I announced in the papers that all tickets were general admissions, and "first come, first served" would be our principle. Sunday morning, when I was half-way through my discourse, one of the committee handed me a note. I did not open it until I finished. It was a threat that if I did not call off the democratic order, the committee would leave the church. The meeting was a great success, and the committee made good its threat. What the writer of the following letter expected of me I have no idea, nor did his letter enlighten me:

"DEAR SER:

"Wen I gave my name for a church member it was fer a peeples church, not a fol-de-rol solo and labour union church.

"Drop my name."

We had at our opening a solo by the finest singer in the city, and I had thanked the labour unions for their help. His name was dropped.

An educated woman thought she saw in our simple creed an open door she had been seeking for years. She joined us with enthusiasm. One day I was calling on her, and as I sat by the door I saw a dark figure pass with a sack of coal on his back. The figure looked familiar.

"Pardon me," I said, as I stepped out to make sure.

"Hello, Fritz!" I called. The coal heaver had only trousers and an undershirt on, and looked as black as a Negro. Sweat poured over his coal-blackened face. We gripped hands. The lady watched us with interest.

"Do you know him?" she asked.

"Yes, indeed!" I said. "And you must know him, for he is one of our deacons."

She never came back. Democracy like that was too much for her. The deacon himself left our church a few months later because he discovered that I did not believe in a literal hell of "fire and brimstone," whatever that is.

The chairman of our trustees was a business man who was very much engrossed with the New Thought. He saw a great future for me if I would get "in tune with the infinite." I was more than willing. He expounded to me the wonders of the new regime. Would I take lessons in healing? Certainly! He paid an American Yogi a hundred dollars to teach me. I was unaware of the cost. At first it was by correspondence. His chirography looked like a plate of spaghetti. I was instructed how to take a bath and when. The second letter ordered me to sleep with my head to the East. I was "a Capricorner, buoyant, lucky," so he said. At the end of a month I paid him a visit. He showed me how to manipulate a patient—absent or present—and how to charge!

The correspondence was taken verbatim from a ten-cent book on astrology; I got tired, and handed the letters over to my wife. She took them seriously, and when she had made what she thought was progress she inadvertently told the chairman of the trustees. That settled him. He resigned forthwith, and we saw him no more.

I thought we had reached the point where there was nothing further to lose; but I was mistaken. I had been charged with being a Socialist, and, curious to know what a Socialist was, I began to study the subject. What I feared came upon me: I announced myself a Socialist. That settled the Single Taxers; they left in a bunch! No, hardly in a bunch; for two of them remained.

The Universalists invited us to use their church for our Sunday night meetings. We thought that a fortunate windfall. We were to pay five dollars a night. We did so until one week we had nothing to eat and we let the rent wait. The trustees of the Universalist Church met and passed a resolution something like this: "Resolved, that in order that the good feeling existing between the People's Church and the Universalist Church be maintained, that the People's Church be requested to pay the rent after each service." We paid up and quit.

The most intelligent man in our church was a young draftsman in the Winchester Arms Company. He was a man of boundless energy and great courage. He lost his job. No reason was given. His wife, before her marriage, had been a trained nurse, and in her professional life had nursed the wife of a bank president, who was a director in the gun company. One day these ladies met, and the lady of the bank said she would find out why the husband of her former nurse was discharged. The director got at the facts, and gave them to his wife, sub rosa: "He belongs to Irvine's church—and Irvine is an anarchist." The young man got another job in another city. After a few discharges of that kind, men who did not want to leave the city got scared and gave me a wide berth.

I looked around for something to do to earn a living. I found a young bookbinder in a commercial house, and as he was a master craftsman, I advised him to hang out a shingle and work for himself. He did so. When I was casting around for a new method of earning a living I thought of him, and asked him to take me as an apprentice. He did so, and I put an apron on and began to work at his bench. One day, when the reporters were hard up for news, one of them called for an interview.

"Have you ever published any sermons, Mr. Irvine?"

"Yes; one, and a fine one."

"Where was it published?"

"Right here in New Haven!"

"A volume?"

"Yes."

I went to my case and produced a book—I had sewed it, backed it, bound and tooled it. It was my first job, and I was proud of it. I am proud of it now. It is the best sermon I ever preached.

Another day a professor in the Yale Medical School called to have some books bound at the bindery.

"Who is that fellow at your bench?" he asked.

"Mr. Irvine," the bookbinder replied.

"The Socialist?"

"Yes."

He took the young man aside and told him that he could expect no recognition from the "best citizens" as long as he kept me. Off came my apron, and I looked around again.

I was very fond of Dr. T.T. Munger. In his vigorous days his was a great intellect, and when in his study one day he told me that I had no gospel to preach, I felt deeply the injustice of the charge. I could not argue. I would not defend myself. I valued his friendship too highly. I hit upon a plan, however. I had published in a labour paper seventeen sermons for working people. I went to a printer and told him that, if he would print them in a book, I would peddle them from door to door until I got the printer's bill. They were printed in a neat volume, entitled "The Master and the Chisel." I paid the printer's bill, and gave the rest away. I sent one to Dr. Munger; and this is what he said of it:

"DEAR MR. IRVINE:

"Many thanks for the little book you sent me. I have read nearly all the brief chapters, and this would not be the case if they were dull. That they certainly are not. Nor would they have held my interest if they did not in the main strike me as true. I can say more, namely, that they seem to me admirably suited to the people you have in charge, and good for anybody. They have at least done me good, and often stirred me deeply. Their strong point is the humanity that runs along their pages—along with a sincere reverence. I hope they will have a wide circulation."

The tide was ebbing, but it was not yet out. The announcement that I was a Socialist brought, of course, the members of the party around me, but on Sunday nights, when they came, expecting a discourse on economic determinism and found me searching for the hidden springs of the heart, and the larger personal life, as well as the larger social life, they went away disappointed and never came back.

As I looked around, however, at the churches and the university, I could find nothing to equal the social passion of the socialists—it was a religion with them. True, they were limited in their expression of that passion, but they were live coals, all of them, and I was more at home in their meetings than in the churches.



CHAPTER XVIII

I BECOME A SOCIALIST

I soon joined the party and gave myself body, soul and spirit to the Socialists' propaganda. The quest for a living took me to a little farm on the outskirts of the city. There were eighteen acres—sixteen of them stones.

Gradually I began to feel that my rejection was not a mere matter of being let alone, of ignoring me; it was a positive attitude. There was a design to drive me out of the city. On the farm I was without the gates in person but my influence was within, among the workers. We spent every penny we had on the farm. I hired a neighbouring farmer to plow my ground and plant my seed, for I had neither horse nor machinery. I told him I had a little cottage in the woods in Massachusetts that I was offering for sale and I would pay him out of the proceeds. At first he believed me and did the work.

It took me two months to get that cottage sold and get the money for it. The farmer's son camped on my doorstep daily. Every day I met him, in the fields or on the road. I spoke in such soft tones and promised so volubly every time he approached me that he got the impression that I had no cottage—that I was a fraud and cheating his father. He spread that impression. He began after a while to insult me, to make fun of me. I debated with myself one afternoon whether when he again repeated his insults I should thrash him or treat him as a joke. I decided on the former. Meantime the check for the cottage came and relieved the situation. Despite my inability to become a Yogi, I believed in the New Thought. My wife and I used to "hold the thought," "make the mental picture," and "go into the silence." We did this regularly.

I had an old counterfeit ten-dollar bill for a decoy. I shut my eyes and imagined myself stuffing big bundles of them into the pigeon-holes of my desk.

I got an incubator, filled it with Buff Orpington eggs and kept the thermometer at 103 deg. F. My knees grew as hard as a goat's from watching it. In the course of events, two chickens came. We had pictured the yard literally covered with them. These poor things broke their legs over the eggs. My wife was more optimistic than I was.

"Wait," she said, "these things are often several days late." So we waited; waited ten days and then refilled the thing and began all over again.

We lost an old hen that was so worthless that we never looked for her. In the fullness of her time she returned with a brood of fourteen! She had been in "the silence" to some purpose!

"Well, let's let the hens alone," my wife said with a sigh; "they know this business better than we do." But we kept on monkeying with mental images—it was great fun.

During our stay on that farm I did four times more pastoral work than I had ever done in my life. I was the minister of the nondescript and the destitute. I presided over funerals, weddings, baptisms, strikes, protests, mass meetings. Nobody thought of paying anything. To those I served I had a sort of halo, a wall of mystery; to me it was often the halo of hunger—of the wolf and the wall—yes, a wall, truly, and very high that separated me from my own.

An incident will show what my brethren thought of my service to the poor. I was in the public library one day when the scribe of the ministerial association to which I belonged accosted me:

"Hello, Irvine!"

"Hello, C——! Splendid weather we're having, isn't it?"

"Splendid," replied C——; and in the same breath he said, "say, you don't come around to the association; do you want your name kept on the roll?"

I hesitated for a moment, then said: "Whatever would give you most pleasure, brother—leaving it on or taking it off—do that!"

That was all—not another word—he reported that I wanted my name removed, and that practically ended my ministerial standing in the Congregational ministry.

The Jewish Rabbi who had taken part in our opening service met me on the street one day.

"Dr. Smyth and I are coming to see you, Irvine," he said.

"I'll be mighty glad to see you both, Rabbi. What are you coming for?"

"Well, we think it's too bad that the labour gang use you as a sucker and we want to see if we can't get a place in some mission for you."

"Rabbi, some of your rich Jews have been after you for appearing on our platform. Come now, isn't that so?"

"Well, it's because they believe as I believe, that you are used as a sucker."

"I don't like your word, Rabbi; but there are fifty ministers in town. If Capital has forty-nine suckers, why not let Labour have one?"

That made him rather furious and he said:

"You remind me of Jesus, a fanatic. He died at 33 when he might have lived to a good old age and done some good!"

"That," I said, "is the highest compliment I have ever received." I bared my head at the word and then left him on the sidewalk.

The New Haven water company managed to get what was called an "eternal contract" passed through both chambers of the city government. Only labouring people opposed it. Naturally there was a strong suspicion of foul play.



A year afterward a man came to me with a grip-sack full of documents. He had been expert book-keeper for the water company, and knew the facts and figures for twenty-five years.

Among them were two cancelled checks—one for a thousand, which was made out by and to the president, and dated the day a certain committee was to meet to go over the terms of the contract. The other was made out to a shyster lawyer and was for fifteen thousand. He expected to create a sensation. The thing had worked on his conscience until it became unbearable. He came to me because of what he had learned of me at the water company office. It takes a civic conscience to deal with such a problem and New Haven had no such thing at that time.

He took the documents from one place to another—to ministers, lawyers, judges, legislators, etc. Nothing could be done. They were all the personal friends of the officials.

The papers wouldn't print anything about it. The book-keeper said he thought he knew why "editors never had any water bills." Some radicals got the big check printed in facsimile and scattered it abroad. The aldermen had been bought; there was no doubt of that, but it was a matter of business.

The whole agitation came back on the reformers like a boomerang. Leading politicians determined to do something to vindicate the leading citizen who had been accused. They elected him to the State Senate! A city of a hundred thousand can by either a positive or a negative process, destroy the usefulness of any man who would be its servant.

I felt my loneliness very keenly—indeed, so much so that it was often as though I had committed a great crime. Always, however, at the breaking-point came a word of cheer—a note of approval.

Bishop Lines of Newark, New Jersey, who was then Rector of St. Paul's church, sent me a note, that reached me in a dark hour.

"I do not suppose," he said, "that I look at things as you do, in all respects, but I would like to assure you of my great regard for you and of my implicit faith in your sincerity and goodness. I know that the world's great sorrow rests upon your heart and that many men who feel it not sit in judgment upon you."

The People's Church dwindled to a vanishing point. The farm produced nothing. Autumn came and we lived largely upon apples.

"Make a break!" my wife said, but it seemed like running away from the fight. The fight was already over and I was beaten—beaten, but unaware of defeat.

One morning I was at the top of a big apple tree, shaking it for three Italian women whom we believed to be worse off than ourselves. A branch broke and I fell on my back on a boulder. I lay as one dead. My wife found me there and hailed a passing grocer's wagon. The boy whipped up his horse to bring a doctor, but on the way spread the news that I had been killed by a fall. Among the first callers after the accident were Donald G. Mitchell and his daughter, my neighbours. I lay on a mattress on the lawn all afternoon in great agony.

Although it was with the greatest difficulty that we scraped together the twenty-five dollars a month for the farm, my wife, putting her philosophy of the New Thought to the test, had rented a house in the city at seventy dollars a month. When she rented it, we hadn't seventy cents. We were to move into it the day of the accident. I insisted that we proceed.

"Send for Jimmy Moohan," I said. Jimmy was a genial old Irish expressman whose stand was at the New Haven Green. Jimmy came and looked me over. Then came Bob Grant, a foreman from a near-by manufacturing concern, and after him four Socialist comrades on their way home from work.

"Ah, Mother o' God," Jimmy said, "shure it's an ambulance yer riverence shud haave."

"I want you, Jimmy; pile me in."

"Holy Saints," he exclaimed, "shure th' ould cyart'll jolt yer guts out!"

"Pile me in."

So they lifted me on the mattress and laid me in the express wagon. Bob Grant sat beside me; the four comrades steadied it—two on each side.

"Git up now, Larry, an' be aisy wid ye."

When the wagon wheel mounted a stone, Jimmy blamed Larry and swore at him. Occasionally he would turn around and say: "How's it goin', yer riverence?"

I was in such agony that I sweat. Pains were shooting through every part of my body but I usually answered:

"Fine, Jimmy, fine!"

So I came back within the gates of the city—rejected, defeated, deserted, and practically a pauper.

It had been a long fight but the city had conquered. A few more attempts at work; a few more appeals for fair play, a few more speeches for the propaganda; but as baggage in Jimmy Moohan's express wagon I was down and out!

At a regular meeting of the Trades Council of New Haven a member moved that a letter of sympathy be sent to me. A week after my fall, another was made and carried to make me a member of the council and a third to send me a check for fifty dollars. This was the only money I ever received for my services to labour and as it arrived a few hours before the agent called for his rent, it was very welcome.

It seemed odd to all sorts of people that, after being starved out, I should bob up again in one of the largest houses on Chapel Street—I couldn't quite understand it myself. My wife could, however. She said the whole business of life was a matter of mental attitude and she only laughed when I asked whether there was any chance of my being kicked to death by a mule for the next month's rent!

I made another attempt to interest the students of Yale in the human affairs of New Haven. Ten years previous to this, when there was some suggestion that I take charge of Yale's mission work, I was astounded to be told by the leaders of the Yale Y.M.C.A. that the chief end in view was not the work but the worker. Yale's mission was to give the student practice. Missions were to be laboratories—the specimens were to be humans. The eternal questions of sin and poverty were to be answered by the pious phrases and the cast-off junk of immature students. I gave a series of talks on labour unions to a selected group of students who were leaders.

I was a social evangelist then and, after the talks, took stock of the results. Many fell by the wayside, but a group of strong men formed themselves into a "University Federal Labour Union." Dick Morse, captain of the 'Varsity crew, became president of it. Representative union constitutions were studied. The following sentences from the declaration of principles will illustrate how thoroughly these young men got in line with the union movement:

"We believe it inconsistent and unworthy that a wage-worker should take the benefits that accrue to a craft as a direct result of organization and at the same time hold himself aloof from the responsibilities and from his share of the expenses of that organization.

"We believe that union men whenever possible should demand the union label as a guarantee that the goods were manufactured under conditions fair to labour. We believe that eight hours should constitute a day's work."

In the preamble was this statement: "We do not look upon the labour union as an ultimate conception of labour, but we believe that whatever progress has been made in the lot of the labourer has been due wholly to the organization of the wage-workers!"

The preamble concludes with this paragraph: "Believing, therefore, in the cause of labour and desiring to add according to our ability to the support of the union movement, we pledge ourselves to study it intelligently and to support it loyally."

Here was the beginning of a splendid mission work among the students; but the New Haven labour movement wasn't big enough to take it in; nor was the American Federation of Labour. The labour men would have no dealings whatever with the students. We managed to keep the big house for a year, but we kept little else during that period. Twice we lost the mental image of the monthly rent. Sam Read supplied it the first time and Anson Phelps Stokes the other. These were my only borrowings in New Haven. In that house I had one of the most bitter experiences of my life.

"I think," said my wife to me, one morning at 2 A.M., "that the baby will be born in an hour."

The announcement chilled me. There was but five cents in the house and that was needed to telephone for the family physician. As I walked down Chapel Street it seemed as if my heart was a nest of scorpions spitting poison.

There was no breakfast in the house for the mother of the new-born babe. The churches, the homes of the wealthy and the university filled me with unutterable hate as I passed them. I was in the frame of mind in which murder, theft, violence are committed.

I had held my integrity intact until that exigency. Then I only lacked opportunity to smash my ideals—to bend my head, my back, my morals!

Cold sweat covered my body, my teeth chattered and my hands twitched. My Socialist philosophy told me that society was in process of evolution. Democracy at heart was correcting its own evils and like a snake sloughing off its outworn skin. I was part of that process. Reason pounded these things in on me but hate pushed them aside and demanded something else. I wondered that morning whether after all there weren't more reforms wrapped up in a stick of dynamite than in a whole life of preaching and moralizing. In that fifteen-minute walk there passed through my mind and heart all the elements of hell.

It was a new experience to me—I had not travelled that way before. I went into a little restaurant to use the 'phone. I laid the nickel on the counter, when I had finished, and as I did so the waiter said, "It's a 'phone on me, Mr. Irvine;" and he rang up five cents in the cash register.

"Ah," I said, "you know me then?"

"Sure thing," he said, "don't you know me?"

I shook my head.

"Gee!" he said, "you're sick. You look like hell!"

"I feel like it."

"What's up?"

"You heard me 'phone?"

"Sure—aint you glad?"

"Yes—but——"

"Say, have a cup of hot coffee, won't you?"

"Thank you, I think I will."

His intuition was keen enough to perceive that the trouble was mental and as I took the coffee he said:

"Discouraged a bit, hey?"

Without waiting for a reply he proceeded to tell me how a few words of mine at one of the trolleymen's midnight meetings had changed his life. He went into details and as he went on I saw a look of contentment on his face and as I watched, it changed the look on my own.

I could not drink his coffee but I shared his comradeship and as I went back home I became normal. Hate left my heart. I was beaten, in a way; but the love of mankind was a fundamental thing and the other was a mental storm that passed over and left no ill results.

Things took a new turn that morning. We saw a rift in the clouds and were encouraged. It became clear that my work in New Haven was ended.

I took a commission from the Young Men's Christian Association on West 57th Street to open up meetings in some of the big shops and factories of New York.

Mr. Charles F. Powlison, who is one of the largest minded and noblest hearted men in the Association, is special secretary there, and it was through his faith and confidence that the work came to me.

The Interborough Rapid Transit Company gave us permission to hold meetings in several of their largest shops.

I enjoyed the work very much—these big crowds of men in jumpers and overalls had a fascination for me. The work in the Interborough went well for a year. I reviewed great books, I gave the biographies of the world's greatest men, I talked of ethics, science, art and religion. I taught the truth as I understood it; but it was all utterly unsectarian and universal. In one shop the company cleaned out the junk and replaced it with a restaurant: the superintendent told me it was the result of my work there. My talks were never over fifteen minutes long and seldom over ten. I was always assisted by a musician of some sort.

The work went well for a year in the big shops; then my part in them came to an abrupt end.

The board of directors at the West Side Y.M.C.A. is composed of representative men of affairs in New York—men of big responsibilities and large wealth; as splendid a set of men as ever governed an institution.

This particular Y.M.C.A. was a pioneer institution in a big way. It stood for large things when those things were unpopular. It was a heretic in a way. In ten years the procession came up and the institution seemed to stand still.

It had given the Y.M.C.A. world a larger outlook in religion and it may be that it will yet become a pioneer in giving it a larger sociology.

I was one of two men to address the board of directors one night and I stated the case at more length than I do here.

"What shall I tell those workingmen you stand for?" I asked. "Do you believe in the right of the workers to organize? If you do, say so, and, as your representative, let me tell them that you do."



The next time I addressed a big shop meeting I gave the musician all the minutes save three. Several hundreds of men stood around me—disorganized, poorly paid men.

"Men," I said, "there is in this city a thing called the Civic Federation. Its leaders are directly the owners of this shop. In it are also leaders of labour, Mitchell and Gompers. There are several bishops of various beliefs. Now the Civic Federation tells us—tells the world—that it believes in labour unions. What I want to suggest is this: A dozen of you get together; write a note to your masters and ask them if that belief applies to you?"

Of course I knew it didn't apply to them, but I got very tired merely telling the slaves to be good, and ended my service there in that way. A spy at once informed the superintendent, and I was told—the Y.M.C.A. was told—that I could never enter their shops again. The man who succeeded me as a speaker at that shop, the following week, went much further; he positively advised them to organize, for hardly in the United States could one find greater need of organization.



CHAPTER XIX

I INTRODUCE JACK LONDON TO YALE

The last piece of work in New Haven was a master stroke. It was an inoculation. Jack London was in the East and I persuaded him to pay the comrades in New Haven a visit and make a speech. The theatres were all engaged, so were the halls.

The new Y.M.C.A. hall could not be rented—for London. There was only one hope left—Yale. I knew a student who was a Socialist. We outlined a plan. London was a literary man; Yale had probably heard of him. The Yale Union was canvassed. It was a Freshman debating society. Certainly; they had read London's books—"The Call of the Wild," "The Sea Wolf," etc.

"Well now, boys, here's your chance. Jack London can be had for a lecture."

The Union had no money and Woolsey Hall cost fifty dollars. "That's easy," I suggested, though I didn't have fifty cents at the time. That seemed fine. "Of course," I said, as I remembered the empty Socialist treasury, "we'll have to charge an admission fee of ten cents." That, too, was all right. In case of frost or failure I promised to make good so that the Union would have no responsibility. I meekly suggested that as compensation for "risk involved" I would take the surplus—if there was any.

"They say Jack London is Socialistically inclined, Doctor," said the youthful president of the Yale Union.

"Yes, he is, rather," I answered.

"Well," he added, "I suppose we will have to take our chances." The chances seemed small then; they loomed up larger later.

He hoped President Hadley would not interfere with him.

"Will you introduce him, Doctor?"

"Certainly."

"What's his topic?"

"He calls it 'The Coming Crisis.'"

"Social, I suppose, eh?"

"Yes, it's a suggested remedy for a lot of our troubles."

The Socialist student had a few rounds with Lee McClung, the Yale treasurer. "Mac" didn't know Irvine from a gate-post but took Billy Phelps's word for it that London was a literary man and let it go at that—let the hall go, I mean.

"Yale," said the brilliant Phelps, "is a university, and not a monastery; besides, Jack London is one of the most distinguished men in America."

When it was decided we could have the hall the advertising began. Streets, shops and factories were bombarded with printed announcements. Next morning—the morning after securing the hall—Yale official and unofficial awoke to find tacked to every tree on the campus the inscription, "Jack London at Woolsey Hall."

Max Dellfant painted a flaming poster that gripped men by the eyes. In it London appeared in a red sweater and in the background the lurid glare of a great conflagration. Yale and New Haven had never been so thoroughly informed on such short notice. The information was in red letters.

The first thing done was to run down the officers of the Yale Union. They had previously run each other down. The boys were thoroughly scared, explanations were in order all around.

The wiseacres of Yale got busy and the new Yale took a hand also. Professor Charles Foster Kent—the Henry Drummond of Yale—and Professor William Lyon Phelps counselled a square deal and fair play.

The Yale Union had a stormy meeting. A real sensation was on their hands; there was possible censure and probable glory and every man in the Union went after his share.

It was indignantly moved and carried that the president of the Union introduce the speaker.

"Irvine is a Socialist," the mover said, "and would spoil the show before it began."



They next discussed the topic. One boy suggested that London be asked to cut out all mention of Socialism. That was tabooed because no one knew that he would mention it anyway.

The day of the lecture I got this note from the Socialist student: "Yale Union and many of the faculty are sweating under the collar for fear London might say something Socialistic. The Union realizes that it would be absolutely useless to ask him to smooth over his lecture and cut out anything which sounds radical. Also they have decided that it would be a shock to the university and the public to have you appear upon the platform in any way, shape or manner. They are going to ask you to cancel your engagement to introduce London. In this I think they are unwise, but as they are determined it must be so. I advise you to agree to whatever arrangement they suggest. This done, they will 'take the chances' that London will express Socialistic ideas. Now I fear there will be the devil to pay for the lecture—the university is going to be surprised, the faculty shocked beyond measure and the Yale Union severely criticized!"

This is how the president of the Union expressed the situation in a note to me on the day of the lecture. "At a meeting of the executive committee of the Yale Union it was voted that the president of the Union introduce the speaker of the evening as it would tend to identify the Union more conspicuously and also to give it prominence before the student body. For this reason—wholly beyond my power and opposed to my opinion—I shall be forced to forego our little plan which I thought by far the best," etc., etc.

Some small portion of prosperity having come our way I was able to dine a small group with Jack London as the chief guest. Professor Charles Foster Kent of Yale, and Charles W. De Forrest, a business man, were among the guests.

It was a Socialist innings at Woolsey Hall that night. The big crowd gave the Yale Union an idea—this time it was a financial idea—twenty-eight hundred people paid admission—the officers swept down on the box office; but there was a Socialist inside playing capitalist. Socialists are not familiar enough with the game to play it successfully, but in this instance we played in strict accordance with the rules. We furnished the capital, took the risks and bagged the pot! We conceded nine points out of ten—the tenth was a financial one. The audience represented every phase of life in the city. Over a hundred of the faculty and ten times as many students. Citizens of all classes were there.

The Harvard Students had played horse with London a few weeks before this and we—the Socialists—were prepared for any sort of demonstration.

"The spectacle of an avowed Socialist," said the New Haven Register, "one of the most conspicious in the country, standing upon the platform of Woolsey Hall and boldly advocating the doctrines of revolution was a sight for gods and men."

Jack London talked for over two hours to that packed hall and received a most unusual attention. After the lecture he was taken to a students' dormitory where he answered questions till midnight. Then he was escorted by a smaller group to Mory's for supper and at one o'clock we held a reception at the big house which was known as "the Socialist Parsonage."

For over twenty years I have been a contributor to newspapers and religious periodicals, but not until I met Jack London did it ever occur to me that I could earn a living by my pen. London made me promise to write. My first story I mailed to California for his criticism and suggestion, but before it returned I had entered the field.



CHAPTER XX

MY EXPERIENCE AS A LABOURER IN THE MUSCLE MARKET OF THE SOUTH

Appleton's Magazine published my first serious attempt at fiction. It was a short story entitled, "Two Social Pariahs."

The cry of peonage was in the air and I arranged with Appleton's Magazine for a series of articles on the subject. Dressed as a labourer I went to the muscle market of New York and got hired. To do this I had to assume a foreign accent and look as slovenly as possible. With a picturesque contingent of Hungarians, Finns, Swedes and Greeks, I was drafted for the iron mines of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. The mines are near Bessemer, Ala. At every turn of the road south we were herded and handled like cattle.

It was a big, black porter who led us into the car at Portsmouth, Va. I was the leader of the contingent, and the porter addressed us for the most part by signs, and when he spoke at all he called me "Johnny." When inside, he arranged us in our seats, putting his hands on some of our shoulders to press us down into them. I did not realize that I was in a Southern state until I saw a big yellow card in this car marked "Coloured." Then I knew instantly that we were in a Jim Crow car. A coloured woman sat next to the window in my seat and by her look and little toss of the head and a quick nervous movement she seemed to say, "What are you doing here?"

When the train pulled out of the depot, I stepped up to the porter and said:

"Haven't you a law in Virginia on the separation of the races."

The big black fellow grinned.

"Dere sho' is, boss—but you ain't no races. You is jest Dagoes, ain't you?"

At Atlanta we changed cars and were again driven into the Jim Crow car. This time I made a more intelligent attempt to solve my race problem. The conductor, faultlessly dressed in broadcloth and covered with gold lace, strode into our car with the air of an admiral of the fleet. He went straight through the car, collecting the block ticket for our gang from the boss, and as he returned I stepped into the aisle in front of him, blocking his passage.

"Pardon me, sir," I said, "isn't there a law in Georgia on the separation of the races?"

Without a word, he removed the glasses from his nose, stared at me for a moment, then turned sharply, walked to the end of the car, removed the card which read "Coloured" and reversed it. It then read "White." Then he came back through the car slowly, staring at me as he passed but without uttering a word.

Our particular destination was "Muckers Camp" at Readers. A group of three buildings on the brow of a hill—the hill where the blacks live. The first of these buildings is a kitchen and dining room, the second is a big dormitory and the third is a wash-house. This was our new home. The dormitory was originally intended for a series of small rooms but the work was arrested before completion. The uprights marking the divisions of the rooms were still standing—bare and uncovered. The floor of the big dormitory was littered with rubbish—miners' cast-off clothing, shoes, broken lamps, and in a corner there was a junk-heap of broken bedsteads, slats, army blankets and sodden mattresses. We were told to make ourselves "at home." There was room enough and plenty of bedding. All we had to do was to fish for what we needed and put it in order. Everything was red—red with ore that men carried out of the mines on their bodies.

The junk heap in the corner played an important part in the movements of my gang. The thought of having to sleep in the sodden stuff chilled me to the bones, but I kept silent. Whatever the previous condition of the men had been, they felt as I did as they pulled their bedding out piece by piece. They had gone to spend the winter in the mines of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company; they knew the work, conditions and pay; they had refused to be bribed on the way down, but as they tugged at the junk, a change came over them! They swore in half a dozen languages—they gritted their teeth and vowed that they wouldn't be treated like pigs.



We went to the wash-house and the outlook was less encouraging. There was a long, narrow trough in the centre. It was half full of red ore. The floor was wet and covered with ore, rags, old papers and other rubbish. There were compartments intended for shower-baths, but there again the work had been arrested and was incomplete. We washed, made our beds, ate dinner and proceeded to the company store to be fitted out.

Each man was furnished with a number. By that number he was to be known while in the company's employ. Each man showed his number and drew what he needed—overalls, lamps, and heavy boots. There was nothing niggardly in the credit. The deeper the debt the tighter the grip on the debtor. The goods cost just one hundred per cent. more than anywhere else. The company paid wages once a month. If a labourer borrowed of his own within that time, he paid ten per cent. on the loan.

As we came back from the store, the miners were just leaving the mines and it was interesting to see them gaze into our faces and address us in Russian, Hungarian, Swedish and various other languages. It was one of the excitements of camp life—to inspect and classify the newcomers.

One of the men had a wheezy accordion and he relieved the monotony of the evening with some German airs. The big shed was unlighted, save as each man was his own lamp-post. Each made his own bed by the light of the lamp on his cap. As he undressed, the cap was the last article to be set aside and the extinguishing of the smoky, flickering blaze the last act of the night.

As the first streak of the gray dawn came in through the bare windows, four of our gang dressed and deliberately marched out of the camp—never to return.

The first number in the programme of a "mucker's" toilet is to adjust his cap with his lamp in it, trimmed and burning. The second is to light his pipe; then he dresses.

It was half-past five and still dark, when those nude, shaggy men with heads ablaze with smoky, flickering lamps, began to move around. They looked grotesque—unearthly—denizens of some underground pit. They were good-humoured and full of boisterous laughter.

A breakfast of pork, beans, potatoes, bread and coffee—plenty of each—and we went off with dinner pails over the hill to the valley, where five tall, smoking chimneys marked the entrances to as many mines.

Each mine has a complete outfit of men and machinery, and a certain number of chambers or pockets in which, with blast and hammer and hand, the red hills are made to disgorge their treasures of iron ore.

Three of us perched ourselves on the rear end of the "skip"—a big iron-ore disgorger—and began the half-mile descent. It was a 45 per cent. grade, and the skip, at the end of a powerful wire cable, went down by jerks. One of my companions was Franz, the Hungarian, the other was a German. The big square mouth of the mine became smaller and smaller as we bumped into the bowels of the earth. In a few minutes it looked like a small window-pane, and then disappeared altogether and we were left in the darkness.

Each mine is like a little town. It has a main street and side alleys—"pockets," they are called. There are "live" and "dead" pockets—the dead are the worked out.

At the first of the live pockets the skip was stopped by some invisible hand and we clambered over the side to a platform where a foreman met and conducted us to the task of the day.

The mine was filled with red dust. We could see but a few feet ahead of us. The lamps on men's brows looked like fire-flies dancing in the red mist. There was a sound of rushing water and the chug, chug of the pumps. As we waded ankle-deep through a water alley, we heard the warning yells of a foreman. A charge of dynamite was about to burst and the men were flying out of danger. We were whisked into a cleft for safety. Half a dozen old miners were squeezed in beside us. Our scarcely soiled caps told the story of our newness and the old hands watched us closely.

Boom! The hills shivered like the deck of a warship as she discharges a broadside. Franz shivered too. His eyes bulged and he stared, loose-jawed, at the men around us, who laughed at his fright.

The explosion was in our alley; it had torn up the car-tracks like strips of macaroni; it was the salute of dynamite to our soft, flabby muscles, to our white caps and new overalls; it was a stick of concentrated power throwing down the gauntlet to men in the raw.

We had a foreman who superintended our compartment, "a driller," who with a steam drill sat all day boring holes for dynamite, and we were the "muckers"—miner's helpers—who carried away with muscular power the effects of the explosion. Each alley had similar crews.

"Mule boy!" I roared with all my vocal power into what looked like an ugly rent in the rocks. A moment later, I saw a glimmer of light, then a mule shot up out of a hole and a black boy brought up the rear, clinging to the tail of "Emma," the mule, our sure-footed locomotive.

We were handed a huge sledge-hammer each and the work began. My hammer bounded off the rocks as if it were an air ball. It bounded for a dozen heavy strokes.

"Turn that rock over and look for the grain!" the foreman shouted in my ear. Then he took the hammer, turned the huge boulder over on its side, struck it twice or thrice and it flew into splinters.

We acquired the knack of things quickly, and instinctively struck the working pace. It was the limit of human strength and endurance. My jacket came off first, then my overalls, then my shirt, leaving trousers and undershirt only. The others followed suit. The sweat oozed out of every pore of my body. We smashed, filled and ran out the full cars. We worked silently, doggedly and at top speed. Several hundred men were doing likewise in other pockets; they were less bloody, perhaps, but the work was the same and they did it without knowing that it was brutally hard. There was a halt of fifteen minutes for dinner. Then we went at it again. Our best fell short of the demand. For every car of ore blasted, the foreman got fifty cents and for running out each car, we got twenty cents—a little over six cents each.

"—— —— your souls to h—l," the foreman shouted. "Why don't you get a move on you —— hey?"

We moved a little faster.

"You muckers ain't goin' t' get ten cars out t'day if ye don't mend yer licks!"

We "mended our licks."

He looked like a wild beast. Short of stature, but his arms were hardened and under the red skin the muscles were hard as whip-cords and taut as a drum. His eyebrows were heavy and bushy and over his strong chest grew shaggy masses of black hair. Our car slipped the track once and when he heard the smash he came thundering along, ripping out a string of oaths as he came. Putting his powerful body to the lever, he lifted the car almost alone. As he did so, his lamp came in contact with my hand. Unable to let go, I screamed to him to move. As he did so, he saw the seared flesh.

"Too bad! Too bad!" he said, as he dropped the truck. I gazed into his eyes.

"Look here!" I said, "if you will look as human as that again, you may burn the other hand!"

The human moles who empty these pockets of ore are inured. Life down there is normal to them. After a few years' work, the skin becomes calloused and tough. The hands become claws or talons—broken and disfigured. The muckers laughed at us. They saw we were concerned about trifles. Bloody sweat and hot oil held the red dust around us like a tight-fitting garment. Our scanty clothing was glued to our bodies. Our shoes were filled with water, but that was a luxury—it was cool.

What a hades of noise and dust! The continual noise and clatter of the pumps, the rattle of the drillers, the hissing of steam and the ear-splitting roar of the dynamite explosions are matters that one gets accustomed to in time. The frenzied desire to get cars filled and run out leaves little time for novel sensations—for that, brute force alone is needed.

At the end of the first day we had filled and run out ten cars. Our pay for that was sixty-six cents apiece. During the same time, Philo, the mule boy, made seventy-five cents and Emma—she had earned what would enable her to return to-morrow to repeat the work of to-day.

About five o'clock in the afternoon we were sandwiched into the big iron skip with a score of others—black and white. Eight hours had taken our newness away. We were as others in colour and condition. We looked into their faces and felt their hot breath. Then a signal was given and the panting, squirming mass was jerked to the surface.

As we passed over the hill to the camp I was in an ecstasy. The sense of relief under the open sky was intense. Others seemed to have it—for they joked and laughed boisterously over trifles as we went "home."

Seven of us together went to the big wash-house. It was rather crowded. I marvelled that nobody was using the shower-baths. I soaped myself, stood beneath the big iron water-pipe and waited, but there was no response. There was a loud laugh, then a miner asked:

"Air ye posin' for yer photo, mister?"

"No. What's the matter with the water?"

"Fits, Buttie—it's got fits!"

There was plenty of food, of a kind. The supper, at the close of the day was a brief function, but brutal as it was brief. It was something of a shock, the first night we were in camp, but at the close of my first day's work I found myself on a level with the grossest. The finer instincts were blunted or gone and I was in the clutch of a hunger like that of the jungle, where might and cunning rule. At a signal from the cook, we rushed in, crushed by main force into a seat, seized whatever was nearest and began. Scarcely a word was spoken—heads down, hands and jaws at top speed. The disgusting spectacle lasted but a few minutes, then up and out to smoke and talk.

Beside me sat a strong, powerfully built German boy, who joked about the age of the pork for supper.

"What you guff about?" the burly steward asked.

"Schmell, py gee—its tick mit bad schmell!"

"Vell, you shut your —— maut or I smash your —— head, see?"

The boy laughed, then the steward removed his plate and refused to give any more. Nobody took any notice. We were too busy and too brutally selfish to interfere. The steward was the camp bully and the men were afraid of him. They must not even laugh at his provisions. We had pork for breakfast, we took pork chops to the mines for dinner, and the staple article—the standby—of every supper was pork. Pigs in Alabama are like turnips in Scotland—there are no property rights in them. They breed and litter in the tall dog-fennel; they root around the shanties and cover the landscape.

"Who owns these pigs?" I asked old Ransom Pope, a Negro.

"One an' anoder!" he said.

The gullies and the weeds were full of them and the steward found them easy and cheap feeding.

"You come yere for breakfast to-morrow an' I smash your dam head!" the steward said to the boy, as we left the dining room. There was no reply. Each man went his way. They were tired—too tired to think. Though a stranger to even the taste of liquor, I had an intense craving for it and it seemed as if I had used it all my life. An hour after supper, I lay down on my sodden pile and went to sleep.

I was awakened next morning by a Norwegian mucker who was organizing a strike over the incident of the tainted pork. Five minutes later, every man in the shed was around the stove in an impromptu indignation meeting. It was agreed that Max, the German boy, should go in first; if the steward put him out, we were all to leave with him and refuse to work. He was allowed to take breakfast but was refused a dinner pail. We dropped ours and marched to the office in a body. An investigation was made and it was discovered that the steward was feeding us on his neighbour's pork and charging it to the company. He was discharged and we went back to the camp to make merry for the rest of the forenoon. The fun, for most of them, consisted of an extra demand on their physical force—rough horse-play, leap-frog and wrestling. One man went to town for extra stimulants. Another, a big Swede, stripped nude, drained at a single draught a bottle of whiskey and lay down to sleep himself drunk and sober again before his next call to the pits. At the close of the day he lay there—a big, shaggy animal, wallowing.

The mines were shut down on Sunday and we had an opportunity to look around. Though a place of one thousand inhabitants, it has no post-office. There are ditches but no drains; wide, deep gullies, but no streets. The moon shines there in her season, but there are no street lamps. The hogs are somewhat tame and we fed them as we went along. There is a church but it's for black folks—it's essential to them. The whites fare not so well. If they want one, they travel for it. They do likewise for a school, for the little school beside the church is for coloured children. The only "modern convenience" was an ancient style of hydrant, around which the children were organizing fire companies and extinguishing imaginary fires.

After visiting the mule boy in Rat Hollow on Sunday, I returned to the camp. The men were lounging around the stove, smoking, and exchanging experiences. In one corner, a German sailor was playing his wheezy accordion, and in another, to a group of Slavs, a Russian soldier was singing a love song. It was my last day with the muckers. Many of my gang had already gone—the rest would follow. It wasn't a matter of wages or hours—it was a question of muck. Once in it, men lived, moved, and had their being in it, but even the most brutalized quailed at the junk pile in the corner of the shed.

The sun was setting behind the red hills. Save for a long, yellow streak just above the horizon, the sky was a mass of purple billows. The yellow changed to amber and later to a blood red. Then rays of sun-fire shot up and splashed the purple billows; the purple and gold later gave place to black clouds through which the stars came one by one, while the muckers were settling down for the night.

It seemed at first as if I would have to commit some crime to get admission to the stockade where the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company had their largest convict labour force. I was seedy-looking—my beard had grown and I was still in blue shirt and overalls. I approached the chaplain—told him my story and gained admission to his night school; and for three weeks moved in and out among the socially damned of that horrible stockade.

In that time I got the facts of the life there and I became so depressed by what I saw that I had to fight daily to keep off a sense of hate that pressed in upon me every time I went into that atmosphere.

Here were eight hundred men, seven hundred of them coloured. They had committed crimes against persons and property. The state of Alabama hired them out to the corporation at so much a head and the corporation proceeded, with state aid, to make their investment pay.

The men were underfed and overworked and in addition were exploited in the most shameful manner by officials from the top to the bottom.

For the slightest infraction of the rules they were flogged like galley slaves. Women were flogged as well as men. What the lash and the labour left undone tuberculosis finished. Unsanitary conditions, rotten sheds, sent many of them into eternity, where they were better off.

They were classified according to their ability to dig coal, not according to the crimes committed.

From the stockade I went to a lumber camp where some officials had been found guilty of peonage.



I got a job as a teamster and took my place in the camp among the labourers as if I had spent my life at it.

In this way I got at the facts of how and why men had been decoyed from New York and imprisoned in the forests.

I was so much at home in my work and so disguised that no one ever for a moment suspected me. I obtained photographs of the bosses, the bloodhounds and the camp box cars in which the lumber Jacks lived.

Several times around a bonfire of pine knots I entertained the men of the camp with stories of travel, history and romance.

If I had been discovered, if the purpose of my presence had been known I would have been shot like a dog; for life is as cheap in a Southern lumber field as in any part of the world.

From the lumber camp I went to one of the big turpentine camps where conditions are as primitive and as inhuman as in the stockades.

My next and last job in the South was punching logs in Pensacola harbour for a dollar and six "bits" a day. There I got material for several stories of peons who had escaped from the woods.

While in Pensacola I made a visit, one Sunday morning, to the city jail and asked permission to address the prisoners. The jailer, of course, wanted to know what an unkempt labourer had to say to his charges.

In order to convince him I had to deliver an exegesis before the desk! The cells were iron cages with stone floors.

A young Englishman, who had just landed after a long sea voyage the night before, was the first man to whom I talked. He claimed to have been drugged and robbed in a saloon. The fact of his incarceration was a small thing to him; what made him swear was the condition of his cage. The excrements of probably half a dozen of his predecessors in the cell lay around him, nauseating and suffocating him. Fire shot from his eyes as he pointed to it. He was bitter, sarcastic, sneering, and with evident and abundant cause.

Whatever I had to say to the men and women in that dungeon that morning was driven from my mind and my lips.

The young man pushed all the resentment of his soul over into mine! I spent that Sunday in working out a plan by which I could help Pensacola to clean up this social ulcer.

There was a Tourist Club there and I offered to lecture for them. It was arranged for the following Sunday afternoon. I called on the mayor and he promised to preside. I interviewed several aldermen and they promised to attend. I lectured for forty minutes on my experiences as a labourer in the camps of the South, and for ten minutes at the close described what I had seen in the city jail.

It was a somewhat heroic method of treatment, and I did not remain long enough to see the effect, but I at least deprived them of the plea of ignorance.

I found in Florida two Government officials who had done splendid work in behalf of labour. I mean the labourers who were decoyed by false promises and brutally abused on their arrival in the camps. They were both modest men—men unlikely to enter politics for personal advancement. I cut my articles out of the magazine and sent them to President Roosevelt, calling his attention to the conditions and commending these men to his notice. The result was that they were both promoted to positions where their usefulness was increased and the cause of labour considerably helped.



CHAPTER XXI

AT THE CHURCH OF THE ASCENSION

A group of literary people with whom I was acquainted had rented No. 3 Fifth Avenue, and were operating a cooeperative housekeeping scheme. I became part of the plan and it was there that I first met the Rector of the Church of the Ascension, the Rev. Percy Stickney Grant.

Naturally, we talked of the church and its work. I was so impressed with Mr. Grant's bigness that I volunteered to devote some of my spare time to the work of his parish. A few weeks later I got a letter from him inviting me to become a member of his staff. This was a surprise to me, but I made no immediate decision. I was earning a comfortable living and devoting my spare time to the Socialist propaganda. I was free—very free—and I saw danger ahead in church work.

I had several interviews with Mr. Grant and went over the situation. I wasn't a man with Socialistic tendencies; I was a Socialist—a member of the party.

The danger ahead looked smaller to Mr. Grant than it did to me. He had absolute confidence in the broad-minded men of affairs around him. My Socialism was explained and understood. Just how to fit in was the next problem.

The mission of the church is at No. 10 Horatio Street. It was without a minister in charge. For a few Sunday evenings I conducted the service. The audience was composed of half a dozen parishoners and a dozen of my personal friends. Mr. Grant knew nothing of my ability in public address. I took his place one night in the church and that ended my career at the chapel. I had discarded an ecclesiastical title I possessed but never used; I became a lay reader in the Episcopal Church—the church of my youth—the church in which I was baptized and confirmed.

The conference and discussion following the service was an afterthought. The audiences steadily grew. It was and is the most cosmopolitan audience I ever saw. I wanted to get acquainted with the people and suggested a sort of reception in the chapel. The ladies of the church provided refreshments.

"Who is that man?" one of the ladies at the tea table asked one night.

"He is a Socialist agitator," I answered.

"Why don't you ask him to talk?"

The man was Sol Fieldman and I asked him to speak for five minutes. He did so and from that time the character of the after-meeting changed. The first few evenings after the change the speaking was very informal: any one of note who happened to be in the meeting was asked to speak. Later, the invitation was enlarged and any one who desired to speak could do so. Then came a time limit. A workingman asked that the refreshments be cut out. The table took up valuable space and the time consumed in "serving" was "a pure waste," so he said. Then we arranged for a formal presentation of a topic and a discussion to follow it.

The Socialists were always in the majority. Every Socialist is a propagandist—not always an intelligent propagandist. Intelligent and leading Socialists are generally engaged Sunday evenings, so the majority of those who came to us were of the hard-working kind—limited, very limited, in the literary expression of the social soul flame that so passionately moves them.

Some of our church officers who took an active part in the first year's meetings were somewhat alarmed at the brusqueness of these men and women, and undertook to correct their manners.

The Rector understood. And with great patience and tact he heard all. The Church of the Ascension has in its membership some of the country's biggest leaders in industry; some of these men came to the meetings. What they saw and heard was different to what they expected. They fraternized with the men of toil. It was a fraternity utterly devoid of patronage. There were free exchanges of thought. The average labouring man is incapable of such conference, for no matter how many years a member of a labour union it is only when he becomes a Socialist that he becomes an intelligent advocate of anything.



The Rector and I tried to avoid the notice of the newspapers and for about six months we succeeded. Then came the explosion of the bomb on Union Square and we were at once thrown into the limelight. I was on the Square that afternoon.

It was designed to be a mass meeting of the unemployed. The unemployed are not usually interested in any sort of propaganda; the more intelligent of the labour men are, and the Socialists are more so.

So the promoters of the mass meeting for the unemployed were Socialists. It was at this meeting that a police official declared to a man who had the temerity to question him that the policeman's club was mightier than the Constitution of the United States.

No permit was given and no mass meeting held, but the multitude was there and when the police began to disperse it the people who were neither Socialists nor unemployed resented being driven off the streets. I saw men clubbed and women deliberately ridden over by the mounted police. I kept moving: I wanted to be where it was most dangerous. I suffered for months with a bruised arm that I got as I went with the crowd in front of the horses: it was a blow aimed at a man's head; I was clubbed on the back for not moving fast enough. At every turn, at every angle of the Square, the police were as brutal as any Cossack that ever wielded a knout.

Late on that afternoon the police opened the Square—that is, the people were permitted to cross it in all directions. My study was at No. 75 Fifth Avenue, and I was moving in that direction past the fountain when the explosion took place. I was hurled off my feet; that is, the shock to my nervous system was so great that I collapsed. My first flash of thought was of the battle-field!

Fifteen feet in front of me two men staggered. It seemed to me that one of them had been ripped in twain. He fell and the other fell on top of him. Instantly the policemen around me seemed crazed: as I staggered to my feet one of them struck me a terrific blow with his club. The blow landed between my shoulders, but glanced upward, striking me on the back of the head. I tumbled over, dazed, but the thought that his next blow would murder me seemed to give me superhuman strength and I ran. As I turned he attacked another man and I thought I was free. I was mistaken, however, for he gave chase and if I had not escaped into the crowd I would have fared badly at his hands.

My nerves were so badly shattered that on the way to my room I fell several times. The following Sunday night the Civic Federation packed our meeting with their speakers.

Mr. Gompers's representative in New York was the first man put up. He was furnished with quotations from alleged Socialist writers on the question of religion. Then a woman from Boston who had once been a Socialist, sent a note to me—I was presiding—asking for extended time. I was the only Socialist in the place who knew what was going on.

The newspapers had all been "tipped off," as the Herald reporter told me later. The discussion waxed so warm that fifty people were on their feet at once, shouting for recognition.

Humour in such a situation is a tremendous relief. I managed to inject some into the discussion and it was like grease to a cartwheel. In a humorous way I turned the light on the Civic Federation and the audience laughed. Next day every newspaper in New York had an account of the meeting. From that time until the end of the first year of the meeting the papers reported not only what happened but much that never happened. Most of them were humorous in their treatment. The Marceline of the press gave us much space in its characteristic style.

The result was that we were forced to have policemen guard the door so that when the chapel was full the crowd unable to gain admittance could be dispersed. We admitted by ticket for some weeks, but the plan didn't work well. Of course, many who came were moved solely by curiosity, but for two years the chapel has been filled at every meeting. On the wildest winter nights it looked sometimes as if the choir was to be my only audience, yet when the after-meeting opened, the place was as full as usual.

The Sunday evening service is designed to be of special helpfulness to working people; it is an extra service permitted by the canons of the church, and in this instance directed to helpful and constructive social criticism. The discourses have not been theological in any sense, but I have seen men and women converted, experiencing a change of heart in exactly the same manner as people are converted in revival meetings. The same energies of the soul were released and the same results obtained with this extra consideration, that the change was a new attitude toward society as well as a change of heart.

Men and women who had not been in church since they were children have found an atmosphere—a spiritual atmosphere—that has been a distinct help to them during the week. There have been unique examples of this that cannot be recorded or catalogued. If we were padding a year-book, bolstering a creed or attracting men merely to put our tag on them the meetings would have waned long ago, for the class of people who attend are quick to discover undercurrents or ulterior motives.

The spiritual atmosphere is created by a combination of forces. The picture of the Ascension by La Farge has contributed not a little to it—even to people to whom the circumstance was a myth. The architecture and music contributed much.

We held the after-meeting in the church one night—to accommodate hundreds of people who couldn't get into the chapel. The meeting was a failure. The most radically minded men told me that they couldn't talk in the church.

"Why?" I asked one man.

"—— if I know, but it took the fight out of me!"

It took the fight out of all. So we went back to the chapel. One man whom I have known for years as a Socialist agitator who fought the intellectuals in his party and was a materialist of the most radical kind made this statement at the last meeting of the first year:

"I appreciate the courage of Mr. Grant in opening this church to the people and opening its pulpit to a representative of the people. I am grateful for the fine fellowship, the freedom of discussion, the music, the beautiful architecture and the inspiration that comes from such contact, but these are the smallest of what has come to me during the past winter. I am the son of an orthodox Rabbi but I have been an atheist all my life. I have been over-bitter and destructive in my addresses. I have learned something here. I did not expect nor did I want to, but I have. I am now a believer in the immortality of the soul and I look forward to life instead of death. This has influenced my work, my life. Instead of a hundred words against human slavery to one for human freedom I speak a hundred for human freedom to one against human slavery. That may seem small to you. It's big to me—it's a new psychology."

A school teacher, a brilliant young Jewess, said: "The inspiration of that service in the church lasts all week with my scholars. I am worth twice as much as I was to the public schools."

A letter from a trained nurse says: "I am going away for the summer, but before I go I want you to know how much of a blessing your service has been to me, and to both physicians and nurses in this hospital, for we have all been at one time or another, and we have always talked over your topics with interest and profit."

During the first year we had a tremendous stimulus in the meetings from the active participation of four of the most prominent theosophists in the country—two of whom are members of the vestry. They sharpened the line between spiritual and material things. They brought to the notice of working-class Socialists the essential things of the soul. They made the meetings a melting-pot in which the finest, best and most permanent things were made to stand out distinctly. The world affords not a better field either for the testing or propagating of their philosophy, but they did not come the second year and we missed them very much.

There was a good deal of misunderstanding about the meetings, arising from garbled newspaper reports. The newspaper reporter has a bias for things off colour—buzzard-like, he sees only the carrion—at least he is trained to report only the carrion—this always against his will. So we were kept explaining to men and women of the church who had not been able to attend and see for themselves. There was not only misunderstanding but prejudice. I came in contact with it in quarters the most unlikely. The people of independent means in the Church of the Ascension have social ideals, those of the working class who are in the church have none—none whatever, and what prejudice I found came from those who had never contributed anything to the church but their presence, and to whom the church from their childhood had been an almshouse, a hospital, and a place of amusement.

These were the people, baptized and confirmed Christians, who spoke with bitterness and a sneer of the evening meetings because the majority of the attendants were Jews. The other phase of their prejudice was against Socialism—which they supposed to be a process of "dividing up." My chief encouragement came from the richest people in the church, the sneer came from the poorest.

The range of topics was as wide as the interests of human life. The speakers were the leading men of New York and distinguished visitors from other lands. One of the earliest speakers was Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, the daughter of Richard Cobden and the intimate friend of William Morris. Capitalism was represented by Professor J.B. Clark, Dr. Thomas R. Slicer and Herman Robinson of the American Federation of Labour. There were many others, of course, but these were the best known. The Socialist leaders were W.J. Ghent, Rufus Weeks, Gaylord Wilshire and R.W. Bruere. Exponents of individualism were many, and most of them were brilliant. The most powerful address on behalf of labour was made by R. Fulton Cutting. There has been no attempt to bait an ecclesiastical hook to catch the masses. We have tried to make men think and to act on their best thought.

This venture in ecclesiology is not the democratization of a church. It is the leadership of a rector—Mr. Grant is an ecclesiastical statesman—he has a strong cabinet in his vestry. Men who, having made big ventures in the business world, are not averse to an occasional venture in matters not directly in their line. He has enough reaction among them to keep the balance level.

The Church of the Ascension is the real Cathedral of New York. What matters it about Canon, Chapter, Dean and Prebend? A cathedral is a church of the people—all the people!



CHAPTER XXII

MY SOCIALISM, MY RELIGION AND MY HOME

My vision spiritual came to me out of the unknown. The facts and experiences of life led me to Socialism. In each case it was a rebirth.

"The Way" of Jesus was at first a state of mind; it had no relation to a book; it had no connection with a church. Socialism is a passion for the regeneration of society, it is a state of mind, a point of view. The religion of the peasant Saviour and the movement for industrial democracy expand as they are understood. Both thrive under opposition and are retarded only by unfaithful friends. I caught the spirit, then studied the forms. I got tired of doling out alms. It became degrading to me either to take them from the rich or to give them to the poor. Almsgiving deludes the one and demoralizes the other. I had distributed the crumbs that fall from rich men's tables until my soul became sick. I expected Lazarus the legion to be grateful; I expected him to become pious, to attend church, to number himself with the saved, and he didn't.

Almsgiving not only degrades the recipient but the medium also. The average minister or missionary is looked upon by the middle and upper classes as a sort of refined pauper himself. So, like a mendicant he goes to the merchant and trades his piety for a rebate of ten per cent.; or he travels on a child's fare on the railroads. I have scores of times given away my own clothes and have gone to the missionary "Dorcas Room" and fitted myself out with somebody's worn-out garments; and I, too, was expected to be grateful and to write of my gratitude to the person who, "for Jesus' sake," had cleaned out his cellar or garret. In the West I have been the recipient of Home Missionary barrels packed in some rich church in New York or New England—annual barrels in which there is usually a ten-dollar suit for the missionary, bought by some dear old lady to whom all men were alike—in size. This whole process is hoary, antiquated, stupid and degrading.

My Socialism is the outcome of my desire to make real the dreams I have dreamed of God. It came to me, not through Marx or Lassalle, but by the way of Moses and Jesus. Twenty years' experience in reform movements taught me the hopelessness of reformation from without. It was like soldering up a thousand little holes in the bottom of a kettle.

For a hundred years men and women have been begging the industrial lords to spare the little children of the poor. Have they? Ask the census taker. Millions of them are the victims of the sweater—the dealer in human endurance. The cure for child labour is justice to the father, and justice to the father is his full share of the good things of life. As long as he has to pay tribute to a horde of non-producers, who have merely invested in his endurance, so long will he be unable to keep his child at school.

It is the daughters of the poor that become the victims of middle-class lust—Fantine is the daughter of a working man. She is multiplied by tens of thousands on the streets of great cities, selling her soul for a morsel of bread. We are hardened to that and we think we are meriting the approbation of angels when we start a rescue mission for her special class.

How pure in the sight of God is poor Fantine when compared with the cowards who will not smash the mill of which she is the mere grist. Just so long as there is a cash consideration in her life must capitalism bear the burden of her sin!

There were millions of men out of work last winter. The political parties took no notice. The leaders knew the minds of the electors. They knew that those millions of unemployed were too stupid to see any connection between government and work.

Mr. Taft was asked in the campaign what a workless, homeless man could do to find employment.

"God knows!" was his reply.

Out of this army of the unemployed the ranks of the criminals are reinforced, and the search for creature comforts recruits the ranks of women who are not fallen, but knocked down. The supreme function of the state is to make it easy for citizens to live in harmony with one another and hard to be out of joint.

Poverty is the mother curse of the ages. No man suffering from her withering, blighting touch can be in harmony with the best. Socialism tackles the master job of abolishing it. Not by any fantastic plan of redistribution but by giving to the creator all that he creates and to the social charges, pensioners and cripples an assurance of life without the stigma of pauperism.

Socialism asks for the application of science to the disease of poverty. Science has chained the lightning and harnessed the ether waves, it has filled the world with horseless carriages and is now filling the air with machines that fly like birds. The inventions of the last twenty years are modern miracles but the sunken millions of our fellowmen never speak through a telephone, never ride in an automobile, never send a telegram, never read good books, or see good plays! They make all these things. They make them all possible for others, but the enjoyment of them is beyond their wildest dreams!

The strength of the social chain cannot be greater than its weakest link.

Socialists are grouped around the thin places, the leakages, the weaknesses of democracy, and engross themselves in making them strong. The propaganda in times past wielded only a sword; now it has a trowel. Socialism is a positive force; it is leaven in the lump.

The party has a discipline which often hampers its own progress, but in the regimentation of an idea discipline can not be dispensed with. There are Socialists who see only the goal—are not willing to see anything else or less. There are others who see every step of the way and emphasize each step.

"What kind of a Socialist are you?" a rich man asked me the other day.

"Catalogue me with the worst!" I said, "for he who numbers himself with the transgressors is in direct apostolic succession."

The Socialists are the only people who seem to have the Bible idea of work. The scriptures make no provision for parasites. In the commonwealth of Israel everybody worked. When there was a departure from this ideal, came the prophet to speak for God and the divine order.

Socialists are doing for America what the prophets did for Israel thousands of years ago: we are pointing the way to simple and right living, to justice, brotherhood and religion. Socialism is not an ultimate conception of society: it only paves the way for a divine individualism. When the fear of hunger is vanished men will have a chance to be individuals.

Men striving all their lives to live—to merely live—have no time, no opportunity for a career.

Opposition to the democratic ideal of Socialism is based on ignorance. Opponents ask for a mechanical contrivance that will wind up and go like a clock. We are asked questions that only our great-grandchildren can answer. We are told by the good people that the ideal leaves out God. The British Parliament proclaimed that bloodhounds and scalping were "means that God and nature had given into its hand." A coal baron of Pennsylvania declares that God has entrusted a few men with untold wealth and consigned a multitude to degrading poverty—that kind of a God the democratic ideal does leave out. He is a God spun out of the fertile brain of the materialist. Critics of Socialism assume and herald their own patriotism, their devotion to law and order, but they are usually men who distrust any extension of the functions of the state not directly beneficial to their personal interests.

The Socialists of to-day know that their ideal can not be realized during their lifetime; they are people of vision; they are not saying, "Lord, Lord," but they are bringing in His Kingdom.

The early Socialists met their worst opposition in a corrupt church and their writings were coloured by the conflict. We are asked to stand sponsor for all they said. One might as well charge 20th century Christians with the horrors of the Inquisition!

We are not even willing to stand sponsor for their economics. Many of their prophecies are yet unfulfilled, the currents of thought and action are not flowing in the direction they anticipated, but the facts they faced have altered little and we moderns have made our own diagnosis, and we have decided on a remedy. The remedy is not revolution in the historic sense; it is not a cataclysm, it has no room for hatred. Its method is evolutionary; its watch-word is solidarity, its hope is regeneration.

The process levels up, not down. It has an upward look. It will abolish class struggles and divisions. It will usher in a reign of peace. Just at present it is a class struggle, a struggle on behalf of that social group of labourers on whose back are borne the world's heaviest burdens, but it is no more a labour movement than the emancipation of the slaves was a Negro movement.

The man who enunciated the doctrine of the class struggle belonged only by soul contact to the struggling class. The Socialist appeal is made directly to that class, for until it is awakened to its own peril and its own need little progress can be made.

Changes in society are like changes in human character: they must have their origin in the heart and work outward. It is at the heart of things we place our hope and the secret of the social passion to me is the knowledge that I am a cooeperator with God.

There comes over me occasionally an idea, as I look into the future, that the fact may become the mockery of the dream. Our temples are built with hands, they are fair to look upon even in the dream, but other builders will come and build on other foundations temples of the soul more fair, more enduring. Socialism the fact will have the higher individualism as the dream; but the conflict will be lifted from the sordid plane of the stomach to the realm of mind, heart, and soul.

The apologist of the status quo is of all things the most pitiful. If a politician, he has no dream; if a business man, he has no vision; if a preacher, he lives in a mausoleum of dead hopes. To these the ten commandments sum up the moral order of the universe. The eleventh commandment shares the fate of the seed that fell on stony ground.

The worst that a man can do against the democratic ideal is not to work for it. He might as well fight against the stars in their courses. What does it matter who brings it to pass or how it comes?

To work for it is the thing. To feel the thrill of a world-comradeship, a world-endeavour, to be in line with the workers and touch hands with men of all creeds, all classes, this is social joy, this is incentive for life!

"Then a man shall work and bethink him, and rejoice in the deeds of his hand, Nor yet come home in the even, too faint and weary to stand. Men in that time a-coming shall work and have no fear For to-morrow's lack of earning and the hunger-wolf a-near. Oh, strange, new wonderful justice! But for whom shall we gather the gain? For ourselves and for each of our fellows, and no hand shall labour in vain. Then all mine and all thine shall be ours and no more shall any man crave For riches that serve for nothing but to fetter a friend for a slave. And what wealth then shall be left us when none shall gather gold To buy his friend in the market and pinch and pine the sold? Nay, what save the lovely city and the little house on the hill, And the wastes and the woodland beauty and the happy fields we till, And the homes of ancient stories, the tombs of the mighty dead, And the wise men seeking out marvels and the poet's teaming head. And the painter's hand of wonder, and the marvellous fiddle-bow, And the banded choirs of music—all those that do and know. For all these shall be ours and all men's, nor shall any lack a share Of the toil and the gain of living in the days when the world grows fair."

In the very advent of my spiritual life I gravitated toward the church. There I added to my faith a theology. A theologian is a fighter—a doctrinaire. Every item of knowledge I got I sharpened into a weapon to confound the Catholics.

Before my nakedness was wholly covered I was shouting with my sect for "Queen and Constitution," and I could discuss the historic Episcopate before I could write my own name. Then came a hidebound orthodoxy. I measured life by a book and for every ill that flesh is heir to I had an "appropriate" text. I had a formula for the salvation of the race. I divided humanity into two camps—the goats and the sheep. I had a literal hell for one crowd and a beautiful heaven for the other. The logical result of this was a caste of good (saved) people for whom I became a sort of an ecclesiastical attorney. Naturally one outgrows such obsolescence. Such archaism has an antidote: it is an open-minded study of the life of Jesus. The result of such a study to me was a rediscovery of myself, that I think is what Jesus always does for an inquiring soul. He is the Supreme Individualist, the Master of Personality.

I did not ask him what to wear or how to vote. I did not even ask him what was moral or immoral, for these things change with time and place and circumstance.

I asked him the old eternal questions of life and death and immortality, of God and my neighbour, of sin and service. The answers stripped me of fear and gave me a scorn of consequences. The secret of Jesus is to find God in the soul of humanity. The cause of Jesus is the righting of world wrongs; the religion of Jesus the binding together of souls in the solidarity of the race.

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Three miles north of Peekskill and two miles east of the Hudson river lies this farm place that I have named Happy Hollow. It looks to me as if God had just taken a big handful of earth out from between these hills of Putnam County and made a shelter here for man and beast.



The Hollow is meadow-land through which runs a brook. Across the meadow in front of the house, rises almost perpendicularly a hill five hundred feet high. It is clothed now in autumnal glory. On the summit there are several bare patches of granite rock surrounded by tall dark green cedars that look like forest monks, from my study window. There are over two hundred acres, two-thirds of them woodland. Through the woods there are miles and miles of old lumber roads over which my predecessors have hauled lumber since the days of the Revolution.

"Is there a view of the Hudson River from any of these hills?" I asked when buying.

"Somewhere," said the owner, but she was not quite sure.

One day I was exploring the fastnesses and came upon a rock ledge standing a hundred feet high. I walked to the edge, pushed the branches of the elder bushes aside and out there in front of me lay that glorious valley and beyond the valley over the top of my house lay the mighty river like an unsheathed sword!

On that ledge I have built a platform of white birch and behind the platform a bungalow from the window of which I have a full view of the valley, the Westchester County hills and the river. I have named the ledge "Ascension Point" in memory of the valued friendships formed at the church on Fifth Avenue.

On the edge of the amphitheatre-shaped meadow, beside the old road that leads to the river, stands the farmhouse. It is sheltered from winter winds by the hills and from summer sun by elm, maple and walnut trees.

There is nothing to boast of in the arrangement; it was built quickly and not over-well. If the man who planned it had any more taste than a cow he must have expressed it on the building of the barn, not on the house. It had been heated with stoves for years, but I tore away the boards that covered the open fireplaces. I built a cistern on the hill and a cesspool down in the meadow, and between them, in a large room in the house, arranged a bathroom, a big bathroom, big enough to swing a cat around.

I am now knocking a wall down here and there, wiping some outbuildings off the map, and by degrees making it habitable throughout the year.

There is a five-acre orchard on the hill east of the house and through it runs a brook that can be turned to good account.

I had a population of twenty-five during the summer. They were encamped within a few hundred yards of each other in tents, overhauled barns, etc. We were all hand-picked Socialists—dreamers of dreams.

Of course we had to eat and as the raw-food fad did not appeal to us we had to have a fire on which to cook; and as there was an abundance of wood I instituted a wood pile!

To any one about to form a cooeperative community I can recommend this institution as an infinitely better gauge of human character than either the ten commandments or the royal eight-fold pathway! We didn't need much wood and there were plenty of men. We had good tools and—I was going to say, "wood to burn."

"It was jolly good fun, don't you know," to hack up about three sticks; then the woodcutter would have a story to tell or he "had something he had left undone for days." There was an atmosphere around the pile that affected us as the hookworm affects its victims in some Southern communities—we grew listless, dull, flaccid.

The influence was baneful, subtle. None of us ever confessed to being affected. It rather emphasized our idealism.

"In the future," said one comrade as he laid the axe down after his second stick, "wood will be cut by machinery!" We looked interested. "Yes," he said as he rolled a cigarette, "there will be a machine that will cut a cord a second!"

"Why don't you invent one?" we asked.

"How can one invent anything in this slave age?" he asked, as he glared at us between the curling puffs of smoke.

"That's true," we said, and piped down.

He went over to the well to get a drink. The housekeeper called for firewood. He smiled—he was a jolly good-natured chap.

"Keep cool, comrades," he said gently, "it'll be all the same in a thousand years!" The axe was blunt. He took it to the grindstone—a new patent, with a bicycle seat on it, and there he sat puffing and grinding until a neighbour's cow broke into our corn. He dropped the axe and went after the cow.

The housekeeper kept calling for wood. Another comrade was pressed into the killing ether and he smashed and hacked for five minutes; then he straightened himself up and, said, with a look of disgust on his face, "That's a mucker's job!"

"Who will be the muckers under Socialism?" I asked mildly.

"The dull, brainless clods who can do nothing else!" he said.

Just then our neighbour's hired man, a Russian muzik, passed with his ox-team. He wore a smock of his own making and a pair of shoes he had made of hickory bark.

"That," said the comrade at the block in a stage whisper, "is the type that will do the rough work. You couldn't wake that thing up with a plug of dynamite!"

We watched Michael and his ox-team as they lumbered lazily along the lane.



We had one poet in our midst—just one. He had lately completed a poem on the glories of our valley. Two men stooped to pick up the axe. Gaston and Alphonse like, they stooped together. As they did so the poet came along with a beaming face. "Stop!" he said; "listen, boys, listen."

We all straightened up, and stood at attention. He read:

"Not far from turmoil, strife, the mountain-vying waves Of life's antagonisms that delude the world— Amidst elysian valleys, slopes, majestic hills and caves That mark the path where ages wrought their wrath and hurled The crumbling sinews of the soil down to defeat, To linger in the depth as symbols that all power Is at the will of the Supreme—in this retreat, Filled with the chirping music of the nightly hour, And seeking rest from joyous toil, reward for which Is given by the thought that all is mine, that none Do rob, that love adds to each stroke its rich And sweetening cheer: In such rare world that I have won——"

The housekeeper rudely broke the spell!

"You comrades had better eat that poetry for dinner," she said.

We all looked and all understood—all save the poet. He looked aghast, thinking in Yiddish.

"Go on," somebody said, but the poet was a sensitive youth and could sense an atmosphere quicker than most of us.

"Wood," said the housekeeper, pointing at the few sticks lying around the block.

"Ah," exclaimed the poet as he took up the axe, "you shall have it, comrade—have it good and plenty."

He laid the poem in the white birch frame against a stone and proceeded. We moved away, every man to his own place.

In a community where the communers have to chop the fire-wood, canned salmon is a good standby.

That day we had salmon for dinner.

Just as a matter of encouragement I had the artist of the community print a Latin motto in fine Gothic characters:

"LABORARE EST ORARE"

This I tacked to the block at the woodpile. We had one orator in the community—just one.

Next morning, when the motto stared him in the face, he said: "Gee whiz! that's great—Labour is oratory!" It was a blow at a venture in the interpretation of Latin and instead of wood to cook the breakfast we had a speech on the labour of the orator!

The idea that I was giving land away got noised abroad, and a thousand letters of inquiry came to me. Most of the inquirers asked if I gave "deeds" to the land.

Others got an idea that I had a cooeperative colony and all they had to do was to come and plant themselves on the land. I never intended to organize a colony but I did invite some families to enjoy the summer on the farm.

I shall not ask as many next year for I have no talent as a manager and it takes more management than I imagined to look after even half a dozen families.

I had a number of parties from the city during the summer—the largest being from the Church of the Ascension and the Cosmopolitan Church. From Ascension Church came a young men's club on Decoration day. I introduced the boys to their first experience in archery.

The people from the Cosmopolitan Church came on a Sunday and I took them over the hill to call on my friends, the Franciscan monks, of the society of the Atonement. The Franciscans are my nearest neighbours on the north and on the south is my neighbour Mr. Epstein, a Russian Jewish farmer.

From the north we have had an intellectual and moral fellowship and from the south the comradeship of the soil.

To Mr. Epstein's bull we are indebted for the element of excitement—a very necessary element if one could get it in any sort of orderly arrangement.

The bull objected to Mr. Epstein interfering in what might be called his (the bull's) family affairs. He tossed his owner into the air three times one afternoon in my meadow and, but for the timely interference of a dog, would have gathered the farmer to his fathers. Several of our community saw the incident, but the vibrations had a more enervating effect than even those around the woodpile, and being armed only with the first law of nature they left the honours of the incident to the dog.

The following Sunday morning I saw a crowd in Mr. Epstein's orchard. It looked like a small county fair. A cow doctor had been imported to perform an operation on the bull. Mr. Epstein and his muzik, Michael, almost came to blows in trying to decide which of them should put the yoke on the bull's neck. No decent farmer will stand aloof in such a crisis: so I threw my coat off and offered my services. The patient made serious objections to me, but permitted the yoke to be adjusted by a day labourer named Harvey Outhouse.

This Holstein aristocrat had a terrible come-down. He used to stalk around as if he owned the earth, but now he is a common "hewer of wood and drawer of water" like ourselves.

I see him occasionally, now, pulling a heavy load of stones or hay past our place as meekly and quiet as the dull ox by his side, and involuntarily I exclaim: "How are the mighty fallen!"

I have a horse and a cow. The artist of the community, who remains as one of my family, took charge of the cow and the care of the horse was distributed among the rest of us. The house is made comfortable and snug for the winter and I have settled down here for the remainder of my life.

With my family are these two comrades, the artist and the mechanic, and we are in complete harmony in work and ideals. I have been a gypsy most of my life. I am to have a respite now. Here in this corner of Putnam County I have found my happy hills of rest. My work will always be in the city but here my home is to me and here I am to do my writing, thinking, living. In the solitude of these woods I am to find inspiration and quiet, here I am to dream my dreams and see my visions. I am forty-seven years of age now, but I have the health and vigour of a boy and I feel that for me life has just really begun. I have but one ambition: it is not wealth, or fame, or even rest. It is to be of service to my fellow-men; for that is my highest conception of service to God.

This memoir is but a catalogue of events—a series of milestones that I have passed. My life has been at times such a tempest and at other times such a calm, and between these extremes I have failed so often and my successes have been so phenomenal that the world would not believe a true recital of the facts, even though I were able to write them.

The conflicts of the soul, the scalding tears that bespeak the breaking heart, can not be reduced to print. Nevertheless, I hope that what I have written may be of encouragement to my fellow-travellers along the highway of life, especially men who mistakenly imagine they have been worsted in the fight.

There is a great truth in the doctrine of the economic interpretation of history but there is also truth, and a mighty truth, in the spiritual interpretation of life. The awakened human soul is indissolubly inknit with the warp and woof of things divine. It fights not alone, it is linked with God.

"No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him; there is always work And tools to work withal for those who will. And blessed are the horny hands of toil! The busy world shoves angrily aside The man who stands with arms akimbo set, Until occasion tells him what to do; And he who waits to have his task worked out— Shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled."



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