns in the
neighborhood of Ottawa and Utica I found abundant offers of a job.

From Davenport I went by rail to Minneapolis, for I had resolved to
emerge for a week and attend the National Republican Convention in that
city, and not days enough remained, when I reached the river, to admit
of my walking there in time for the political gathering. But when the
Convention closed I started again, penniless and afoot, on the long
march which I have interrupted twice, once when working for a fine old
Irish farmer near Belle Plain, and a second time when I accepted Mr.
Barton’s offer.

It is difficult to pass thus lightly over wide stretches of the
journey. Under every casual sentence is a mine of what proved valuable
experience to me: The days in the Steel Works, for example, as a member
of a gang of foreign laborers and associated with an army of skilled
and disciplined workmen, meeting some of them on familiar terms at the
boarding-house and at the club, which is an interesting experiment on
the part of the company. Then a tramp along the Illinois River through
a rich country which teemed with vegetation in the luxuriance of the
tropics; and a day’s march on the railway with a veritable hobo who
had lost his partner and cheerfully took up with me, and who proved
to be a delightful fellow, by no means lost to manliness, from whom I
parted most regretfully when a job was found for him in a brick-kiln
near Ottawa. Then the Convention itself, with its vast array of
party organization, and its highly dramatic incidents as affecting
the careers of political leaders, and its strong undercurrents of
personal and sectional ambition, and the interesting personages, and
picturesque figures; all so intensely real and finely typical and
keenly alive with national spirit, and splendidly representative of
wide, heterogeneous empire bound together in marvellous union. And then
a few days spent near Belle Plain, where, driven by the rain from the
road, I found shelter in a farm-house shed and was eagerly seized upon
by the farmer as a hired man, until one morning, when, as usual, I had
risen at sunrise and had cleaned the stables and curried the horses
and was milking the old white cow, the longing for the tramp laid
sudden hold of me and soon after breakfast my eager feet were again
on the main-travelled road. The storm had passed, the sun was shining
from a cloudless sky, and a strong, cool wind was tossing the graceful
branches of a cluster of American elms at the roadside as I left the
farm, and was blowing through the dewy, dark recesses of a bit of
fragrant woodland as I climbed the hill, giving the sense of infinite
vitality; when I reached the summit there lay below me, embedded in
deep green, one of the hundred exquisite lakes of southern Minnesota,
with its rippling surface joyously dancing in the sunlight and adding
a touch of magic beauty to the rich, undulating landscape of varying
field and forest and deep meadow-land. All about me were the homes of
original settlers, where yet live some of the very men and women who,
only a generation ago, began to reclaim this paradise from a boundless
waste of treeless prairie. Looking out upon it now from such a height,
seeing its dense woodlands, the fields rank with standing grain, the
farm-houses gleaming white in the sun, the blue sheets of living water,
and the distant Minnesota threading its way by towns and villages along
fertile banks, one could but dream of its future, when the crudeness
will be gone, and close culture will have made it all a very garden of
the Lord!

It was through such country as this that my way led me toward the Iowa
border. I walked along the valley of the Minnesota by Le Sueur and St.
Peter to Mankato, where I spent Sunday, and then, cutting over the
ridge, I went by Lake Crystal to Garden City, and so through Vernon and
Amboy to Winnebago and on to Blue Earth City.

Not often on the march am I offered a lift, but now and again I am
picked up and hurried over some miles of the road, and it was one of
the best of these windfalls that befell me on this particular journey.
I had left Amboy only a few miles behind, and the long, dusty road
stretched far to the south in the direction of Winnebago, where I meant
to spend the night. The day was clear and gratefully warm; in the
meadows had just begun the metallic music of the mowers, and on the air
was the first fragrance of new-mown hay. Soon I caught the sound of the
rapid drum of horses’ hoofs behind me, and, turning, I saw a gentleman
seated in a light open four-wheeler, driving a pair of Indian ponies
at a spanking pace in my direction. He drew up beside me, and asked,
pleasantly, whether I cared to ride. I lost no time in thanking him
and in mounting to the seat at his side; in a moment more we were off
at a ten-mile gait, and I was watching with delight the business-like
movement of the ponies’ pace, with their backs so straight and level
that each might almost have held a coin without dropping it.

In the meantime Dr. Brooks (for so I shall call the gentleman, who
was returning to Winnebago from a professional visit on the outskirts
of his practice) was engaging me in conversation. We very naturally
discussed the recent nominations and the issues of the coming general
election, and then I had ample opportunity of learning much from him of
actual local conditions.

He seemed to me to be singularly well informed. He had travelled widely
over the West, and this particular region he had known familiarly since
its early settlement. Every farm-house which we passed he pointed out
to me, telling me the farmer’s name meanwhile, and something of his
history. There was a curious uniformity in the narrative. The life was
rough enough in the beginning, no doubt, and of the essence of hard
frontier struggle, but it sounded like a fairy tale as he told me of
one man and another who had come out in the early days almost penniless
from the East or the Middle West or, in some cases, from a foreign
country, and had “squatted” on the soil; now these settlers had each a
hundred and sixty acres under high cultivation and a good, substantial
house and adequate barns and machinery and stock; they could secure
money on easy terms at the local bank when they needed it, and the
market value of their land had risen two hundred per cent and even
higher in the past twenty-five years.

I should have suspected a land-boomer in the doctor had there been
anything aggressive or boastful in his manner, but he was speaking with
the simple directness of one who knows and who needs no bluster to
disguise ignorance or an ulterior motive.

I was deeply interested, and presently remarked that, coming as I did
from the East, the demand for labor on the Western farms had been
a surprise to me, and that I was sure that what he was telling me
would sound strange to Eastern men, whose preconceptions of agrarian
conditions at the West are formed largely from the representations of
certain political parties which are recruited from the farming classes.

Dr. Brooks smiled indulgently, and kept his eyes straight ahead while
he answered me.

“If you stay out here long enough,” he said, “you’ll find that there
are two kinds of farmers in the West. There is one kind that know their
business and that are farmers, and there’s another kind that are a good
deal more interested in politics than they are in farming. You can
put it down as a pretty safe rule that the farmers who have the best
knowledge of their business and who are the most industrious and frugal
and economical are the least dissatisfied with their conditions and
the least anxious to change them by political action, while the more
inefficient and shiftless and thriftless a farmer is, the more likely
he is to be a violent agitator for financial or political change.

“There seems to be a growing weakness among whole masses of our
people,” he went on, “which leads them to look to the Government
for help instead of to themselves in their own industry and thrift.
Not only the farmers are affected by it, for every demand upon the
Government for special legislation in the interest of one class or
another is evidence of this spirit. We need very much, as a people, to
relearn the simple, common-sense maxims of Benjamin Franklin, and to
practise them.”

I told him something at this point of my past winter in Chicago--of an
army of unemployed and of other armies of underpaid workers, and of
hosts of sweat-shop victims who could scarcely be said to be lacking in
industry and at least a measure of enforced economy.

He listened patiently and with some curiosity, I thought, and when I
had done he took up the subject quite eagerly.

“What you say is true enough,” he answered. “We live in an age of high
civilization, and civilization means city life, and that means great
centres of population, and that gives rise to congested labor markets
with all the want and misery which you describe. All this, as we have
it now, in this country, is of comparatively recent growth, being
complicated by the vast numbers of our ignorant immigrant population,
and we have by no means adjusted ourselves to it yet. You tell me of
an army of unemployed in Chicago, and I can tell you, in reply, of a
chronic demand for help in this country-side, which I know well; a
demand so great that within the limits of a few neighboring counties we
could put fifty thousand men of the right kind to work.”

“Yes,” I said, “I have met with an amazing demand for workers ever
since I left Chicago. But this is the busy season in the country; when
the winter comes, would not the men who answered to the demand for
agricultural laborers be forced out of employment again and back upon
the chance livelihood of the towns?”

“Not unless they preferred it,” he replied. “Of course the demand
is exceptional at this season. How great it is you can infer when
I tell you that, for the next five or six weeks, almost any sort of
a man could get his board and a dollar a day, and men of fair skill
and experience two and two dollars and a half a day, while the best
men will command, for certain kinds of work, as high a wage as three
dollars and a half a day besides their keep.

“But the point is that our farmers prefer to hire men by the month for
the whole season. They want their help from the 1st of April until the
end of November, and they are willing to pay an active, steady fellow
twenty dollars a month and everything found, even to his washing. And
the demand is so steady and the difficulty of getting good, industrious
men so great, that multitudes of our farmers would be willing enough
to keep the right sort of hands through the winter months and pay them
something for the little that they could find for them to do, for the
sake of having them through the spring and summer and autumn when men
are hard to find.”

On the next day I reached Blue Earth City at noon, and spent a dime at
a bakery for a mid-day meal, and then went bowling off toward the Iowa
border at Elmore, which place I counted upon reaching by nightfall.

One dollar remained to me of my last store, and there is a marvellous
fund of the feeling of independence in a dollar for one who is familiar
with the sense of cowing, unmanning insecurity which comes of being
penniless. Already I had stopped once in southern Minnesota, and so
large a sum as a dollar would certainly see me well into Iowa, I was
thinking, before I should be obliged to halt again to replenish my
purse.

It was this view of the case which made me not very hospitable to the
offer of a farmer who presently called to me with an inquiry as to
whether I would work for him.

The incident was an every-day occurrence, and I felt at first only the
usual embarrassment in my effort to evade the offer with some show of
reason; but Mr. Barton, for it was he, asked me to at least give it
a trial before deciding the matter, and, seeing in the suggestion an
admirable opportunity for a short term of service, I replied that, if I
concluded to stay at all, I could not consent to remain for longer than
a week together, and must be held free to go at the end of the first
week if I chose.

Mr. Barton agreed to this immediately, and invited me to a seat beside
him on a load of wheat which he was taking to the mill. I said that I
preferred to walk on to his farm, the direction of which he had pointed
out to me and which was but a couple of miles down a side road.

At first every step which bore me away from the main-travelled road
added to my uncertainty of mind. Was I acting wisely in stopping so
soon again when I might easily push on for another fifty miles or more?
Presently I came to a railway crossing, and sitting down to rest on the
roadside, I thought the matter over, and decided finally to go on to
the farm.

I had no difficulty in recognizing it from Mr. Barton’s description.
A row of poplars stood just within a trim picket-fence which enclosed
the farm-house yard from the road. Opening the gate I walked up the
foot-path which cut its way for a hundred yards through a well-kept
lawn, shaded with fruit-trees, to the house standing on the crest
of the ridge, surrounded by well-grown maples. It was the usual
two-storied, white farm-house with green shutters, having a wing at the
side with a porch in front of it overgrown with honeysuckle.

I had come armed with a message for Mrs. Barton from her husband; but
for all that, an increasing feeling of embarrassment accompanied me up
the walk, and when I knocked at the screen-door which opened upon the
porch, I was sorely tempted for a moment to break and run. The inner
door was open, and through the screen I could see Mrs. Barton and one
of her daughters, whom I shall call Miss Emily, ironing at opposite
ends of a table, while another daughter, Miss Julia let us say, was
sewing beside them. The faultless order and precision which had
appeared in every external detail of the farm were in perfect keeping
with what I could see of the interior of the home. It contained only
the plainest furniture, but the room was redolent of a clean, cool,
inviting comfort, perfectly suited to the needs of men who come in from
long, hard work in the heat of the fields. The windows and outer doors
were guarded by close-fitting screens; the inner wood-work was painted
a light, delicate color, as fresh and clean as though newly applied;
and the walls were covered with a simple, harmonious paper which
matched well with the prevailing shade in the clean rag-carpet on the
floor. A large rocker and a sofa, covered with Brussels carpet, were
supplemented by a plentiful supply of plain chairs.

Miss Julia was the first to notice me; putting down her sewing, she
stepped to the door and stood facing me from behind the screen.

“Is this Mr. Barton’s house?” I asked.

“Yes,” said his daughter.

“Well, he has sent me here with a message for Mrs. Barton,” I went on;
“and wishes me to say that he has hired me to work on the farm.”

I was sadly ill at ease by this time, and very sorry that I had not
accompanied Mr. Barton to the mill, and then to his home, and left to
him all necessary explanations. But it was too late now for regrets,
and Mrs. Barton, a sweet-faced, gentle little lady, had joined her
daughter at the door.

“I did not know that father meant to hire any more men just now,” she
said, while a nervous alarm played in her timid eyes at sight of so
rough an applicant for work.

I do all that I can to keep a respectable appearance, and never a day
passes without the opportunity of a bath in a lake or a wayside stream,