The mob spirit in man is one of those blind forces that so often lead to shipwreck. The mob-mind differs from the mind of reason. To tell them apart is like distinguishing mushrooms from toadstools. They look alike, but one means health and the other is poison. Life has taught me the difference between a movement and a mob. A movement is guided by logic, law and personal responsibility. A mob is guided by passion and denies responsibility.

I have seen meetings turned into mobs and mobs dissolved again into meetings. Swept by passion we willed a strike. That strike would have been just, and, yet, it would have ruined us. We were like a mob in which every man forgets his own responsibility, The mob mind would have rushed us to our own ruin. My speech called for individuals to stand up. That set each individual thinking: "If I stand up, that crazy guy will smash me." Each man became responsible again. The mob was gone, and all we had was individual men, each thinking for himself. That thinking then went on and each man reached a verdict based on logic, sense and duty. The meeting could no longer speak with one voice. It couldn't talk at all. It stammered. The action showed that each mind stood apart, alone. And yet the vote revealed that they were all together.

I have watched the long struggle of unionism in America and I know the law that has governed all its ups and downs. Wherever it was still a movement it has thrived; wherever it became a mob it fell. The one Big Union was a mob. No movement based on passion finally wins; no movement based on reason finally fails. Why then say life is a riddle and man helpless?

When I became Secretary of Labor, one of the first letters I received was from Mrs. Eli Baldwin whose coal oil I burned shamelessly, studying far into the night. Mrs. Eli Baldwin wrote from Atlanta, Indiana, where she now lives:

"When your roommates complained because your light kept them awake, I knew what you were doing. I knew that you were studying their problems for them, getting yourself an education so you would know how to get them better wages and better working conditions."

This letter pleased me more than I can tell. This kind old lady, now eighty-two, had faith in me and feels that her faith was justified. Now, then, can I believe that life is meaningless,—that there is no plan, and that all man's efforts are foredoomed to failure?



CHAPTER XXXIII. I MEET THE INDUSTRIAL CAPTAINS

Elwood, Indiana, was a small village that had been called Duck Creek Post-Office until the tin mill and other industries began making it into a city. In my capacity as president of the local union and head of the wage mill committee, I was put in personal contact with the heads of these great industrial enterprises. This was my first introduction to men of large affairs.

I approached them with the inborn thought that they must be some sort of human monsters. The communist books that Comrade Bannerman had given me taught me to believe that capitalists had no human feelings like ordinary mortals. I therefore expected to find the mill-boss as cunning as the fox and ape combined. I supposed that his word would be worthless as a pledge and would be given only for the purpose of tricking me. His manners I expected to be rude; he would shout at me and threaten me, hoping to take away my courage and send me back to my fellows beaten.

What I found, of course, was a self-possessed man, the model of courtesy and exactness. He differed from us men in one respect. His mind was complex instead of simplex. That is, he could think on two sides of a question at the same time. He had so trained his mind by much use of it that it was as nimble as the hands of a juggler who can keep several objects tossing in the air at the same time. We men were clumsy thinkers, and one thing at a time was all we could handle without fumbling it.

The great manufacturer never showed any emotion. He was never angry, domineering, sneering or insulting. He kept these emotions under control because they could do him no good, and because they would give pain to others. We fellows never hesitated to show how we felt. We would jibe one another, laugh at a fellow to his chagrin, and when we were angry bawl each other out unmercifully. For a fellow to smile when he was angry and not let the other fellow know it, was a trick we had not learned. That a bloodthirsty, cruel capitalist should be such a graceful fellow was a shock to me. I saw from the start that the communist picture of a capitalist as a bristling, snorting hog was the farthest thing from the truth. The picture was drawn by malice and not from a desire to tell the truth.

I learned that when Mr. Reid and his fellows gave their word they never broke it. It was hard to get a promise from them, but once they made a promise they always fulfilled it. If they said they would meet us at a certain hour, they were always there on the minute. They were patient, firm and reasonable, and they always treated us as their equals.

They always gave us the reasons for the stand they took. At first I doubted their sincerity, but in the end I learned that the reasons they cited were the true reasons. At first they thought that they would have to guard themselves against roguery and double-dealing on the part of the tin workers. This showed that they had had unpleasant experiences. For, men who knew their business as well as they did must surely have had some cause for their suspicion. Baseless suspicion is a trait of ignorant men, and these men were not ignorant. A burnt child dreads the fire.

I decided to take them as my models, to learn all their virtues and let them know that I was as square in my dealings with them as they were with me. I studied their business as thoroughly as I studied the case of the men. I soon got from them all the concessions we had demanded when we called the strike. It was fortunate for us that the strike was cancelled, for we kept our jobs and in due course got all the things that we were going to strike for.

In fact, I got so many concessions by dickering with those bosses that I made life a burden for them at times. I knew the cost of every different kind of plate the mill put out, and so I could demand a high rate of wages and support my demands with logic. My midnight studies had not been in vain. It all came back in cash to the working man; and yet it was my own pals who had rebuked me for being too bookish. This did not make me sour. I loved the fellows just the same, and when they showed their faith in me, it more than paid me back.

But I had learned this general rule: The average working man thinks mostly of the present. He leaves to students and to capitalists the safeguarding of his future.



CHAPTER XXXIV. SHIRTS FOR TIN ROLLERS

In summer the temperature in the tin mills is very high. It is as hot as the Fourth of July in Abyssinia. One day a philosophical fellow was talking religion to me. He said, "I don't believe in hell as a place where we boil forever in a lake of brimstone. It can't be as hot as that. My constitution never could stand it." His constitution stood up under the heat in the tin mill. So it is plain that the tin-mill temperature was somewhat less than the temperature of the Pit.

Outsiders began coming into the mills and giving us workers a chill by telling us that the heat was killing us. The men used to cool themselves down with a glass of beer at the close of the day. The social investigators told us that alcohol taken into the system at such a time would cause sunstroke. If beer was fatal, most of us figured that we had been dead for years and didn't know it. The effect of constant complaints was to demoralize us and make our work harder. I thought at first that these investigators were our friends and I gave them all the help I could. But instead of helping us, they only hurt us, and then I soured on their misapplied zeal. They were a species new to me that seemed to have sprung up in the hard times, just as cooties spring up in time of war. And like cooties, they attached themselves to us closer than a brother and yet they were no brothers of ours. The social investigators nibbled away at the men and kept them restless in their hours of ease. They sat at our boarding table and complained of the food. Corned beef and cabbage was one of our regular dishes. Mr. Investigator turned up his nose and said: "I never touch corned beef. If you knew as much about it as I do, you would insist on steaks or roast beef instead. You know what corned beef is, don't you?"

The men got mad and one fellow said: "Yes; it is dead cow. All meat is dead animals. Now give us a rest."

"Yes, it's all dead, but some of it is a whole lot deader than you imagine. I've been investigating the packing business, and I'll tell you all about corned beef and wienies." He then went on with a lot of sickening details and when he got through he found that the younger men had not eaten any dinner. The older men paid no attention to him and worked right ahead to the pie and toothpick stage, but the younger fellows had been euchred out of dinner and went back to work with wabbly steps and empty stomachs.

This convinced me that the investigator was a false alarm. If corned beef was poison, as he said, there wouldn't be a working man alive in America. But millions have eaten corned beef all their lives and have thrived on it. Things are never one tenth so bad as the agitators say. They merely take the heart out of men and send them back to work weakened and unhappy.

This fellow had a favorite joke which he sprang every meal. After sniffing at the soup and meat and cabbage he would exclaim: "Hebrews, 13-8." We thought it was some jibe about the fat pork, and after he had sprung it every day for a week we learned that he was hitting at the monotony of the diet. The verse in the Bible reads:

"Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever."

The fellow came into the mills and sympathized with us because we worked with our shirts off. To withstand the heat we stripped to the waist. We didn't want to wear a shirt. It would have clung to our flesh and hampered our moving muscles. We were freer and cooler without any cloth to smother us. It was a privilege to go shirtless. Adam enjoyed that blessing in the Garden of Eden. And when he sinned they punished him by putting a shirt, collar and necktie on him. And yet this theorist in the mills demanded working conditions that would let us wear shirts. Why? Who was asking for shirts? Only he, and he had a shirt. In their own words, the fellows would have enjoyed making him eat it.



CHAPTER XXXV. AN UPLIFTER RULED BY ENVY

The uplifter saw the men between heats drinking beer out of tin pails.

"Why do those big fine fellows drink beer," he asked me, "when they have plenty of water?"

I asked him: "Why don't you drink beer?"

"It makes me bilious," he replied. "If I drink one glass of beer every day for a week it upsets me and I get weak and dizzy."

"Do you think that one drink of beer a day will upset those fellows and make them dizzy?"

"Evidently not."

"Then when you oppose beer you are doing it to keep yourself from getting sick, aren't you? Do you really care a darn whether those fellows get sick at the stomach or not?"

"Certainly, I—"

"You don't want them to get sick at the stomach?"

"Then, why did you give that lecture on corned beef and make those strong fellows all sick at the stomach while you enjoyed your own dinner?"

"I didn't know it would disturb them so. Besides I wanted to keep them from getting sick later."

"Well, they prefer to have their health now, and wait for their sickness until later on. You are doing no man a favor by making him sick when he is feeling well. If God is willing for them to be well, and they want to be well, and the only thing that keeps them from being well is you, aren't you afraid that they will pile on to you and knock the daylights out of you?"

"I am really working for their good."

"Then you want their stomachs to have what agrees with them?"

"Certainly."

"Well, I'll tell you something, then. Water doesn't always agree with the stomach as well as beer does. You never worked at terrific muscular exertion handling white-hot iron in a mill like this. You haven't got the muscles to do it, and I doubt if you've got the heart. You can not know the condition a man is in when he hits his hardest lick here. But they know, and I know. Some of the men feel they can't drink water at that time. My pal tells me that his stomach rejects it; his throat seems to collapse as he gulps it. But beer he can drink and it eases him. The alcohol in beer is a blessing at that time. It soothes his laboring stomach until the water can get into his system and quench the man's thirst. Iron workers in the Old World have used malt beverages for generations. Why take away the other man's pleasure if it doesn't injure you? If it was deadly we would have been weakened in the course of generations. But look at the worker's body. It is four times as strong as yours." I saw an envious look in his eye.

"Of course I inherited my muscular build," I apologized, "and so I try to make the most of it in boasting to you fellows who haven't any muscle. But really I envy you. You have education and brain power. That's what I lack and that's what I want above all other things. I try to study at night and educate myself. But I haven't got any chance against you fellows who are born intellectual and have college training on top of it. So if I have talked sharp to you, my cussedness is really due to envy. I really want to be in your shoes, and I haven't got the brains for the job."

This worked.

"There is nothing about me for a fellow like you to envy," he said condescendingly. "I'm no better off than you are. In fact, I envy you fellows. You are never sick; you can eat and digest anything. I really envy you. You are built like a young Hercules and are never ashamed when you strip. When I put on a bathing suit I am embarrassed until I get out of sight in the water, because I'm all skin and bones. My arms and legs are the size of broomsticks."

"Oh, well," I said, "you're just as well off without the Hercules shape. You are always healthy."

"Healthy? What I call health, you fellows would regard as the last stages of decrepitude. A little beer and tobacco knocks me over. If I drank coffee and ate pie the way you do, I'd have to take morphine to get a night's sleep. You fellows need never envy us intellectuals. You can drink and smoke and eat anything, and all the poisons you take in are sweated out of your pores in this terrific labor, so that every night you come out as clean and lusty as a new-born child. I'd swap all my education in a minute for the mighty body and the healthy and lusty living that you enjoy. If you knew how much I envy you, you would never think of envying me."

He had blurted out the truth. It wasn't love of comrades that gave a motive to his life. It was envy that turned him inside out. Envy was the whole story, and he admitted it.



CHAPTER XXXVI. GROWLING FOR THE BOSSES' BLOOD

I thought I made a number of enemies among the men while I was head of the mill committee. When a man dissipated and afterward came back to work, trembling and weak, the boss would refuse to let him take up his tools, but would lay the man off for a few days. The man usually thought this a useless and cruel punishment; and to lose a few days' wages would make him all the poorer.

The man thus laid off would come to me and ask that I get him reinstated.

"Tell 'em you'll call a strike," the man would say. "Tell 'em that if they don't let me work, nobody will work."

I always refused to take such complaints to the office. I never approached the boss with a demand that I did not think was right. Some of the men thought we ought to be vindictive and take every opportunity to put a crimp in the business for the owners. I envied the owners (we've all got a touch of that in our system), because they were rich and were making profits. I knew what their profits averaged. By calling fussy little strikes often enough I could have kept the profits close to the zero mark. Thus the men would be making wages out of the business and the owners would be making nothing. But I declined to let my actions be governed by envy. The Ten Commandments forbid covetousness. The Golden Rule also forbade my practicing sabotage. And I have never tried to find a better guide than the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule. The test of my misconduct would have come when, having cleverly destroyed their profits, I found them quitting in discouragement, closing up the business and throwing us all out of our jobs for keeps.

I tried to point out these things to the men. Some of them felt as I did about it. Others couldn't see it. So I learned darn early in life that you can't reform 'em all.

I used to say to the complaining man:

"Look here, Bill; you're in no shape to work. Go home and lie down for a couple of days. You wouldn't last here two hours in your present shaky condition. You'd pinch the rolls with your tongs and probably get your neck broke. That's why they won't let you work. You can't work. So back to your bed, Bill, we will not call them out to-day."

Bill usually went away cursing me as the friend of the "plutes" and the enemy of labor. "I'll get you yet," he'd say, "you black-headed buzzard."

And so while I was making enemies among many of the men who thought I wasn't standing up for their rights, I was making myself even more unpopular with the owners by sticking up too firmly for the rights of the men. They told me they believed I knew as much about the tin plate business as any man in the trade. This knowledge would enable me to do better in the distributing end of the business, while as a worker I could only make the union wages that all the fellows were getting. This gave me an idea that has since become the dominating purpose of my life. Handicraft is the basis of the best schooling. By working with my hands as well as with my head I learned the actual cost of production of every kind of plate they put out. This was something that I could not have learned from books. Without such knowledge the business would have to be run partly on guesswork. With a thorough knowledge of the production end of the business I became a valuable man. The way was open for me to get out of the labor field and into the field of management.

But here is where my natural feeling of fraternity stepped in. I liked to be among the men. I felt at home there. I was only twenty-two, and salesmanship was a field I had never tried, except for a season when I sold Mark Twain's book, Following the Equator. There were plenty of men who had the knack of selling. My natural gift, if I had any, was to smooth the path for working men and help them solve their problems. I had learned that labor was the first step on the road to knowledge. It was the foundation of all true knowledge. I wanted to help the fellows take the next step. That step would be to learn how labor can enrich itself and do away with strikes and unemployment. That is a question that still fascinates me. I did not care to dodge it and become a manufacturer. I am the kind of fellow who, when he takes hold of a question, never lets go. The picture of Comrade Bannerman shaking his fist at the trainload of "plutes" lingered with me. I still heard the voice of the knock-kneed reformer who envied my husky limbs. The cry for bloody revolution was already in the air. When would the mob be started and what would it do? When Comrade Bannerman had robbed the rich and piled their corpses in a Caesar's column, would not the knock-kneed uplifter break my legs in making all men equal? These men were moved by envy and they lusted for blood. I faced the problem with a thirst for accurate knowledge, and my passion was not for bloodshed but for brotherhood.



CHAPTER XXXVII. FREE AND UNLIMITED COINAGE

It was during the panic in 1894 that the strike vote was defeated. We worked on until the first of July, 1896, when our agreement expired. By that time the tin mill was on its feet. The town of Elwood had grown from a country cross-roads to a city of the first class. As president of the union, I had steadily gained concessions for the workers. We were getting paid every two weeks. It is not practical to pay oftener in the tin trade. A man's work has to be measured and weighed, and the plate he rolls on Saturday can not be cut and measured in time for him to get his pay for it that week. For the pay envelope is handed to him Saturday noon, and his Saturday's rolling will not go through the cutter until Monday. He can not be paid for it until it is in shape to be measured. So we were satisfied to be paid twice a month.

But the mill was now making big profits and we demanded a raise in pay. The mill owners countered by refusing to "recognize" the union. They would deal with the men only as individuals. A strike was called, and the union won. We recovered our raise in pay and signed a new contract. The strike was off in September after two long months of idleness, and within a few days after the dust had settled we smelt the fireworks of political oratory. I am telling it now as it appeared to me then, and of course I beg the indulgence of those concerned.

Bryan, the bearcat of the Nebraska ranches, had roared with his ears back, and the land was in a tumult. "Coin's Financial School" had already taught the people that the "gold-bugs" owned the country and that the people could save themselves from eternal serfdom only by changing the color of their money. Bryan told the westerners that the East was the "enemy's country" and that the gold standard was a game by which the East was robbing the West, and the only way the people of the West could save themselves was to move East and clip bonds or else change the color of the money!

This is the way it looked to me as a working man, and I hope my good friend Bryan will pardon me for writing of his "great paramount issue" in a joking way. For after all it was a joke, a harmless joke—because we didn't adopt it. I got excited by the threatened "remedy" and went into politics. While the tin trade was on strike, crazy propagandists from everywhere poured into Elwood and began teaching the men bi-metalism, communism, bolshevism and anarchy. A communist propagandist is like a disease germ; he doesn't belong in healthy bodies. If he gets in he can't increase and is soon thrown out again. But let a strike weaken the body of workers, and the germs swarm in and start their scarlet fever.

As soon as the strike was won, I threw myself into the task of combatting the rising tide of class hatred led by Bryan, representing agrarians in a fight against bankers and industrialists. I was chairman of the mill workers' Sound Money Club. Bryan was running for president on a platform declaring that the laboring man should "not be crucified upon a cross of gold." No laboring man wanted to be. I was on the same side of the fence with Bryan when it came to the crucifixion question, but on the opposite side of the fence regarding the gold question. Of course I knew little about finance, and could not answer the Nebraskan. But had he advocated the free and unlimited coinage of pig-iron I could have talked him into a gasping hysteria. For, we mill fellows figured that this was exactly what Bryan's money theory amounted to. His farmer friends had borrowed gold money from the bankers, spent it in drought years plowing land that produced nothing, and then found themselves unable to pay it back. They wanted to call silver and paper cash and pay the debt with this new kind of money. He wanted a money system by which a farmer could borrow money to put in his crop, then having failed to raise a crop (I have mentioned the great drought years) could yet pay back the money. But no farming nation can suffer great crop losses without being set back financially and starved to where it hurts. You've got to figure God's laws into your human calculations.

"Bryan might as well try to dodge the hungry days by advocating the free and unlimited coinage of tomato cans," is the way one of the fellows put it; "then every man could borrow a dollar and buy a can of tomatoes. After eating the tomatoes he could coin the can into a dollar and buy another can of tomatoes. And so on until he got too old to eat, and then he could use the last dollar from the tin can in paying back the banker." Schemes like that are all right for orators and agitators who make their living with words. But farmers and iron workers know what it is that turns clods into corn and what makes the iron wheels that bear it to market. It is muscle applied with the favor of God.

Without labor, no crops. Without rain, no crops. It was world-wide crop failures that finally brought the lean years of the nineties. The return of big crops was already reviving the sick world. It rejected the radicals' "remedy" and next year it was well. Had we taken that wrong medicine in the dark it would have killed us. Thirty years later Russia let them shoot that medicine into her arm and it paralyzed her. The rain falls upon her fields and the soil is rich, but it brings forth no harvest and the people starve.

Russia has had famines before, but they were acts of God. The rain failed and there was no harvest. Their present famine is an act of man. Labor ceased. And the ensuing hunger was man's own fault. Nations that think labor is a curse, and adopt schemes to avoid labor, must perish for their folly.

In 1896 we came within an inch of adopting financial bolshevism. This taught me that a people are poorly schooled who can not tell the good from the bad. The wise heads knew what was good for the country. Hard work and good crops would cure our ills. But millions voted for a poison that would have destroyed us. From that time on I dreamed of a new kind of school, not the kind we had that turned out men to grope blindly between good and folly. But a school based on the fundamental facts of life and labor, the need of food and housing, and the sweating skill that brings man most of his blessings. A school from which no man could come out ignorant. That school should teach the eternal facts, and he that denied the facts would then be known for a fool or a rogue—and not be thought a Messiah.

I love sentiment, and I believe in God. And I believe that facts are God's glorious handiwork. "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free." The man who shuns realities because they belittle him is on the wrong road; he is hopelessly lost from the beginning.



CHAPTER XXX VIII. THE EDITOR GETS MY GOAT

Madison county, Indiana, was a Democratic stronghold outside the mill towns, and a few farming townships. Free silver orators were telling the farmers that under a gold standard no factory could run. The farmers could see the smoke of the tin mills which had built a great city just beyond their corn-fields. The silver men explained that smoke as "a dummy factory set up by Mark Hanna with Wall Street money to make a smoke and fool the people into thinking that it was a real factory and that industry was reviving under a Republican tariff." The orators said the best proof that it was a sham mill lay in the fact that the plutocrats claimed it was a tin mill, while "everybody knows it is impossible to manufacture tin plate in America."

My method of getting votes for the tariff was to take young Democrats from the mill and transport them to Democratic rallies in the far corner of the county where they heard their Democratic orators saying that the mill was a sham put up to fool voters and that it was not manufacturing any tin. When the young Democrats heard such rot they turned against their party. They were farm boys who had been brought up in that county and had quit the farm and gone into the tin mill because they could earn twice as much making tin as they could farming. A worker at work is hard-headed enough to know that when an orator tells him he is not working and not earning any money, the orator is an ass. These lies about fake factories hurt the Democrats by turning all the mill Democrats into Republicans. This is the only method I have ever used in campaigning. The Republicans carried the town. When, two years later, I ran for city clerk, they passed around the rumor that I was a wild Welshman from a land where the tribes lived in caves and wore leather skirts and wooden shoes, and that I had had my first introduction to a pants-wearing people when I came to America. They said that I had not yet learned to speak English, could not spell my own name, and was unable to count above ten.

These charges printed in the opposition paper offered me my only chance for election. I went to all my meetings with a big slate. I asked my audience to call out numbers. I wrote down the figures and then did sums in arithmetic to prove that I could count. I would ask if there was a school-teacher in the audience (there was always one there). He would rise, and I would ask him to verify my calculations. I would also have him ask me to spell words. He would give me such words as "combustion," "garbage disposal," "bonded indebtedness" and so on. I would spell the words and write them on the slate. He would then ask me questions in history, geography and political economy. Then the school-teacher would turn to the crowd and say:

"Friends, I came to this meeting because I had read that Mr. Davis is an ignorant foreigner unfitted for the duties of city clerk. I find to my surprise that he is well informed. I am glad we came here and investigated, for we can all rest assured that if he is elected to the office, he is entirely capable of filling it."

I handled the money and kept the books for the union, and this work in addition to my campaign efforts wore me down at last. Two nights before the election I decided that I had small chance of winning. I was on the Republican ticket, and the Republicans had been in office four years and their administration had proved unfortunate. There had been rich pickings for contractors in that new and overgrown city, and the people blamed the Republicans and were determined on a change.

I was passing the office of the opposition editor late at night after canvassing for votes all day. I thought of the nasty slurs he had written about me and my whole ancestry. I had fought hard to educate myself and had been helpful to others. My self-respect revolted under this editor's malicious goading. I happened to see him in his front office, and on a sudden impulse, I went in, took hold of his collar, and gave him a good licking.

The next day he bawled me out worse than ever. He said I was not only a wild Welshman and a blockhead, but what is more deadly still, I was a gorilla and an assassin.

And the next day I was elected.



CHAPTER XXXIX. PUTTING JAZZ INTO THE CAMPAIGN

I will go back and relate more details of my race for office. Having won the nomination, I thrilled with pleasure and excitement, but I was at a loss as to how to begin my campaign for election. Should I hope for support among the white-collar classes in the "swell" end of town, among the merchants and mill owners or only in the quarter where the workers lived?

The first act of a candidate is to have cards printed and pass them out to every one he meets. My cards bore my name and my slogan: "Play the game square." I argued that the workers should take part in the city government. I quit the tin mill and went around making speeches. And as there were no movies, and the men had nothing to do evenings but listen to speeches, it was no trouble at all to find an audience. I learned that a politician or an orator has the same appetite for audiences that a drunkard has for gin. When is an orator not an orator? When he hasn't got an audience. I found that when a horse fell down on the street and a crowd gathered to pick it up, somebody began "addressing the gathering on the issues of the day."

Now I know why the cranks from everywhere swarm into any region where a strike is on. They are seeking audiences. They have no love for humanity except that portion of humanity which is forced to be an audience for their itching tongues. I have known rich Jawbone Janes to travel half across the continent to harangue a poor bunch of striking hunyaks. These daughters of luxury wanted one luxury that money could not buy. The luxury of chinning their drivel to an audience. You can't buy audiences as you buy orchids and furs. Accidents make audiences. When a horse falls down and a crowd gathers, he'll be up again and the crowd gone before a girl from Riverside Drive can come a hundred miles in a Pullman. But when the job falls down, the strike crowd sticks together for days. This gives the crack-brained lady opportunity to catch the Transcontinental limited and get there in time to pound their ears with her oratory. She prefers a foreign crowd that can not understand English; they are slower to balk on her. Not understanding what she says, it fails to irritate them greatly. I know of one radical rich girl who boasts she has spread the glad tidings to audiences of thousands representing every foreign language in America. She still hopes some time to catch an audience that understands her own language. That would be a little better fun, she thinks; but still the joy of talking is the main thing, so it matters little whether their audience understands. She wants her audiences to be alive, that's all; she doesn't care much what they're alive with.

When the worker comes to understand that these "leaders" from high society care nothing for him but only want a prominence for themselves and have no natural talents with which to earn that prominence, then the worker will get rid of that tribe forever. Bill Haywood lacked the qualities that made Sam Gompers a labor leader. Bill decided to be a leader without qualifying for it, and history tells the rest.

I circulated among the audiences that were listening to other candidates and waited for the men to express their opinions. I heard one stalwart old fellow declare he was going to vote for Jazz. "Jazz is the fellow we want for City Clerk," I heard him tell his comrades. I had never heard of Jazz in those days: Jazz was decidedly a dark horse. But the man was strong for him and wanted his friends to vote the same way.

There is a trick that was often used in small-town elections. When the "reform element" made a fight on the "old gang" it was customary for the gang to lie down and place the name of the new man on the ticket. The reformer thought the gang beaten and that his own election was sure, so he didn't make a hard campaign. But the gang quietly passed around word to scratch the name of the reformer and to write in the name of a gang candidate in the secrecy of the polling booth.

Was this trick being played on me? Were they now passing around the word to scratch me and write in the name of their friend, Jazz, who had not come out as a candidate before? I edged in closer to the man who was boosting Mr. Jazz for my job, and after listening for a while I learned that "Jazz Davis" was the man he was electioneering for. He caught sight of my face and said: "There he is now."

"My name isn't Jazz," I said. I handed him my card. It read:

JAS. J. DAVIS

"What is it then?" he asked.

I saw that I would lose a vote if I humiliated him. So I laughed and said: "Yep, I'm him. I was just kidding. I'm mighty glad to have your support. Have a cigar."

But I went away worried. My personal friends knew me as Jimmy. The men electioneered and handed cards to thought my name was Jazz. On the ballot my name would appear JAMES. Between "Jimmy," "Jim," "James" and "Jazz" my fellows would find lots of room for confusion. Every vote that I lost on that account would be due to my own carelessness.

It taught me the lesson of exactness. I never again put out any puzzling language, but tried to stick to words that could not be misunderstood.



CHAPTER XL

FATHER TOOK ME SERIOUSLY

There was an interval of nearly five months between the time of my election, which was in May, and the date of taking office in September. I decided to use this time to improve my qualifications for the job. I returned to the old home town of Sharon and took a course in a business college. Again I walked the old familiar paths where as a boy I had roamed the woods, fished the streams, brought the cows along the dusty road from pasture and blacked the boots of the traveling dudes at the hotel.

There is a great thrill for the young man who comes home with a heart beating high with triumph, to see the love and admiration in his parents' eyes. Father shook my hand and said. "You're a good boy, Jimmy, and I'm proud of you. I always knew you'd make your mark."

"I haven't made much of a mark, dad," I laughed. "City clerk isn't much. County recorder is what I'm aiming for." In fact, I had gone so far as to dream of being auditor of the state of Indiana.

A jolly old uncle who was there and who was looked on as the sage and wit of the Welsh settlement, began kidding me.

"From city clerk to county recorder is only a step, Jimmy," he said. "Next you'll be governor, and then president."

Father took it seriously.

"You'll never be president, lad," he said, "because you wasn't born in this country." He seemed to think that was the only reason. He turned to my uncle and explained regretfully: "Of all my boys, only one has got the full American birthright. My youngest boy, Will, is the only one that can be president."

"Well," said the jolly old uncle, "the rest of 'em can be government officers."

Even this joke father took as a sober possibility. I saw then the full reason why he came to America. He wanted to give his boys boundless opportunities. A humble man himself, he had made all his sacrifices to broaden the chances for his children. This was a lesson to me. I could not repay him. I could only resolve to follow his example, to stand for a square deal for children everywhere.

Mother was as pleased with my humble success as was father. When I sat down to the table she apologized for her cooking and said:

"After the fine food you have been eating in the big hotels, you will find our table pretty common."

"You're wrong, mother," I said. "The best food I ever had I got right here at your table. You've never lived in boarding-houses, but father has. He knows that it's a rough life, and they don't feed you on delicacies. Hotel cookery is not like the cookery in the Old World. Over there they make each dish as tasty as they can, and good eating is one of the main objects in life. But Americans don't like to eat. They begrudge the time they have to spend at the table. They get it over as soon as they can. They seem to take it like medicine; the worse the medicine tastes, the better it is for them. An egg is something that is pretty hard to spoil in the cooking. Yet some of these boarding-house cooks are such masters of the art that they can fix up a plate of steak, eggs and potatoes and make them all as tasteless as a chip of wood. I've had this kind of fare for the last few years, and getting back to your table is the best part of home-coming."

Father was still a puddler, and to show my appreciation of all he had done for me, I went into the mill every afternoon that summer and worked a heat or two for him while he went home and rested in the shade.

The workout did me good. It kept my body vigorous and cleared my brain so that my studies were easy for me, and I advanced with my education faster than ever before.

This proved to me that schooling should combine the book stuff with the shop work. Instead of interfering with each other, they help each other. The hand work makes the books seem more enjoyable.



CHAPTER XLI. A PAVING CONTRACTOR PUTS ME ON THE PAVING

I was the only Republican elected that year. But for this exception the Democrats would have made a clean sweep of the city. If the editor had not charged me with being illiterate I would neither have been nominated nor elected. When I appeared before audiences in the "swell end" of town and wrote my lessons on my little slate, I gained their sympathy. They believed in fair play. And I found I had not lost their support by thrashing the editor.

Nearly all of the mill workers in Elwood voted for me. I supposed that I had made many personal enemies among the men by refusing to take their grievances up with the bosses when I thought the men were wrong. But the election proved they were my friends after all. The confidence of my own fellows pleased me greatly. Later on, the men as a further token of their good will clubbed together and gave me a gold watch. This gave me greater joy, no doubt, than Napoleon felt when, with his own hand, he placed a gold crown upon his head.

When it came time to qualify and be sworn into office I found trouble. The Republican boss was disgruntled because only one Republican was elected while the Democrats got everything else. He wanted me to give up the office. "Let the tail go with the hide," he said. "Let 'em have it all." His idea was to give the Democrats a closed family circle, so that when temptation came along, they would feel safe in falling for it. He feared that a Republican in the house to watch them would scare them away from the bait. He wanted them to take bribes and be ruined by the scandal, and that would bring the Republicans back to power. It was a good enough way to "turn the rogues out" by first letting them become rogues, but my heart was not set on party success only. I believed in protecting the public. So I went ahead and got bondsmen to qualify me. But as often as I got men to sign my bond, the boss went them and got them off again. A firm of lawyers, Greenlee & Call, stood by me in my struggle to make my bond. These men were ten years older than I. I was twenty-five. They acted as godfathers to me. They gave me the use of their library, and throughout my term as city clerk I spent my nights poring over their law books. I became well grounded in municipal law and municipal finance. I was able to pay back their kindness some years later when C. M. Greenlee aspired to be judge of the Superior Court of Madison County. I went to the convention as a delegate and worked hard for Judge Greenlee until he was nominated, and elected.

The city administration of which I was a member let many contracts. As I said before, a cross-roads town had become a city and there were miles of paving and sewer to put in, and scores of public buildings to go up. Old Francis Harbit was the Democratic mayor, and he didn't intend that the contractors should graft on the city nor give boodle to the officials. I remember one stirring occasion. There was a big contract for sewers to be let, and if a certain bid should go through, the contractor would profit greatly. Big Jeff Rowley (I'll call him) was the grafting contractor who had ruined the Republican administration. He was six feet, two inches tall in his stocking feet. He had put in his sealed bid and then had approached everybody with his proposition. His overtures were scorned and he was told that we were not out for boodle but were "playing the game on the square" (that had been my campaign slogan). It finally dawned on the corrupt old bully that the lowest bid would get the contract. He then came into my office and took down his bid to revise it. It was such a big contract that he could not afford to lose it. I told him that if his bid was not back in time I would so note it.

Bids were to be opened that night and read by me before the mayor and council. I was familiar with every detail of the law governing municipal bonds and contract letting. We had advertised that bids must be filed before seven-thirty that evening. Big Jeff took down his bid at seven-fifteen and filed his new bid at seven forty-five; fifteen minutes after the legal time limit.

The council was in session and hundreds of citizens were there to protest against any more deals in letting contracts at exorbitant prices. I opened and read aloud the various bids, including that of the big boss, Jeff Rowley, adding that Jeff's bid had been filed too late to be legal.

"You lie!" he screamed. "You're a Welsh liar, and I'll kill you for this!" The threat was heard by the council and the citizens. But the man seemed so terrible that no one dared reprimand him.

A few moments later the city attorney sent down to the clerk's office for some blanks. Jeff was waiting behind a corner of the hall. He hit me a blow in the neck that knocked me four yards. It was the "rabbit blow" and he expected it to break my neck. The hard muscles that the puddling furnace put there saved my life. I sprang up, and he came after me again. I seized the big fellow by the ankles and threw him down. Then I battered his head against the floor until I was satisfied that he could do me no more harm. He went home and took to his bed.

He announced that when he got out he would charge me with assault. I went before the mayor and offered to plead guilty to such a charge. The mayor protested against it. He said I had done the right thing in protecting the honor of the city, and that the citizens would not permit my action to cost me money. The local banker took up a collection to pay my fine in case a fine should be assessed against me.

My salary as city clerk was forty dollars a month. My wages in the tin mill were seven dollars a day. A week in the mill would have brought me more than a month's pay in the city office. But I hoped the clerkship would lead to something better.

One incident that happened while I was city clerk I have already related. The city attorney almost sent a man to jail because he couldn't understand the lawyer's questions. I put the lawyer's language into simpler words, and the man then understood and quickly cleared himself of the charge against him. At another time, the mill owners petitioned for the vacation of an alley because they wanted to build a railroad switch there to give access to a loading-out station of the mill.

"I suppose," their representative told me, "that since this would be a favor to the mill, and you were opposed by the mill owners, you will hand it to us in this matter."

"Why should I?" I asked. "Don't you think you ought to have this alley?"

"Certainly we do, or we wouldn't have asked for it."

"Do you think the city needs the alley worse than you do?"

"No. It is an alley only on paper. There are no residences there and nobody needs the alley but us."

"But you think because I am a labor man and you are a mill owner, and you and I have had many hot fights over wage questions, that I will fight you on this just for spite?"

"Such things have been done."

"Well, I am not spiteful. Many a time I have made the men mad at me by being fair to you. Spite and malice should have no place in dealings between employer and employee. If you had a chance, would you give the men a dirty deal just for spite?"

"We're business men," he said. "And we never act through malice, but we often expect it from the other side."

"Well, don't expect it from me. As a city official my whole duty is to the city. If we give you that railroad switch it will help the mill and can't hurt the city. Without your mills there would be no city here, and all the alleys would be vacated, with grass growing in them. If I took advantage of my city job to oppress your mill business, I would be two kinds of a scoundrel, a public scoundrel and a private one. I favor the vacation of the alley and when the council meets next Wednesday I am sure they will do this for you."



CHAPTER XLII. THE EVERLASTING MORALIZER

I played the game fair throughout my term of office. I hate dishonesty instinctively. I like the approval of my own conscience and the approval of men. This is egotism, of course. I claim nothing else for it. I am no prophet. I do not claim to be inspired. The weaknesses that all flesh is heir to, I am not immune from. I write this story not to vindicate my own wit nor to point out new paths for human thought to follow. I am a follower of the old trails, an endorser of the old maxims. I merely add my voice to the thousands who have testified before me that the old truths are the only truths, and they are all the guidance that we need. I am an educator of the young, not an astounder of the old; and it is for the boys and girls who read my book that I thus point the morals that life's tale has taught me.

Had I proved unfaithful in my first office I could not have gone to higher offices. My opponents would have "had something on me." As secretary of labor, I am called on to settle strikes and to adjust disputes between employers and employee. I could do nothing if either side distrusted me. But since both sides believe me to be honest, they get right down to brass tacks and discuss the cases on their merits only. Sometimes the employees ask too much, sometimes the employers. When either side goes too far I feel free to oppose it.

I approach each problem not only from the economic but from the human angle. I took my guidance from the words of President Harding, when he said:

"The human element comes first. I want the employers to understand the hopes and yearnings of the workers, and I want the wage earners to understand the burdens and anxieties of the wage payers, and all of them must understand their obligations to the people and to the republic. Out of this understanding will come social justice which is so essential to the highest human happiness."

The Labor Department has been able to settle, after candid argument, thousands of disputes saving millions of dollars for workers and employers and relieving the public from the great loss and inconvenience that comes with strikes and industrial war. I have but one aim, and that is justice. I know but one policy, and that is honesty. I am slow to reach decisions. I must hear both sides. I want the facts, and all the facts. When all the facts are in my mind the arguing ends; the judgment begins. I judge by conscience and am guided by the Golden Rule. Decision comes, and it is as nearly right as God has given me power to see the right.

Out of four thousand disputes handled by the Department, three thousand six hundred were settled. These directly involved approximately three and one-half million workers and indirectly many others. At first seventy per cent. of the cases were strikes before conciliation was requested. Now, in a majority of the cases presented, strikes and lockouts are prevented or speedily adjusted through our efforts.

This was due to perfect candor in talking. Honest opinions were honestly set forth. Both sides took confidence in each other, and both sides accepted my suggestions, believing them sincere and fair. And so I say to the young men that honesty is the best policy because it is the only policy that wins. The communists tell the young that honesty is not the best policy. They say that the rich man teaches the poor to be honest so that the rich can do all the stealing. They say that the moral code is "dope" given by the strong to paralyze the weak and keep them down. It is not so. Honesty is the power that lifts men and nations up to greatness. It is a law of nature just as surely as gravity is a natural law. But one is physical nature and the other moral nature. A fool can see that physical laws are eternal and unbreakable. The wise can see that the moral law is just as powerful and as everlasting.

Had I not won the people's confidence while I was city clerk of Elwood, Indiana, my public career would have ended there. But after four years in that office I aspired to be county recorder. The employers who once had feared that I would be unfair, now said, "Davis is the man for the job," and so I got their vote as well as the vote of the workers, and I was elected to that higher office by a great majority.



CHAPTER XLIII. FROM TIN WORKER TO SMALL CAPITALIST

During my term as county recorder at Anderson, Indiana, I saved money. I was unmarried and had no dissipations but books, and books cost little. I had lent money to several fellows who wanted to get a business education. By the year 1906, or ten years after I quit the mill, the money I had lent to men for their education in business colleges had all come back to me with interest. All my brothers had grown up and left home, and mother wrote that I ought not to send so much money to her as she had no use for it. Although unmarried, I had bought a house, and still had several thousand dollars of capital. So from time to time when some friend saw an opportunity to start a business in a small way, I backed him with a thousand dollars. My security in these cases was my knowledge of the man's character. Some of these ventures were in oil leases in which my chance of profits was good and they ranged from novelty manufacture down to weekly newspapers in which no great profit was possible. So many of the ventures thrived, that by the time I was forty I was rated as a prosperous young man. This gave me a great confidence in myself and in the institutions of this country. A land where a boy can enter the mills at eleven, learn two trades, acquire a sound business education and make a competence in his thirties is not such a bad country as the hot-headed Reds would have us believe. I was now launched on a business career and my investments were paying me much larger revenues than I could earn at my trade. It was a rule of the union that when a man ceased to work in the iron, steel or tin trades he forfeited his membership. However, the boys thought that Mahlon M. Garland—a puddler who went to Congress—and myself had done noteworthy service to the labor cause, and they passed a resolution permitting us to remain in the organization. Mr. Garland served six years in Congress and died during his term of office. I still carry my membership and pay my dues.

I was in France when the great Hindenburg offensive in the spring of 1916 overwhelmed the Allies. The French soldiers I met were worried and asked what word I brought them from America. I said: "I am an iron worker and can speak for the workers. Their hearts are in this cause. They will work as one man until all the iron in the mountains of America is hurled into the belly of the Huns."

The war was an iron war. The kaiser had the steel and the coal that move armies. France lacked these, and the Germans thought she was doomed. They cut the French railroads that would have brought the troops and munitions to defend Verdun. Then the Germans attacked this point in overwhelming numbers. But the French troops went to Verdun without the aid of railroads. The Germans did not dream that such a thing was possible. But America had given the world a new form of transportation, trains that run without rails and with-out coal. Motor-trucks, driven by gasoline, carried the troops and munitions to Verdun. And so, after all, the genius of America was there smiting the crown prince to his ruin long before the first American doughboy could set foot in France.

For years the names of oil king and iron master have been a hissing and a byword among the hot-heads in America. Yet oil king and iron master filled a world with motor lorries. The blessings these have brought to every man are more than he can measure. We mention this as one: They stopped the Germans at Verdun and saved our civilization. It was an iron war and our iron won.

My days were spent at forge and puddling furnace. The iron that I made is civilization's tools. I ride by night in metal bedrooms. I hear the bridges rumble underneath the wheels, and they are part of me. I see tall cities looking down from out the sky and know that I have given a rib to make those giants. I am a part of all I see, and life takes on an epic grandeur. I have done the best I could to build America.

If God has given it to the great captains to do more than the privates to make the plan and shout the order, shall I feel thankless for my share of glory? Shall I be envious and turn traitor and want to crucify the leaders that have blessed mankind?

I am content to occupy my secondary station, to do the things that I can do, and never to feel embittered because other men have gifts far surpassing mine.



CHAPTER XLIV. A CHANCE TO REALIZE A DREAM

On October 27, 1906, I joined the Loyal Order of Moose at Crawfordsville, Indiana, and a new chapter in my life began. The purpose of the Order was merely social, but its vast possibilities took my imagination by storm. For I believed that man's instinct for fraternity was a great reservoir of social energy which, if harnessed aright, could lift our civilization nearer to perfection.

On the night of my election and initiation to membership, the Supreme Lodge was in convention and they requested me to make a talk. I suggested a scheme to save the wastage of child life resulting from the death of parents and the scattering of their babies; and also to provide for the widows and aged. This problem had haunted me from boyhood when, as I have told, I was the bearer of death news to the widows and orphans of the mill town. I felt that the Loyal Order of Moose could cope with this problem. They elected me supreme organizer and put me in charge of the organization work, and after several years I showed so much zeal that the office of director general was created and I was put in full charge.

The Order was then nineteen years old, having been founded in St. Louis as chartered in 1888, in Louisville, Kentucky. It had thrived for a while and then dwindled. At the time I joined there were only two lodges surviving, with a total roll of some two hundred and forty-six members. I set to work with great enthusiasm, hoping to enroll a half million men. This would make the Order strong enough to insure a home and an education for all children left destitute by the death of members. In fancy I again beheld the vision of long trains of lodge men going to their yearly meeting, but this time, in a city of their own building, and over the gateway to this red-roofed town I saw the legend:

THE CITY OF HAPPY CHILDREN

But alas for dreams! Any one can have them, but their realization is not always possible. The men in the Moose before me had fought vainly for these high ideals. At the end of my first year as director general I had not made one-tenth the progress I had hoped for. Figuring on the rate of progress I was making, I saw that a lifetime would be too short to accomplish anything. It was then that I would have despaired, if my Welsh blood had not been so stubborn. I summoned new courage and went on with the work. At the end of the fourth year I began to see results from my preliminary efforts. The convention of 1910 showed that the membership was eighty thousand, distributed among three hundred and thirty-three lodges. It was resolved to start the actual work of founding an educational institution. A tax of two cents a week was laid on members and later increased to four cents. Land was bought, a building erected and in 1913 the school was dedicated by Thomas R. Marshall, Vice-President of the United States. There were eleven children established in the home. Soon the lodge membership increased enormously. Having passed the hundred thousand mark it swept on to the half million goal. The "Mooseheart idea," as we called it, had caught the imagination of the men. To-day the city of Mooseheart in the Fox River Valley, thirty-seven miles west of Chicago, is the home of more than a thousand fatherless children and one hundred and fifteen mothers who are there with their children, and several old men whose working days are over. The dream of the Moose has come true. In many ways the "City of Happy Childhood" is the most beautiful and the most wonderful city in the world.



CHAPTER XLV. THE DREAM COMES TRUE

What kind of school is Mooseheart? That can not be answered by making comparisons, for it is the only school of its kind. When the Moose committee met to decide what sort of school it would build, somebody suggested a normal school, a school to teach the young how to become teachers.

I objected. "The world is well supplied with teachers," I said. "Everybody wants to teach the other fellow what to do, but nobody cares to do it. Hand work will make a country rich and mouth work make it poor. All the speeches I have ever made have never added a dollar to the taxable value of America. But the tin and iron I wrought with my hands have helped make America the richest country in the world. The Indians were philosophers and orators; they could outtalk the white man every time. But the Indians had no houses and no clothes. They wouldn't work with their hands. A race that works with its hands has run the Indian off the earth. If we quit working now and try to live on philosophy, some race that still knows how to work will run us out of this country. The first law of civilized life is labor. Labor is the giver of all good things. Let us teach these orphans how to apply their labor, and after that all things will be added unto them."

And so we established a pre-vocational school where the young people are taught farming, carpentry, cement construction, blacksmithing, gas engine building and dozens of other fundamental trades that nourish our industrial life, a life that draws no nutriment from Greek or Latin. I am not opposed to literature and the classics. I make no war on the dead languages. The war that killed them did the business. Why should I come along and cut off their feet, when some one else has been there and cut off their heads? But as an educator I promote the industrial trades, because they educated and promoted me. I have done well in life, and if you ask me how I did it, I'm telling you. Industry first and literature afterward. And if you wish to see that kind of school in action, you can see it at Mooseheart, Illinois.

There is a school with more than a thousand students, boys and girls of various ages, ranging from one month to eighteen years. Some of the students were born there, the mother having been admitted with her youngsters soon after the loss of the father. Each lad will get an introduction to a dozen trades, and when he selects the one that fits him best, he will specialize in that and graduate at eighteen, prepared for life. This education is the gift of more than half a million foster fathers. The Moose are mostly working men, and so they equip their wards for industrial life, and then place them on the job.

A boy that knows how to build concrete houses will not have to sleep in haystacks. If every high-school boy in America was a carpenter and cement builder how long would the housing shortage last? "The birds of the air have their nests," says the Bible. And we know why they have them. Every bird knows how to build its nest. Nature teaches them their trade. But men must learn their trades in school. I visited a college once and saw how Greek was taught. They showed me a clay model of ancient Athens and pointed out the house that each philosopher and poet lived in thousands of years ago. "Where are the houses," I asked the graduates, "that you are going to live in to-morrow?" "Heaven only knows," they said. "We'll have to take our chances in the general scarcity; our fate is on the knees of the gods." The luck of the Mooseheart boy is not on the knees of the gods; it is in his own hands.

I visited the Latin department and heard of Rome's ancient grandeur. "The Romans," they told me, "were not philosophers, but builders. They built concrete roads to the ends of the earth. But their soldiers brought back malarial fever from Africa. It destroyed the builders and their secret perished with them. Eighty years ago concrete was rediscovered." I asked the students: "Do you know how to make concrete?" "I'll say we don't," they answered. And that's how much good their Latin education had done them.

The Mooseheart boys know how to make those concrete roads and how to build the motor-trucks that travel on them. "Transportation is civilization." We teach civilization at the Mooseheart school. We teach art, too. But what is art without civilization? The cave men were artists and drew pictures on their walls. But you can't eat pictures. There is a picture on every loaf of bread. You always slice the colored label off the loaf and eat the bread and throw the art away. The Russians quit work a few seasons ago, and now they are selling their art treasures cheap to the roughneck nations that stuck to the pick-ax and the plow. The moral is: Keep working and you'll get the chromo. This truth was taught at Mooseheart long before the Russians saw the point and awarded us their picture gallery.

What I want to emphasize is that we are not opposed to art and literature. All men want them; need them. We teach how to get them.



CHAPTER XLVI. THE MOOSEHEART IDEA

The majority of the Moose are men in the mechanical trades. But the primary trade, the one on which all others rest, is agriculture. The men knew this, and so they founded Mooseheart on the soil. It is an agricultural school. It occupies more than a thousand acres in the richest farming region of Illinois. The first thing the students learn is that all wealth comes out of the earth. The babies play in the meadows and learn the names of flowers and birds. The heritage of childhood is the out-of-doors. I heard of some children in the city who found a mouse and thought it was a rabbit. But when the city-born children come to Mooseheart they come into their own. They trap rabbits and woodchucks, fight bumblebees' nests, wade and fish in the creek and go boating and swimming in the river and the clear lake.

When a boy gets old enough to leave the kindergarten and start in the primary school he mixes agricultural studies with his books. First he plants a small garden and tends it. Then he is taught to raise chickens. Next he learns swine husbandry and then dairying and the handling of horses. The girls learn poultry-raising, butter-making, gardening, cooking, dressmaking and millinery.

After the boy has had a general course in all the branches of agriculture he is permitted to specialize in any one of them if he wants to. He can make an exhaustive study of grain farming, dairying, stock breeding, bee culture, horticulture and landscape gardening.

After this grounding in agriculture, which all the boys must have, the student gets an introduction to the mechanical trades. Then he may select a particular trade and specialize. The usual grammar-school and high-school courses are taught to all the students, also swimming and dancing and music, both vocal and instrumental. The kindergarten has a babies' band, and both the girls and boys have their own brass bands and orchestras.

Students are graduated when they are eighteen. Up to that time they are permitted to stay and learn as many trades as they can. Learning comes easy in such a school as Mooseheart, and many of the boys go out with two or more finished trades. Music is one of the trades that the boys double in. We have graduated many fine musicians, but none who didn't know a mechanical trade as well and, on top of it all, he knew how to run a farm. Such a boy can serve his country in peace or war. Before men can eat they have to have food, and he knows how to raise it. To enjoy their food they must have a house to live in, and he knows how to build it. After a house and food comes music. This lad can play a tune for the cabaret.

One of Mooseheart's earliest graduates made a high record in his academic studies and mastered the trade of cook, pastry cook, nurseryman, cement modeler, cornetist, saxophone player and landscape gardener. He was brilliant in all these lines and ready to make a living at any one of them. And if all these trades should fail, he was yet a scientific farmer and could go to the land anywhere and make it produce bigger crops than the untrained man who was born on the soil.

What other school in the world will give a boy at eighteen an equipment like that? I ask this, not to disparage the old-fashioned schools, but to call their attention to what the new are doing.



CHAPTER XLVII. LIFE'S PROBLEMS

Mooseheart is at once a farm, a school and a town. The boys help handle the crops and herds under the guidance of the experts who teach the classes in agriculture. For extra work in the fields the boys receive pay. They save their money to buy the tools of their trade. The bandsmen when they graduate go out with fine instruments bought with their own earnings during their school years. "Preparation for life" is the one aim of Mooseheart. Therefore at Mooseheart the boy or girl will encounter every problem that he will encounter in his struggle in the wider world. Nothing is done for him that he can do for himself. He is taught no false theories. But every fact of life is placed before him in due time. The first wealth of facts comes to these city-bred children when they are set down in the middle of this great, busy, beautiful farm. John Burrows says: "No race that does not take to the soil can long hold its country. In the struggle for survival it will lose its country to some incoming race that loves the soil." Already the Japanese farmers in California have shown that if we should let them in they would take this whole country in a few years. They drive the American farmer out because they have a passion for the soil, and they turn their whole families in to till it. What is the answer? Teach our young to love the soil and to till it well, or else an alien race will take away their heritage. The first lesson in Mooseheart is to till the soil.

But in addition to being a farm, Mooseheart is a town. The young folk live in cottages and do their own cooking and house-keeping. There are no great dormitories where hundreds sleep, and no vast dining-room where they march in to the goose-step. We are preparing them for a free life, and the only place they use the goose-step is in the penitentiary. Mooseheart is a town instead of an institution. All "institutionalism" is cast away. In each cottage is a group of boys or a group of girls living under family conditions. They are not all of the same age; some are big and some are little, and the big ones look after the little ones. Each cottage has its own kitchen and orders its own supplies from the general store. The girls' cottages have each a matron (sometimes a widow who with her little ones has been admitted to Mooseheart), and she advises the girls how to do the buying and the cooking.

In the boys' cottages there is a proctor to advise them and usually a woman cook. The boys who care to can learn cookery and household buying under her supervision. All the boys do their own dishwashing, sweeping and bed-making. Once three boys about fourteen years old went on strike because the proctor asked them to scrub the dining-room floor on their knees. They thought this work would degrade them, and they started toward the superintendent's office. On the way they met me and told me their troubles.

"I think it is all right for a young man to scrub a floor on his knees," I said. "I've done it for my mother many a time. I have been a bootblack. But it didn't hurt my character. You are going to the superintendent for his opinion. He is a Harvard man, but he worked his way through school and one of his jobs was bellboy in a hotel. Had he been too proud to work as a servant he would never have gotten the education that makes him head of this great school. Didn't you ever scrub a floor on your knees? You can see the dirt come out with the suds and you can watch the grain of the wood appear, where before it was hidden by dust and grease. If you never saw that, you have missed something that I have seen many a time. To know how to scrub a floor is as much a part of your education as to know how to sandpaper a floor and varnish it. We could hire this work done better than you can do it, but that wouldn't be giving you a chance to learn the work. Now I'm not telling you boys to go back and do the work if you don't want to. Use your own judgment. But fellows that balk on a job never go far. A balky man is like a balky horse, everybody gets rid of him as quickly as they can. A quitter is never given a good job. They always keep him in a place where it doesn't make any difference whether he quits or not."

The leader of the boys said: "Aw, piffle, cut it out. We might as well be scrubbing the floor as listening to this talk. Come on, fellows." He led them back, one of them protesting that he would never scrub a floor for any man. He went ahead and scrubbed the floor still saying that he wouldn't. That lad was weaker than the leader. He went wherever he was led. The leader was a boy who made his own decisions. He was ashamed of calling off the strike, but he did it because he felt the strike was wrong.

This is the Mooseheart idea of education. Every boy must use his own judgment. He faces every fact that he will face in life, and by the time he is eighteen his judgment is as ripe as that of the much older average man. The Mooseheart boys are not selected students. They come from the humblest families, from homes that have been wiped out early. But the training at Mooseheart is so well adapted to human needs that these orphans soon outstrip the children of the more fortunate classes. They become quick in initiative, sturdy in character and brilliant in scholarship. Visitors who come from boys' preparatory schools where the children of the rich are trained for college are amazed to find these sons of the working people so far ahead of the young aristocrats. The Mooseheart boys as a group have the others beaten in all the qualities that go to make a young man excellent. We have prepared them for life.



CHAPTER XLVIII. BUILDING A BETTER WORLD BY EDUCATION

And so the great dream of my life has been realized. In youth I saw the orphans of the worker scattered at a blow, little brothers and sisters doomed to a life of drudgery, and never to see one another again. No longer need such things be. The humblest worker can afford to join an association that guarantees a home and an education to his children. In Mooseheart the children are kept together. Family life goes on, and with it comes an education better than the rich man's son can buy.

As individuals, the Moose are not rich men, but in cooperation they are wealthy. They have a plant at Mooseheart now valued at five million dollars, and they provide a revenue of one million two hundred thousand a year to maintain and enlarge it. They received no endowment from state or nation. They wanted to protect their children and they found a way to do it. They based their system of education on the actual needs of men. They know what life is, for they have lived it. In mine and field and factory they had tasted the salty flavor of real things, and they built a school that has this flavor.

The war drove home a lesson that will forever make false education hateful to me. Education in the wrong direction can destroy a nation and wreck the happiness of the world. The German worker was taught that he would get rich, not by patient toil, but by taking by force the wealth that others had created.

On my return from France, where I had witnessed the Hindenburg drive into the heart of France, I addressed the Iron Workers in their national convention. "I am glad," I said, "that I was born an iron worker and not a Chancellor of Blood and Iron. For the iron I wrought has helped build up a civilization, while the German's 'Blood and Iron' has sought to destroy it.

"France stands knee-deep in her own blood while the iron of Germany is being hurled into her breast. Iron Workers of America, to you has God given the answer to the German thunderbolt. The iron of the republic shall beat down the iron of the kings. Wherever I walked behind the battle lines in France I told them I was an iron worker and I gave them this message for you:

"'The American iron worker will not fail you. We have been taught to believe in justice as the German believes in might. We will back up our soldiers with ships and guns until Kaiserisim is beaten. We will set the workers of Germany free—free from their foul belief in murder and in kings. And when we have bound up our wounds we will build a new world that shall be a freer world than man has ever known.'

"I have dedicated my life to this purpose. We will build this freer world by the right instruction of our young. Education is of two kinds, one kind is good and the other is poison. A poisonous education took but one generation to turn the German working men into a race of blood-letters. Wrong education tears a nation down. Right education will build it up. One generation of right education will remake the world. Who will furnish this new education? I, for one, will do my share, and more. My heart is in this one cause, and my whole life from now on shall be devoted to it.

"You will hear me speaking for it on every rostrum and in every schoolhouse in America. I have been handicapped in life because I had no education. But it is better to have no education than a false one, for I was left free to know the truth when I found it. I went into the mills when I should have been in school. As a working man I have helped get better conditions for the worker. Think how much more I could have done if I had had an education. Your leaders have done much for the iron workers because they could see farther than the common man. The worker with an education can see far. He can judge quickly and be guided rightly, for he has knowledge to guide him. I have knelt and prayed to God to direct me. Now I know He has answered my prayer. My mission is to bring to the poor man's boy the ample education that the rich man gives his son. Equal education will make men equal in the gaining of wealth. Education is Democracy.

"A French soldier lay dying on the battle-field, and a comrade kneeling by him asked what last word he wished carried to his wife and children. And the dying man said with his last breath: 'Tell them that I gave my body to the earth, I gave my heart to France and I gave my soul to God.'

"And so I say to you in the spirit of the French soldier that this, my body, I will give at last back to the iron earth, in whose deep mines and smoking metal shops my muscles took their form. This heart of mine that beats for liberty and equality I give—and give to its last beat—to the cause of equal education for our young. And my soul at last I shall render back unto my Maker knowing that I have served His cause as He has given me to see it."



CHAPTER XLIX. CONCLUSION

H. G. Wells has asked all scholars to unite in writing a "Bible of the New Education." I am no scholar, but if Wells will take suggestions from an iron puddler, I offer him these random thoughts.

This generation is rich because the preceding generation stored up lots of capital. We are living in the houses and using the railroads that our fathers built by working overtime.

When labor loafs on the job it makes itself poor. We are not building fast enough to keep ourselves housed. Were it not for the houses our fathers built this generation would be out-of-doors right now, with no roof but the sky.

No matter who owns the capital, capital works for everybody. Ford owns the flivver factory, but everybody owns the flivvers. The oil king owns the gasoline, but he has to tote it to the roadside where every one can get it. Equal division is the goal that capitalism constantly approaches. No man wants all the gasoline. He wants six gallons at a time, with a service station every few miles. Capital performs this service for him. Under "capitalism," so-called wealth is more equally divided than under any other system ever known.

Work is a blessing, not a curse. This country had the good luck to be settled by the hardest workers in the world. Their big production made us rich. If we slacken production we will soon be poor. The Indians owned everything in common. They did not work. And they were so poor that this whole continent would support less than two million of them. Thousands of Indians used to starve and freeze to death every hard winter.

The white man who doesn't want to work is sick. He needs a dose of medicine, not a dose of the millennium. The Bible says that in the sweat of his face man shall eat bread. When labor loafs, it injures labor first and capital last. For labor grows poor to-day while the capitalist gets poor to-morrow. But to-morrow never comes. The capitalist can turn laborer and raise himself a mess of pork and beans.

The laborer who does not turn capitalist and have a house and garden for his old age is lacking in foresight.

Men will never be equal. John L. Sullivan had many fights, and John always whipped the other fellow, or the other fellow whipped John. When all men are equal, every prize fight will end in a draw, and every batter will knock as many home runs as Babe Ruth.

"There is enough already created to supply everybody if it were equally divided." Yes. And there is enough ice at the North Pole to cool off the Sahara Desert if it were equally divided. There is enough water in the seven seas to flood the six continents if it were equally divided.

The time to quit work and divide the wealth is just two weeks before the end of the world. For the world's surplus of supplies is just two weeks ahead of starvation. Wheat is being harvested in one country or another every week in the year. And yet with all the hard work that men can do, they can not boost the world's supply of bread so as to increase our two weeks' lead on the wolf of famine. The wolf is ever behind us only two weeks away. And if we stumble for a moment, he gets nearer.

American machinery enabled the western farmer to raise and harvest as much wheat as twenty Russian peasants. In India where wheat is raised by hand, the labor of one family will only feed one family. But in the Dakotas, the labor of one man will deliver in Chicago enough flour to feed three hundred men a year. This increase in man's power to produce wheat caused the world's population to double itself since McCormack invented the reaper. The Chinese and Hindu millions who would have starved to death, have been fed, and that's why they're with us to-day. The natural limit of population is starvation. The more bread the more mouths, less bread, fewer people. Europe and the Orient reached the starvation limit before America was settled. A bad crop meant a famine, and a famine started a plague. This plague and famine would sweep off a third of the population, and the rest could then raise food enough to thrive on. England and Wales have had famines, Ireland has had famines, France has had famines, Russia has a deadly famine after every bad crop year, while in India and China famine is a chronic condition.

America has never had a famine. But we are not exempt from famine. In the year 1816, known as the year of "eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death," the crops failed throughout America because of freezing weather all summer long. Little or no food was raised and the Americans would have perished from famine had it not been for the wild meat in the woods. The people lived on deer and bear that winter. To-day if our food supply fails we can not live on venison. No country is by natural law exempt from famine. Our famine will come when we fill this country as thickly as men can stand; China and India have so filled themselves. Famine awaits us when we repeat their folly. That day will come soon unless we bar the unworthy from our gates.

But cold weather and crop failure are not the only things that could bring a famine in America. Slacking in production has the same effect as crop failure. A farmers' strike could bring a famine. A railroad strike could do the same. Many men advocate a combination farmers' strike and railroad strike to destroy capital (that is, to destroy the food supply). Don't get impatient, boys. You shall have your famine, if you will wait long enough. And the less work you do while you are waiting, the sooner it will come. Nature is never whipped. Nature will take a crack at you, if you leave an opening. The generation that went before you worked ten to fourteen hours a day; they battled face to face with a raw continent in their fight with Nature. And by their muscle they drove Nature back and she surrendered. She went down like crumpled Germany, and she signed a treaty. Hard were the treaty terms our fighting fathers made with Nature. They took an indemnity. She delivered to them more houses than her cyclones had destroyed, she furnished them millions of cattle in place of the wild deer and buffalo. She yielded up her coal regions to warm them in payment for the torture her winters had inflicted. By this treaty she gave them everything she had and promised to be good.

We are the inheritors of the good things of that peace treaty. We were born rich; we revel in the "reparations" that our fathers wrung from a conquered Nature. But Nature, like Germany, is not really whipped. If we relax, she will default on her payments. As long as Nature is not really whipped, her treaty is a scrap of paper. Nature, right now, is preparing for a come-back. She will not arm openly, for we would then arm to meet her. She is planning to attack us by a method that is new. She will weaken us by propaganda, and when we are helpless she will march over us at will.

Who then are the propagandists that Nature is using to undermine the race that conquered her? Communists, slackers, sick men and fools. The man who says let us "quit work and divide our cake and eat it" is opening the way for Nature to strike suddenly with a famine. The man who advocates "one big strike" to destroy our capital is the secret agent of starvation. Nature when up in arms can sweep men off like flies. She has always done it and she always will, unless man uses his intelligence and his cooperation to fight the evils in Nature and not to fight his fellow men.

"Capitalism," as the communists call it, is an imperfect system. But it is the only system that has banished famine. Under communism and feudalism there was hunger. Under capitalism the world has been able to feed twice as many mouths as could be fed before.

Capitalism found a world of wood and iron ore, and made it into a world of steel. How? It puddled the pig-iron until the dross was out, and the pure metal was bessemered into steel. Now the task is to purify men as we have purified metals. Men have dross in their nature. They break under civilization's load. A steel world is hopeless if men are pig-iron. There is greed and envy and malice in all of us. But also there is the real metal of brotherhood. Our task is to puddle out the impurities so that the true iron can be strong enough to hold our civilization up forever.

I have been a puddler of iron and I would be a puddler of men. Out of the best part of the iron I helped build a stronger world. Out of the best part of man's metal let us build a better society.

I have no new cure for the ills of humanity.

Life is a struggle, and rest is in the grave.

All nature is in commotion; there is wind and rain; and out of it comes seed harvest. The waters of the sea are poured in thunder wrack upon the hills and run in rivers back into the sea. The winds make weather, and weather profits man. When will man's turmoil cease, when will he find calm? I do not know. I only know that toil and struggle are sweet, and that life well lived is victory. And that calm is death.

Man must face an iron world, but he is iron to subdue it.

The lessons of my life were learned at the forge and I am grateful for my schooling.

"Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend, For the lesson thou hast taught! Thus at the flaming forge of Life Our fortunes must be wrought, Thus on its sounding anvil shaped Each burning deed and thought"

THE END