THE WORKERS




[Illustration: THE SENSE OF INFINITY IS HEIGHTENED BY THE FLOATING MIST.]




  THE WORKERS

  AN
  EXPERIMENT IN REALITY

  BY
  WALTER A. WYCKOFF
  ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL ECONOMY IN PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

  _THE WEST_


  NEW YORK
  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
  1909




  COPYRIGHT, 1898 BY
  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS


[Illustration]




                    CONTENTS


                                               PAGE
    CHAPTER I
  THE ARMY OF THE UNEMPLOYED                      1

    CHAPTER II
  LIVING BY ODD JOBS                             40

    CHAPTER III
  FINDING STEADY WORK                            86

    CHAPTER IV
  A HAND-TRUCKMAN IN A FACTORY                  147

    CHAPTER V
  AMONG THE REVOLUTIONARIES                     190

    CHAPTER VI
  A ROAD BUILDER ON THE WORLD’S FAIR GROUNDS    247

    CHAPTER VII
  FROM CHICAGO TO DENVER                        288

    CHAPTER VIII
  FROM DENVER TO THE PACIFIC                    338




                          LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


  THE SENSE OF INFINITY IS HEIGHTENED BY THE FLOATING MIST  Frontispiece

                                                             FACING PAGE
  “THAT MEETING IS NOT FAR,” HE IS SAYING,
  “AND IT’S WARM THERE. WON’T YOU GO?”                                16

  IN THE CORNER NEAR US ARE THREE MEN, SLOUCHING, LISTLESS, WEARY
  SPECIMENS OF THEIR KIND, WHO ARE PLAYING “COMRADES”                 24

  SHE IS FACING US NEAR AT HAND, HER HEAD FRAMED IN THE DARK
  UMBRELLA WHICH RESTS UPON HER SHOULDER                              30

  OVERFLOWING THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR OF THE FARTHEST PASSAGE UPON THE
  FLOOR OF THE MAIN CORRIDOR ARE THE SPRAWLING FIGURES OF MEN ASLEEP  36

  THE POLICE-STATION BREAKFAST                                        42

  “OUT YOU GO, NOW”                                                   50

  “WE’LL FEED, PARTNER, WE’LL FEED”                                   54

  ALL OF THEM WERE SHOUTING OATHS AND VIOLENT ABUSE                   60

  SHE DREW BACK AND LOOKED AT ME PERPLEXED                            66

  HE WAS PUTTING THE MEN THROUGH A CATECHISM RESPECTING THEIR
  NATIONALITIES, THEIR HOMES AND OCCUPATIONS, AND THEIR MOTIVES
  IN COMING TO CHICAGO                                                88

  I THINK THAT THE COOK THOROUGHLY ENJOYED FEEDING US                 94

  IN THE MIDST OF THE APPLAUSE WHICH MARKED THE PASSAGE OF THE
  RESOLUTION, SHE WAS ON HER FEET                                    106

  “DON’T YOU TOUCH IT,” SHE SAID, FIERCELY                           114

  “WE’VE GOT SOME GRUB, MA!” CRIED THE OLDER CHILD, IN A TONE OF
  SUCCESS, AS SHE RAN UP TO HER MOTHER WITH THE BASKET.
  “RILEY’S BARREL WAS FULL TO-NIGHT”                                 118

  WAITING FOR A JOB OUTSIDE THE FACTORY GATES                        130

  I WAS STRONG AND WARM IN THE WILD JOY OF THE LUST FOR BLOOD        136

  LOADING THE BOX-CARS UNDER CRIST’S GUIDANCE                        150

  IN THE FACTORY                                                     154

  CROWDS OF MEN STREAMING FROM EVERY DOOR AND PRESSING SWIFTLY
  THROUGH THE GATE                                                   160

  THE NOON HOUR                                                      164

  MRS. SCHULZ’S BOARDING-HOUSE                                       168

  NEVER ONCE DID I FAIL OF A FRIENDLY GREETING                       196

  HE HATED KINGS AND POTENTATES AND ALL GOVERNMENTAL AUTHORITY       214

  THE SOCIALIST MEETING                                              222

  THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE DOMESTIC SCENE WHICH MET US TO SUGGEST
  THE HOME OF A REVOLUTIONARY                                        232

  AN EVASION OF THE FACTORY SYSTEM OF PRODUCTION                     236

  RETURNING WORK FROM SWEAT SHOPS                                    240

  “DON’T TALK TO US ABOUT DISEASE;
  IT’S _BREAD_ WE’RE AFTER, _BREAD_!”                                246

  IT WAS A WELL-FED CROWD WHICH SAT SMOKING FOR A QUARTER OF AN
  HOUR OR MORE ON THE ROUGH EMBANKMENTS, OVERLOOKING THE
  AGRICULTURAL BUILDING BEFORE GOING BACK TO WORK                    256

  THE FOURTH OF JULY--“TWO TOWNSHIPS WERE TO PLAY EACH OTHER”        318

  PRICE COULD SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE,
  AND NOW AND THEN ONE JOINED US IN CAMP                             370




                     THE WORKERS




CHAPTER I

THE ARMY OF THE UNEMPLOYED


         ROOMS OF THE YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION, CHICAGO, ILL.
                                    Saturday Evening, December 5, 1891.

A new phase of my experiment is begun. Hitherto I have been in the open
country, and have found work with surprising readiness. Now I am in the
heart of a congested labor market, and I am learning, by experience,
what it is to look for work and fail to find it; to renew the search
under the spur of hunger and cold, and of the animal instinct of
self-preservation until any employment, no matter how low in the scale
of work, that would yield food and shelter, appears to you the very
Kingdom of Heaven; and if it could suffer violence, it would seem as
though the strength of your desire must take that kingdom by force.
But it remains impregnable to your attack, and, baffled and weakened,
you are thrust back upon yourself and held down remorselessly to the
cold, naked fact that you, who in all the universe are of supremest
importance to yourself, are yet of no importance to the universe. You
are a superfluous human being. For you there is no part in the play of
the world’s activity. There remains for you simply this alternative:
Have you the physical and moral qualities which fit you to survive, and
which will place you at last within the working of the large scheme of
things, or, lacking these qualities, does there await you inevitable
wreck under the onward rush of the world’s great moving life?

That, at all events, is pretty much as it appears to-night to Tom Clark
and me. Clark is my “partner,” and we are not in good luck nor in high
spirits. We each had a ten-cent breakfast this morning, but neither has
tasted food since, and to-night, after an exhausting search for work,
we must sleep in the station-house.

We are doing our best to pass the time in warmth and comfort until
midnight. We know better than to go to the station-house earlier than
that hour. Clark is in the corner at my side pretending to read a
newspaper, but really trying to disguise the fact that he is asleep.

An official who walks periodically through the reading-room, recalling
nodding figures to their senses, has twice caught Clark asleep, and has
threatened to put him out.

I shall be on the alert, and shall warn Clark of his next approach, for
after this place is closed we shall have long enough to wait in the
naked street before we can be sure of places in the larger corridor of
the station, where the crowding is less close and the air a degree less
foul than in the inner passage, where men are tightly packed over every
square foot of the paved floor.

We are tired and very hungry, and not a little discouraged; we should
be almost desperate but for one redeeming fact. The silver lining of
our cloud has appeared to-night in the form of falling snow. From the
murky clouds which all day have hung threateningly over the city,
a quiet, steady snow-fall has begun, and we shall be singularly
unfortunate in the morning if we can find no pavements to clean.

In the growing threat of snow we have encouraged each other with the
brightening prospect of a little work, and for quite half an hour
after nightfall we stood alternately before the windows of two cheap
restaurants in Madison Street, studying the square placards in the
windows on which the bills of fare are printed, and telling each other,
with nice discriminations between bulk and strengthening power of
food, what we shall choose to-morrow.

It is a little strange, when I think of it, the closeness of the
intimacy between Clark and me. We never saw each other until last
Wednesday evening, and we know little of each other’s past. But I
feel as though the ties that bound me to him had their roots far back
in our histories. Perhaps men come to know one another quickest and
best on a plane of life, where in the fellowship of destitution they
struggle for the primal needs and feel the keen sympathies which attest
the basal kinship of our common humanity. Ours are not intellectual
affinities--at least they are not consciously these--but we feel
shrewdly the community of hunger and cold and isolation, and we have
drawn strangely near to each other in this baffling struggle for a
social footing, and have tempered in our comradeship the biting cold
of the loneliness that haunts us on the outskirts of a crowded working
world.

       *       *       *       *       *

Early on last Wednesday morning, in the gray light of a cloudy day, I
began the last stage of the march to Chicago. A walk of something less
than thirty miles would take me to the heart of the city.

There is an unfailing inspiration in these early renewals of the
journey. Solid food and a night of unfathomable sleep have restored the
waste of tissue. I set out in the morning with a sense of boundless
freedom, with an opening day and the whole wide world before me, with
my heart leaping in the joy of living and in high expectancy of what
the day may hold of experience and of insight into the lives of my
fellow-men.

On this particular morning there is added fulness and freshness in that
inbreathing which gives the zest of life. Long had Chicago loomed large
to my imagination, and now it stood before me, its volumes of black
smoke mingling with the leaden sky in the northern horizon.

How much it had come to mean to me, this huge metropolis of the
shifting centre of our population! The unemployed were there, and I had
not seen them yet; hundreds lived there who are fiercely at war with
the existing state of things, and their speech was an unknown tongue to
me, and my conventional imagination could not compass the meaning of
their imaginings; and then the poor were there, the really destitute,
who always feel first and last of all the pressure upon the limits of
subsistence, and who in the grim clutch of starvation underbid one
another for the work of the sweaters, until the brain reels at the
knowledge of the incredible toil by which body and soul are kept
together. All this awaited me, the very core of the social problem
whose conditions I had set out to learn in the terms of concrete
experience.

Nor was I insensible to the charm of other novelties. I have been
pressing westward through a land unknown to me. Gradually I am
beginning to see the essential provinciality of a mind which knows the
Eastern seaboard, and has some measure of acquaintance with countries
and cities and with men from Ireland to Italy, but which is densely
ignorant of our own vast domain, and shrinks from all that lies beyond
Philadelphia as belonging to “the West,” which sums up the totality
of a frontier, where man and nature share a sympathetic wildness, and
sometimes vie in outbursts of lawless force. I have not yet reached
“the West” in any essential departure from the social and industrial
structure of the East. And from the new point of view, “the West”
recedes ever farther from my sight, until impatient desire sometimes
spurs me to a quicker journey, in the fear that the real West may have
faded from our map before I reach it, and I may miss the delight of
vital contact with the untamed frontier.

Moreover, I could but feel a student’s kindling interest in the larger
vision of this great centre of industrial life.--Its renaissance with
augmented vigor from the ashes of its earlier history.--The swelling
tide of its swarming people until the fifteen hundred thousand mark
is reached and passed, and the mounting waves of population roll in,
each with the strength of an army of fighting men.--The vastness of
its productive enterprises, where all the shrewd economies of modern
commerce reveal themselves, and where skill and organizing power and
the genius of initiative win their quick recognition and rewards, and
men of parts pass swiftly from the lowest to the highest places in the
scale of productive usefulness and power.--And then the splendid vigor
of its nobler living, its churches and public schools and libraries and
wise philanthropies, and its impatient hunger after art, which impels
it to lay eager, unrelenting hands upon the products of a score of
centuries, and, in a single day, to call them “mine.”

But I was fast nearing the goal of my desire, and the claims of
pressing needs were crowding out the visions of the morning. I had
passed through the wilderness by which the Pittsburg & Fort Wayne
Railroad enters the outskirts of Chicago. As far as the eye could reach
had stretched a dreary plain broken by the ridges of sand-dunes, among
which stood dwarfed oaks, and gnarled and stunted pines, and the
slender, graceful stems of white-barked birches, on whose twigs the
last brown leaves of autumn rustled in the winter wind. Upon my right I
saw at last the broad bosom of the lake, gleaming like burnished steel
under the threatening sky, and breaking into a line of inky blackness
where it lapped the pebbles on the beach.

Presently I learn that I am in South Chicago, and I note the converging
lines of railways that cross the streets on the level at every possible
angle, and the surface cable-cars, and the long line of blast-furnaces
by the lake, and elevators here and there, and huge factories, and the
myriad homes of workingmen. It is all a blackened chaos to my eyes,
rude and crude and raw, and I wonder that orderly commerce can flow
through channels so confused.

But the streets are soon more regular, and for some time I have
been checking off, by their decreasing numerals, the approach to my
journey’s end. I am in the midst of a seemingly endless suburban
region. There are wide stretches of open prairie, cut through by city
streets; there are city buildings of brick and stone standing alone,
or in groups of twos and threes, stark and appealing in their lonely
waiting for flanking neighbors; and there are comfortable wooden
cottages set with an air of rural seclusion among trees, and having
lawns and garden areas about them; and then there are whole squares
built up like the _nuclei_ of new communities with conventional
three-storied dwellings, and the varied shops of local retail trade,
and abundant saloons.

Early in the afternoon I stop to rest on the platform of the Woodlawn
station of the Illinois Central Railway. For some time I have had
glimpses within a highly boarded enclosure of towering iron frames,
with their graceful, sweeping arches meeting at dizzy heights, and
appearing like the fragmentary skeletons of mammoths mounted in an open
paleontological museum.

The suburban trains are rushing in and out of the station with nearly
the frequency of elevated trains in New York, and not far away are
lines of cable-cars, where a five-cent fare would take me, in a few
minutes, over the weary miles which intervene to the business portion
of the town. But I have not one cent, and much less five, and if I had
so much as that it would go for food, for I am tired, it is true, but I
am much hungrier than tired.

There is a hopeful prospect in the air of immense activity in this
neighborhood. I have easily recognized the vast enclosure beyond as
Jackson Park, and the steel skeletons as the frames of the exposition
buildings. Thousands of men are at work there, and the growing volume
of the enterprise may furnish a ready chance of employment. I am but a
few steps from the Sixty-third Street entrance, and, in my ignorance, I
am soon pressing through, when a gate-keeper challenges me, civilly:

“Let me see your ticket.”

“I have no ticket,” I reply.

He is roused in an instant, and he steps threateningly toward me, his
voice deepening in anger.

“Get out of this, then, you d---- hobo, or I’ll put you out!”

At the gate I stand my ground in the right of a citizen and explain
that I am looking for work, and am hopeful of a job from one of the
bosses.

“This ain’t no time to see a boss,” is his retort; “they’re all busy.
If we let you fellows in here we’d be lousy with hoboes in an hour.
Come at seven in the morning, if you like, and take your chances with
the others. Only my private tip to you is that you ain’t got no chance,
not yet.”

Not far away there are many new buildings going up, huge, unlovely
shells of brick that even at this stage tell plainly their struggles
with the purely utilitarian problem of a maximum of room accommodation
at a minimum of cost. I walk toward the nearest one, pondering,
the while, the meaning of the word _hobo_, new to me, and having an
uncomfortable feeling that, for the first time, I have been taken, not
for an unemployed laborer in honest search of work, but for one of the
professionally idle.

It has begun to rain, a dreary, sopping drizzle, half mist, half
melting snow, heavy with the soot of the upper air, and it clings
tenaciously, until my threadbare outer coat is twice its normal weight,
and my leaking boots pump the slimy pavement water at every step.

For two hours or more I go from one contractor to another, among the
new buildings, asking work. The interviews are short and decisive.
The typical boss is he who is moving anxious-eyed among his men with
attention fixed upon some detail. He hears without heeding my request,
and he shouts an order before he turns to me with an imperative “No, I
don’t want you!” and sometimes an added curse.

“I guess you are the fiftieth man that has asked me for a job to-day,”
said one boss, more communicative than the others. “I’m sorry for
you poor devils,” he added, with a searching look into my face, “but
there’s too many of you.”

My walk has carried me now through the coming Midway Plaisance and
past the grounds of the new Chicago University to the outskirts of
a park. I enter there with a feeling of relief, for I am soon out of
the atmosphere of infinite employment where there is no work for me.
Here there are open lawns, with snow crystals clinging to the tender
turf, and trees of bewildering variety whose boughs are outstretched
in graceful benediction over winding walks and drives and the curving,
mossy banks of lakes.

When I emerge from this touch of nature and high art it is upon a
stately boulevard of double drives and quadruple rows of sturdy elms
which line the bridle-paths and wide pavements. Mile after mile I walk,
tired and hungry and wet, and quite lost in wonder. Is there in the
wide world a city street to match with this? Rising in a paradise of
landscape gardening it stretches its majestic length like the broad
sweep of another _Champs Elysees_, flanked by palaces of uncounted cost
and unimagined horror of architecture, opening here to a stretch of
wide prairie, and closing there to the front of a “block” of houses of
uncompromising Philistinism and decorations of “unchastened splendor,”
and reaching, at times, its native dignity in a setting of buildings
which tell the final truth of the elegance of simplicity.

It has grown dark when I enter Michigan Avenue, and again my way
stretches far before me, this time under converging lines of lights
that seem to meet at an almost infinite distance. The sense of infinity
is heightened by the floating mist, in which the nearer lights play
with an effect of orange halo about them, and the farther lamps shine
in an ever vaguer distance behind their clinging veils of fog.

Scarcely a soul is in the street. It is a residence quarter of much
wealth, and like all else that I have seen so far, of strangest
incongruities. Houses of lavish cost and shabbiest economy of taste, so
gorgeous that you can scarcely believe them private homes, give way, at
times, to lines of brown fronts precisely like those which in unvarying
uniformity of basement and “stoop” and four-storied façade, flank miles
of dreary side-streets in New York. These yield in turn to churches
and apartment-houses and hotels and clubs--all creating an atmosphere
of wealth and of social refinement, while almost interspersed with
them are homes of apparent poverty and certainly of gentility on the
ravelled edge of things. And bursting now through all this medley
is the clanging, rumbling rush of railway traffic. I can scarcely
believe my eyes at first, but under the frowning walls of a towering
armory I am held up by the downward sweep of the gates of a railway
crossing, on the dead level of the avenue, and am kept there until a
freight-train has crawled past its creaking length.

It all seems a meaningless chaos at the first, but soon I feel the
pulse of the life within it, a young life of glorious vigor and of
indomitable resolve to attain what it so strongly feels though vaguely
knows. And here and there I can see the promise of its fair fruition
in lines of strength and power and beauty, where the hand of some true
master has wrought a home for the abiding of good taste.

Soon there is an abrupt end of buildings on my right, and the land
fades away into an open plain, and from out the sleet-swept darkness
beyond comes faintly the sound of “crisping ripples on the beach.” I
know that I am at my journey’s end, for I have begun to catch glimpses
of Ossa-piled-on-Pelion structures which rise in graceless lines
into the black night. I come up all standing before one of these, a
veritable Palazzo Vecchio, huge, impenetrable, vast, bringing into this
New-World city something of the sense of time and density of the Piazza
della Signoria.

Here, too, the avenue is almost deserted, and I turn sharply under
the massive battlements of this Florentine palace, to where the glare
of many lights and the counter-currents of street-crowds attract me.
Across Wabash Avenue I pass on to State Street. My eye has just begun
to note the novelties of the scene when it falls upon the figure of a
young man. He stands in the middle of the pavement at the corner, and
swiftly hands printed slips of white paper among the moving crowd.
Many persons pass unheeding, but a few accept the proffered notice. I
take one, and I stop for a moment on the curb to read it. Its purport
as an invitation to attend a Gospel meeting has become clear to me,
when I find the young man at my side. He wears a heavy winter ulster
that reaches to his boot-tops, and its rolling collar is turned up
snugly about his ears. On his hands are dog-skin gloves, and the rays
of street-lights glisten in the myriad drops of half-frozen mist that
cling like heavy dew to the rough, woollen surface of his coat. I
must cut a figure standing there, wet and travel-stained, my teeth
chattering audibly in the cold night-air, and it is plainly my evident
fitness as a field for Christian work that has drawn to me the notice
of this young evangelist.

“That meeting is not far,” he is saying, “and it’s warm there. Won’t
you go?”

[Illustration: “THAT MEETING IS NOT FAR,” HE IS SAYING,
“AND IT’S WARM THERE. WON’T YOU GO?”]

“Thank you, I will,” is my ready reply, and then he politely points
the way down a side street on the left where, he says, a large
transparency over the door marks the entrance to the meeting-hall.

The place is crowded with men--workingmen many of them--and many are
plainly of that blear-eyed, bedraggled, cowering type which one soon
learns to distinguish from the workers. Men pass freely in and out with
no disturbance to the meeting, and watching my chance I soon slip into
a vacant seat near the great stove that burns red-hot half way up the
room. Ah, the luxury of the warmth and the undisputed right to sit in
restful comfort! Again and again, in the afternoon I had sat down on
the steps of some public building, but from every passing eye had come
a shot of questioning suspicion, and once a patrolling officer ordered
me to move on with a sharp reminder that “the step of a church was no
loafing-place.”

Deeper and deeper I sink into my seat. A warm, seductive ease enfolds
me. I dare not fall asleep for fear of being turned into the street.
And yet the very hint of going out again into the shelterless night
comes over me in the dim sense of fading consciousness as a thought so
grotesquely impossible that I nearly laugh aloud. Out from this warmth
and light and cover into the pitiless inhospitality of the open town?
Oh, no, that is beyond conceiving! And all the while I know--such is
the subtlety of our instinctive thinking--that it is the awful fear of
this that conquers now the overmastering sleep which woos me.

The men are singing lustily under inspiring leadership and to the
accompaniment of a cornet and harmonium. Short prayers are offered, and
fervent exhortations, interspersed with hymns, are made, and finally
the men are urged to “testify.”

I follow in vague anxiety the change of exercise, but, no clear idea
reaches me; for in full possession of my mind is the haunting fear
of a benediction which will send us out again. But while the men are
speaking in quick succession there begins to pierce to the benumbed
seat of thought a sense of something very living. Their speech, in
simplest, homeliest phrase, is of things most intimate and real. They
speak of life--their own--sunk to deepest degradation. They tell the
story of growing drunkenness and vice, of hope fast fading out of life,
of faith and honor and self-respect all gone, and at last the outer
dark wherein men live to feed their passions and blaspheme until they
dare to die, or death anticipates the courage of despair. And then the
purport of it all shines clear in what they have to tell of a Divine
hand reached out to them, of trembling hope and love reborn, of desire
after righteousness breathing anew in a prayer for help.

Now I am all vividly alive and keen, for standing straight not far from
where I sit, is a grand figure of a man. He is bronzed, deep-chested,
lithe, and in the setting of his shoulders there is splendid strength,
which shows again in the broad, clean-cut hands that quiver in their
grip upon the seat in front. He has the modest bearing of a gentleman,
and his unfaltering voice vibrates with a compelling sense of deep
sincerity.

“I haven’t any story different from what you’ve heard to-night, but
I, too, want to tell what God has done for me. When I got my growth I
went West, and turned cow-puncher. I was young, and I liked the life
and the men, and I went over pretty much all the western country, and
there ain’t any kind of devilment that cowboys get into that I didn’t
have a hand in. I never thought of God nor of my soul. I never cared.
I despised religion. I thought that I was strong and master of myself.
I drank and swore and gambled, and did worse, and it never troubled
me a bit. But a time came when I found that I wasn’t master. There
was something in me stronger than me, and that was the love of drink.
And, friends, that was the beginning of the end. I began to lose my
self-respect, and the end of it was that there ain’t a poor devil in
this town that is sunk any lower than what I was. You know what that
means. One night, a year and a half ago, I was walking through Harrison
Street. I was half-drunk on barrel-house whiskey, and all I was
thinking of was how I could get up pluck enough to kill myself. But I
stopped in a crowd around some Salvation Army people. A man older than
me was telling how he was helped by the power of God out of a life like
mine and made a man of again. I liked the way he had, for he seemed
straight. I waited for him, and he told me, all to myself, the story
of Christ’s power to save lost men, and how He lived and died to save
us. It seemed too good to be true. I’d known it in a way, but I never
knew it was meant for me. And right away when I began to see that there
was hope for me yet, that I could get back my self-respect, and be
master of myself, not in my own strength, which had failed me, but in
His strength, why, friends, my heart went right out to the Saviour in
a prayer for help. And what I want to say most of all is this, that in
all the hard fight that I’ve had since, in all the ups and downs of it,
He hasn’t failed me once. He’s made my life new to me, and I love Him
from my heart, and I know that in His strength I will gain the victory
at last. Friends, what the Bible tells us about His ‘saving us from our
sins’ is true.”

He sits down, and a hymn is given out and sung, but the truth which
has found lodgement in our hearts is the living truth of a human life
reclaimed. We have listened to the story of the prodigal from his own
lips. We have heard again the cosmic parable of wandering and return;
the mystery of creation, and fall, and re-creation by a power divine;
the great, irrefutable witness to the Truth in the history of a lost
soul come to itself and returning to the Father’s house.

In the midst of the singing the leader walks quietly down the aisle to
the rear. Two ladies are there struggling in a vain effort to quiet an
old man. They have come to help in the conduct of the service, and the
old man has increasingly claimed their care, for he is drunk and is
growing violent. I have noticed him in his restless movements. Upon his
stooping figure he wears an old army coat and cape that are dripping
with the rain. His gray mustache and beard are long and matted, and
stained all round his mouth with the deep brown of tobacco-juice. His
unkempt hair falls in frowsy masses about his ears, and his lustreless
eyes, inflamed and expressionless, bulge from their swollen sockets.

In an instant the leader’s strong hand is upon him, and with no
commotion above the sound of song the old man is soon without the hall,
and the leader back in his place again singing as heartily as ever.

When the meeting ends the crowd moves slowly and listlessly toward
the door, as though its prevailing mood were aimless beyond the dull
necessity of passing the time. The fine rain and melting snow are still
falling through the mist. The men drift away singly or in groups of
twos and threes, under the flickering lights, their heads bent slightly
forward and their bare hands thrust into the side-pockets of their
trousers.

In the crush about the foot of the aisle a young man speaks to me:

“You are pretty wet, aren’t you?” he says, quietly, as the jam presses
him against me.

I see at a glance that he is far more respectable than I, and my first
mental attitude is one of hospitality to further evangelizing effort.
But I shift at once, for without waiting for a reply from me, he adds:

“It’s d---- tough to go out into that,” as he turns up the collar of
his light covert coat in the blast of piercing dampness which strikes
our faces through the open door.

“It is tough,” I agree, as I study his face. He is about thirty, I
should say, and almost six feet high, but of rather slender figure.
He is smooth-shaven, and an effect of pallor is heightened by yellow
hair and pale blue eyes, with dark arcs beneath them and a bluish tinge
about his mouth. Plainly he has been little exposed to the outer air,
but he is an habitual workman, as his hands attest unmistakably when he
lifts them to adjust his coat-collar.

“Ain’t you got no place to go to?” he asks.

“No.”

“No more have I,” he adds, laconically. And then, after a pause:

“When did you strike this town?”

“This evening.”

“Looking for a job?”

“Yes.”

“Same as me. What kind of a job?”

“Any kind that I can get.”

“Ain’t you got a trade?”

“No.”

“Well, I don’t believe you are any worse off for that here. I struck
the place yesterday and I ain’t never seen so many idle men and hoboes
in my life before. When the iron-works in Cleveland closed down,
that laid me off. I couldn’t get no job there, and so I beat my way
here. I had fifty cents in my clothes and that got me something to eat
yesterday and a bed last night, but I spent my last cent for grub this
noon. I’ve been to most every foundry in Chicago, I guess, but I ain’t
found any sign of a job yet. Where are you going to put in the night?”

“I don’t know, for I haven’t any money either.”

“I am going to the Harrison Street station and I’ll show you the way,
partner, if you like. My name is Clark, Thomas L. Clark,” he adds, with
a particularity which is another proof of his belonging to a higher
order of workingmen than I.

I tell him my name, but he evidently considers it not a serviceable
one, for he ignores it from the first, and consistently makes use of
“partner.”

We walk together in the direction of State Street, and Clark explains
to me that we must not go to the station until after midnight, a fact
which he had learned, and the reasons for it, from an acquaintance in a
cheap lodging-house where he had spent the night before.

At the corner I hold Clark for a moment until my eyes have caught the
character of the street. It is wide, with broad pavements on each
side, and is lined with great business houses of retail trade, the
“department store” the prevailing type. The shop-windows are ablaze
with electric lights, and gorgeous as to displays which are taking
on a holiday character. Whole fronts of some of the buildings are
fairly covered with temporary signs, painted in gigantic letters on
canvas stretched on wooden frames, and vying fiercely in strident
announcements of “sweeping reductions” and “moving,” and “bankrupt,”
and “fire sales.”

There is little noise upon the street aside from the almost constant
swishing rush of cable-cars and the irritating clangor of their gongs.
The crowds had wholly disappeared. There are a few pedestrians, who
hold their umbrellas close above their heads, and step briskly in
evident haste to get in out of the stormy night, and we pass men of
our own type who are drifting aimlessly, and now and then a stalwart
officer, well-booted and snug under his waterproof, with his arms
folded and his club held tight in the pressure of an armpit.

We are walking south along the west side of State Street. There is a
swift social decline here, for every door we pass is that of a saloon,
and above us hang frequent transparencies which advertise lodgings
at ten and fifteen cents, while across the way are the flaring lights
of a cheap theatre.

“We can get warm in here,” says Clark, abruptly, and he turns into a
doorway which opens on the street.

I follow him down a narrow passage whose faint light enters through a
stained-glass partition, which hems it in along the inner side-wall of
the building. Through a door at the end of the passage we enter a large
room brilliantly lighted, and I follow Clark to an iron stove at one
side in which a coal fire burns furiously. In the corner near us are
three men, slouching, listless, weary specimens of their kind, who are
playing “Comrades” with a gusto curiously out of keeping with their
looks of bored fatigue. One has a harp, another a violin, and the third
drums ceaselessly upon a piano of harsh, metallic tone.

[Illustration: IN THE CORNER NEAR US ARE THREE MEN, SLOUCHING,
LISTLESS, WEARY SPECIMENS OF THEIR KIND, WHO ARE PLAYING “COMRADES.”]

There are a dozen round tables in the room, and at these are seated
small groups of men and women drinking beer. Some of the men are
workmen, but most are loafers, not of the tramp but of the rough civic
type.

The women are young, most of them very young, and there is little
trace of beauty and almost none of hard brutality in any face among
them. They are simply commonplace. As a company the women lack the
hale robustness of the men. They are mostly little women, of slight
figures, and some add to this a transparency of skin and a feverish
brightness of eye which clearly mark the sure burning of consumption.
A few are cast in sturdier mould, and, with faces flushed with drink,
they look strong and healthy. All seem warmly dressed in cheap, worn
garments suited to the season, and there are many touches of finery and
some even of taste in their shabby winter hats. Each carries a leather
purse in her hand, or allows it to lie on the table before her with her
gloves. The hands of nearly all of them are bare, and you see at once
that they are large and coarse and very dirty.

Suddenly you note that the social atmosphere is one of strangest,
completest camaraderie. The conversation is the blasphemous, obscenest
gossip of degraded men that keeps the deal level of the ordinary
unrelieved by anger or by mirth, and varying only with the indifferent
interchange of men’s and women’s voices.

The naturalness and untrammelled social ease have blinded you for
a time to what you really see, and then the black reality reveals
itself in human degradation below which there is no depth--as though
lost, sexless souls were already met upon a common plane of deepest
knowledge of all evil. And yet in very truth they are living fellow
men and women, in whom have centred the strength of natural love and
hope, and centres still the constraining love of a Heavenly Father.

Clark is whispering in my ear:

“I guess we’d better get out of this. That waiter has his eye on us. In
a minute he’ll ask us for our orders.”

We pass again through the garish lights that flood the pavements before
saloons from whose inner chambers come the tinkling, brassy notes of
cheap music.

“Are they all like that place we’ve been in?” I ask.

“These dives, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“They are all the same. There are hundreds like them in this town,” he
answers.

Near the centre of what appears to be the chief business section of the
street Clark turns into a dark entry.

“Come up here,” he says to me over his shoulder.

“What is this?” I call after him from the threshold.

“Here’s where I slept last night,” he replies.

I follow up a flight of filthy wooden steps. Under the light of a
single gas-jet which burns faintly over the first landing, we turn to
a door at the right. Within is a sustained volume of men’s voices at
conversation pitch, and we enter at once upon a company of thirty or
forty men seated on wooden benches around a base-burner, or standing
in groups within the compass of its grateful warmth. The unmoving
air is thick with tobacco-smoke, and dense with pollution beyond all
but the suggesting power of words. An electric arc gleams from the
centre-ceiling, and sputters and hisses above the noise of mingled
speech. In the ghastly light the floor and walls are covered with black
shadows, sharply articulated, and revealing clearly through their
restless movements the ragged, unkempt condition of the men.

In one corner is an office quite like a ticket-booth at an athletic
field, and behind the narrow window stands a man with an open book
before him. His eyes wander ceaselessly over the company, and presently
he steps out into the open room. He is making straight for Clark and
me; his grease-stained, worn, black suit hanging loose about his wasted
figure, a something not unlike a small decanter-stopper glistening
on the bosom of his soiled, collarless, white shirt, his singularly
repulsive face growing clearer as he comes, the receding forehead
and small, weak, close-set piercing eyes, the high cheek-bones and
bristling black mustache over a drooping mouth stained with tobacco. He
walks straight up to Clark.

“You was here last night?” he asks with rising inflection and a German
accent.

“Yes,” says Clark. “I come up to-night to see a fellow I know,” he adds
of his own initiative.

“Do you see him?” says the clerk.

“No.”

“Was you and your pal going to take beds?”

“No.”

And in the awkward situation thus created, Clark and I go out once more
from the luxury of warmth and shelter.

The pavements are now in possession of crowds returning from the
theatres, and at certain crossings is a rush for cable-cars going
south. We turn down Quincy Street. It is still almost an hour before
midnight. Simultaneously we notice a deep, wide entry of a business
house, so deep that its inner corners are quite dry, and one of them is
fairly shielded from the wind. With a mutual impulse we turn in, and
crouch close together on the paved floor in the shade of the sheltered
corner.

We sit in perfect silence for a time. Our teeth have begun again to
chatter, and it is difficult to speak. Besides, we have nothing to say
beyond the wish that we were fed and warmed and sheltered, and this
is such a deepening longing to us both that we have begun to keep a
reverent silence about it.

Not half a score of people pass us as we crouch there through a quarter
of an hour or more, and none of them sees us, which is fortunate;
for one of the number is a policeman, who walks down the other side,
swinging his club in easy rhythm to his sauntering steps.

But now once more we feel the tension of anxious waiting, for again we
hear the sound of footsteps fast approaching. A lifted umbrella first
appears, and under it a woman’s dark skirt, all wet about the hem,
and clinging to her ankles as she walks and vainly tries to hold it
free from the sloppy pavement. Her eyes are on the ground, and she is
humming softly to herself, and we think that she is safely past, when
both of us start suddenly to a little cry, an exclamation of surprise:

“Oh-h-h! what in h-- are you boys doing there?” And the question has
in it a note of light-hearted merriment, as though the words had come
upon a wave of rippling laughter.

She is facing us near at hand, her head framed in the dark umbrella
which rests upon her shoulder, and her face in the full side-light
of a neighboring window. Out of large dark eyes she is looking straight
at us, and I mark at once the clean-cut pencilling of her eyebrows
against a skin of natural pallor, and the backward sweep of black hair
from a low forehead and about her ears. She is no beauty, but her mouth
is one of almost faultless drawing, large and sensitive and firm, with
a dimple at each corner, and her chin of perfect moulding fades into
the graceful lines of a well-rounded throat.

[Illustration: SHE IS FACING US NEAR AT HAND, HER HEAD FRAMED IN THE
DARK UMBRELLA WHICH RESTS UPON HER SHOULDER.]

I am struck dumb for the moment, but Clark is disturbed in no wise by
the situation, and is answering her in perfect calmness that we have
taken shelter there, and “won’t you go on,” he asks, “for you may
attract to us the notice of a cop.”

“He’s not coming this way yet awhile,” she retorted; “I met him just
now at the corner.”

They fall into easy, natural dialogue, and the girl soon learns that we
are newly come to Chicago seeking work, and hungry and shelterless we
are waiting for the right hour in which to go to the station-house.

“And why did you ever come to this God-condemned town?” she asks.
“There’s thousands of boys like you here, and no jobs for none of you.”

There is quick resentment in Clark’s sharp rejoinder:

“And why in h-- did _you_ come?” But the girl’s good-nature is
unruffled; you simply feel an instinctive tightening of her grip upon
herself as her figure straightens slightly to the reply:

“I come to hustle, sonny, and I guess this is as good a place to hustle
in as any. I’m in ---- hard luck to-night, for I ain’t made a cent, and
I met that cop on ---- Street. He’s spotted me. I had to go down into
my stocking and give him my last dollar to fix him, or else he’d have
run me in, and I’ve been up three times this week. The judge told me
he’d send me to the Bridewell next time.” She is a girl of eighteen,
or, perhaps, of twenty years.

In another moment I see her lift her young, unfaltering eyes to a
passing stranger, and in them, unashamed, is the nameless questioning
which takes surest hold on hell.

And now she has turned again, and one soiled, gloveless hand is
outstretched to us.

“I’m going, boys,” she says. “Good-night. You are in harder luck than
me, for I ain’t hungry and I’ve got a place to sleep, so you take this.
It ain’t much, but it’s all I’ve got. Good luck to you. Good-night.”

Men who have felt it never speak lightly of fear, nor are they ashamed
to own to it--the fear that is fear, when unprepared you face a sudden
danger whose measure you cannot know; when the scalp tightens with a
creeping movement and the hair lifts itself on end, and each muscle
stiffens in the cold of swift paralysis, while your brain throbs with
the sudden rush of hot blood. But there is a feeling beyond that--“when
the nerves prick and tingle and the heart is sick,” and the soul in
ineffable agony of doubt and fear cries through a black and Godless
void for some answer to the mystery of life.

A silver coin is glistening in Clark’s open palm.

“There’s two beers in this, partner, and a free lunch for both of us,”
he is saying. “Let’s go to a saloon.”

Five minutes later he leaves me in high indignation, with a “Stay,
then, and be damned!” and I feel some uncertainty about his coming back.

Soon I fall into the dreamless torpor which comes to relieve the
too-heavy hearted. But from out its stupor I waken sharply to quickest
sensibility. Quivering darts of pain are shooting swiftly through my
body from a burning centre in my thigh. A night watchman stands over
me, holding a dark lantern to my face. He has roused me with a brutal
kick. In my heart black murder reigns alone for a moment, and then I
remember what I am, and I limp into the street speechless under the
watchman’s curses.

I had misjudged Clark. I have not waited long when I see him walking
toward me. He is warmed and fed, and has soon forgot his earlier wrath
in eagerness to “do” the night watchman. From this, however, it is not
difficult to dissuade him on the ground of the weakness of our legal
status as compared with his.

We walk now toward Harrison Street, and as we enter it, there shines
high from out the darkness an illumined face of a clock with its hands
pointing to a few minutes past the hour of twelve. A freight-train is
drawing slowly into the station-yard, creaking and jolting with the
varying tug of a locomotive that pants deeply to a steady pull, and
then puffs hard in sudden spurts which send its wheels “racing” on the
icy rails. The train stands still with a sound of communicated bumping
which loses itself far down the yard, and then there come swarming from
the cars a score or two of tramps who have beaten their way into the
city. They know their ground, for silent and stooping in the wet they
make straight, as with a common impulse, to the station-house on the
corner.

“We’ll leave them go in first,” says Clark, “it’s all the better for
us,” and then we walk up and down before the plain brick building, with
the lights streaming from its basement and first-floor windows.

By a short flight of steps we finally enter a small passage which
opens into a large, square room. A few police officers and reporters
are standing about in casual conversation. One officer, with unerring
judgment of our need, beckons us his way, and, without a word, he
points us down the steps into the basement. A locked door of iron
grating blocks the way at the foot of the steps, and we stand there for
some minutes while a newly arrived prisoner is being registered and
searched. Behind a high desk sits a typical, robust officer who asks
questions and notes the answers in his book, and beside him, near at
hand, a matronly woman is sewing with an air of domesticity and entire
oblivion to her unusual surroundings, while near the prisoner before
the desk, stand two policemen who have “run him in.”

All these are in a wide corridor which extends east and west through
the depth of the building. In its south wall are some half dozen doors
of iron grating, each opening into a small passage at right angles to
the main corridor, and the cells range along the sides of these.

The prisoner has soon been disposed of. The officer on duty then
unlocks the door behind which we stand, and admits us before the desk.
The registrar looks up, an expression of irritation in his face.

“More men to spend the night?” he asks.

“Well, turn in,” he adds, with a jerk of his head to the left. “I’ve
got no more room for names. I guess I’ve entered two hundred lodgers
and more already to-night.”

Clark and I need no further directions. Overflowing through the open
door of the farthest passage upon the floor of the main corridor are
the sprawling figures of men asleep. We walk in among them.

[Illustration: OVERFLOWING THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR OF THE FARTHEST
PASSAGE UPON THE FLOOR OF THE MAIN CORRIDOR ARE THE SPRAWLING FIGURES
OF MEN ASLEEP.]

“If we ain’t never had ’em, I guess we’ll catch ’em to-night,” says
Clark, softly in my ear, and the words take on a sickening significance
as we enter an unventilated atmosphere of foulest pollution, and we
see more clearly the frowzy, ragged garments of unclean men, and have
glimpses here and there of caking filth upon a naked limb.

The wisdom of a late hour of retiring is at once apparent when we have
sight of the inner passage. Not a square foot of the dark, concrete
floor is visible. The space is packed with men all lying on their
right sides with their legs drawn up, and each man’s legs pressed close
in behind those of the man in front.

Clark draws from an inside pocket a roll of old newspapers, and hands
me one. We spread them on the pavement as a Mohammedan unrolls his mat
for prayers, and then we take off our boots and coats. Our soaked,
pulpy boots we fold in our jackets and use them as pillows, and we
soften our bed by spreading over the newspapers our outer coats, which
thus have a chance to dry in the warmth of the room and in that which
comes from our bodies. We need no covering in the steaming heat in
which we lie, and I can see at a glance that Clark and I are more
fortunate than most of the other men, for few of them have outer coats,
and in their threadbare, filthy garments they lie with nothing but
paper between them and the floor, their heads pillowed on their arms.

By no means are all of them asleep. In the thick air above their
reclining figures there is an unceasing murmur of low, gruff voices.
What words can fit the hellish quality of that strange converse? It
is not human, though it comes from living men; it has no humor though
it touches life most intimately; it knows hot hate and craving need
and blank indifference, but all these feelings speak alike a tongue
of utter blasphemy; and it is not prurient even, though it reeks with
coarse obscenity.

And in the men themselves, how widely severed from all things human
is the prevailing type!--Their bloated, unwashed flesh and unkempt
hair; their hideous ugliness of face, unreclaimed by marks of inner
strength and force, but revealing rather, in the relaxation of sleep,
a deepening of the lines of weakness, until you read in plainest
characters the paralysis of the will. And then there are the stealthy,
restless eyes of those who are awake, eyes set in faces which lack
utterly the strength of honest labor and even that of criminal wit.

But there are marked exceptions to the prevailing type, men like Clark,
sound and strong in flesh, and having about them the signs of habitual
decency, and their faces stamped with the open frankness which comes of
earning a living by honest work. Some of these are young immigrants,
newly come, most evidently, and I picture their rude awakenings from
golden dreams of a land of plenty.

Clark is fast asleep beside me, but I cannot sleep for gnawing hunger
and the dull pain of lying bruised and sore upon the hard, paved floor.

There is sudden, nervous movement near me. Looking up I see a man
seated straight, tugging frantically at his shirt, and swearing
viciously the while in muffled tones. In a moment he has torn the
garment off, and his crooked, bony fingers are passing swiftly over the
shrivelled skin of his old, lean body in search of his tormentors, and
his oaths come lisping from his toothless mouth. The men about him are
ordering him, with deepening curses, to lie down and keep still.

The former quiet soon returns, and in it I lie thinking of another
world I know, a world of men and women whose plane of life is removed
from this by all the distance of the infinite. Faith and love and
high resolve are there, the inspirers of true living, and courage
spurs to unflinching effort, and hope lights the way of unsuccess and
gives vision through the vale of sorrow and of death. And the common
intercourse is the perfect freedom which is bred of high allegiance to
inborn courtesy and honor.

What living link is there that joins these worlds together, and gives
vital meaning to the confirmation of brotherhood spoken in the divine
words of the Apostle: “We, being many, are one body in Christ, and
everyone members one of another?”

Pondering this mystery I fall asleep, and so ends my first day in the
army of the unemployed.




CHAPTER II

LIVING BY ODD JOBS


                                No. -- BLUE ISLAND AVENUE, CHICAGO,
                                      Saturday, December 19, 1891.

When life is lived in its simplest terms, one is brought to marvellous
intimacy with vital processes. And through this intimacy no disclosure
is more wonderful than that of nature’s quick response. Exhausted by
hard labor, until your muscles quiver in impotent loss of energy,
you sit down to eat and drink, and rise up to the play of a physical
revival wherein you are renewed by the mystery of intussusception,
and your responsive mood quickens to the tension of the involution
whence life’s energies flow new and fresh again. Another hour may bring
as great a change, and the full tide of your rising spirits may set
swiftly back. It is as though you were a little child once more, and
your moods obedient to little things.

When living is a daily struggle with the problems of what you shall eat
and what you shall drink, and wherewithal you shall be clothed, you
take no anxious thought for the morrow, quite content to let the morrow
take thought for the things of itself, for sufficient unto the day is
the evil thereof. Your heart will leap with hope at any brightening
of your lot, and will sink in deep despair when the way grows dark.
The road of your salvation is by the strait gate and the narrow way of
courage and persistent effort and provident foresight, and whence are
these to come to you whose courage is born of warmth and a square meal,
and whose despair comes with returning hunger? A world all bright with
hope can be had on the terms of heat and food, and the sense of these
can be induced for a nickel in a “barrel-house.”

When Clark and I awakened in the early morning, after our first night
in the station, the dull gray dawn was dimming the gas, and in the
lurid light we could see a writhing movement in the prostrate coiling
mass of reeking humanity about us. We had lost the feeling of hunger,
but a feverish thirst was burning to the roots of our tongues. We could
scarcely move for the pain of sore and stiffened muscles, and I thought
at first that my right leg was paralyzed from the night watchman’s
kick. Only a few hours before, we had entered the station-house from
the streets in eager willingness for any escape from their cold
exposure, and now with intensified desire we longed for the outer air
at any cost of hardship.

But we were not free to go out at once. The officer on duty brusquely
ordered us back among the men when we approached him with a request to
be allowed to leave. We were greeted with a burst of mocking glee as
we walked back to our places, and among the comments was a call to me:
“What have you pinched, whiskers?”

The reason for the delay was soon apparent, for in a few moments we
were all marched down the main corridor and into the passage which
opened nearest to the registrar’s desk. There we waited, closely
huddled, the iron door locked upon us, while an examination was made
as to whether any of the prisoners had been robbed. When all was
reported right, the door was unlocked and we were allowed to file
slowly out past the entrance of the kitchen. There stood the cook with
an assistant, and he gave to each man as he passed a bowl of steaming
coffee and a piece of bread. We drank the coffee at a gulp, and each
man was eating bread with wolfish bites as he climbed the steps and
walked out into the street.

[Illustration: THE POLICE-STATION BREAKFAST.]

Every succeeding breath in the outer air seemed to carry its cleansing
coolness farther down into our lungs. It was like the feeling of
cold water to a parched throat. The sky was overcast, but the storm had
ceased, and the temperature had fallen to several degrees of frost, and
this gave a freshness and vigor to the air which brightened the world
for us amazingly.

We could walk dry-shod in the measure that we could walk at all.
Clark was rather stiff at the start, and I could make scarcely any
progress alone, but Clark generously lent me a shoulder, and his arm
was frequently around me at the street crossings. All this was most
naturally done. The thought of deserting me because I had gone lame
seemed never to occur to him. He must have known that his own good
chances were seriously lessened by his having me upon his hands, but
he accepted this as though it were inevitable. There was no mawkish
sympathy in his manner; he was in for practical helpfulness only, and
now and again he would withdraw his support, and, standing off, would
watch me execute his command: “Now take a brace, partner, and let’s see
you go it alone.”

At Van Buren Street we turned, to the Rock Island Railway station, and
in the waiting-room we quenched our thirst as best we could at the
drinking-fountain. Many of the men had taken the direction of South
Clark Street. I asked Clark why.

“There’s barrel-houses down there,” he explained.

The word had come upon me repeatedly in the last day, with only a dim
suggestion of its meaning, and so I owned to my ignorance.

“A barrel-house?” said Clark. “That’s a dive where they keep cheap
whiskey on tap; you can get a pint for a nickel. It’s about the size
of the whiskey you want for the thirst you get in a station-house, I’m
thinking,” he added. And then more to himself than to me: “I’m damned
if I don’t wish I had some now to wash that air out of my mouth.”

His face was very wry, and there was returning to it the expression of
hopelessness which it had worn while we crouched for shelter in the
doorway on the night before. It cut you to the quick. His light-blue
eyes, which had drawn me from the first by the honest directness of
their gaze, now began to lose their human, speaking quality and to take
on the dumb, beseeching look of a hunted beast.

The bread and coffee and clean air had revived us both. I dreaded
a swift relapse, and so I urged a wash, in the hope of its bracing
effect. But where could we achieve this simple need? Certainly not in
the wash-room of the station, for we had trespassed dangerously far in
drinking at the fountain, and the eye of more than one employee was
already upon us. There was no hotel into whose public lavatory we could
pass unchallenged, and not so much upon Clark’s account as upon mine.
There remained the open lake; so we walked up Van Buren Street and
across the Lake Park and the railway tracks to the edge of the outer
harbor. Here we knelt among the broken fragments of ice and bathed our
faces and hands. It was vigorous exercise to rub them dry before they
chapped in the winter wind. It warmed us, and the feeling of relative
cleanness was enheartening. And then I sat down and dipped up water in
one hand and applied it, until I had a cold saturated cushion against
the bruise on my leg. This wrought wonderful relief until the wet cloth
froze, and then it chafed the bruise badly for a time.

But I could walk alone and fairly well now. We turned up Michigan
Avenue and followed it to the river, discussing, as we went, a plan of
action. Clark was for going at once to the far North Side in search
of employment at various iron-works and foundries there, of whose
existence he had learned. I longed for the means of early relief from
the reviving pangs of hunger through some chance job which I hoped that
we might obtain. This was a new idea to Clark. He was a raw recruit
in the army of the unemployed. That he might look for other work than
that which was in the line of his trade had not yet presented itself to
him as a possibility. He shrank from it with the instinctive dislike
of a conservative for a new way. And all our early essays confirmed
him in his aversion. We went from door to door of the great wholesale
business houses at the head of Michigan Avenue. Large delivery trucks
stood lined up along the curb on both sides, and there was the bustle
across the pavement of much loading and unloading of wares. Workmen
in leather aprons were handling packed boxes with the swiftness and
dexterity of long practice. At half a score of houses we sought out an
overseer or a superintendent and asked to be set to work; but, without
a moment’s hesitation in a single case, we were told, with varying
degrees of emphasis, that we were not needed, not even for some chance,
exceptional demand.

It is difficult to describe the discouragement which results from
such an experience. All about you is the tumultuous industry of a
great city. You feel something of the splendid power of its ceaseless
productivity; you guess at its vast consuming; and in the din of its
noisy traffic you watch the swift shuttles which weave the varied
fabric of its business. Its complexities and interdependencies bear
down upon you with an inspiring sense of the volume of human life spent
in ministering to life. Its multitudes throng you upon the streets,
and you read in countless faces the story of unending struggle to
keep abreast with pressing duty. Work? Everywhere about you there is
work, stupendous, appalling, cumulative in its volume and intensity
with the increasing momentum of a world-wide trade, which is driven by
the natural forces of demand and supply and keenest competition. Men
everywhere are staggering under burdens too grievous to be borne. And
here are you idle, yet counting it the greatest boon if you might but
add your strength to the mighty struggle.

Is there then no demand for labor? There is most importunate,
insatiable demand for all work of finer skilfulness, for all men who
can assume responsibility and give new efficiency to productive forces,
or direct them into channels for the development of new wealth. But
in the presence of this demand Clark and I stood asking hire for the
potential physical energies of two hungry human bodies, and, standing
so, we were but two units in a like multitude of unemployed.

When we reached the river I had difficulty in dissuading Clark from
his confirmed resolve to pass on to the North Side in pursuit of his
earlier plan. He had no thought of leaving me behind. He urged that
a chance job was as probable along his route as any other. But he
consented at last to another hour of search in the immediate vicinity.

We were in South Water Street; we walked west until we had crossed
State and had come to the corner of Dearborn Street. Walking became
increasingly difficult, for the pavements were piled high with boxes
and barrels and crates full of all manner of fruits and vegetables,
and wooden coops packed with live game and poultry. A narrow passage
remained between the piles. Through this we picked our way, carefully
avoiding empty boxes and hand-trucks and stray measures that lay
strewn about. On each side of the street buildings of brick or stone,
fairly uniform in height, rose four-storied and many windowed, with
the monotony of their straight lines relieved by the curves of arched
windows, each bearing a protruding keystone. Over the wide fronts
of the shops sagged awnings in various stages of faded color and
unrepair, their iron frames lying uncovered and unsightly against the
fluted canvas. Along both curbs were backed continuous rows of drays
and trucks and market-wagons. The two lines of horses stood blanketed
in the cold, facing each other across a narrow opening down the
stone-paved street, and more than anything else they resembled lines of
picketed cavalry.

We soon felt the friction of the crowd as it steered its devious course
along the littered pavement, brushing against groups of purchasers
who stood examining sample wares, and against idlers leaning to the
doorposts with hands in their trousers’ pockets, and through the cross
currents of drivers and shopmen who busily took on or discharged the
loads.

The very confusion and hurry of the scene, while they suggested the
chance of work, were really an added embarrassment to our search. More
than under other circumstances we shrank from asking employment from
men hard driven by the “instant need of things.” And this instinctive
feeling was fully justified in the course of the actual quest. Of
common hands there was an abundance, and ours, held out for sale,
were of the nature of a provocation to men cumbered by complex care.
Occasionally we could not get access to an employer; and when we did,
we sometimes received a civil “no,” but commonly an emphatic one in a
vent of evil temper.

At one moment an old gentleman was looking up at us over the tops of
his spectacles as we stood at the foot of his desk. There was much
shrewdness in his eye, and his face was deeply lined, but his speech
revealed the frankness of a courteous nature.

“No, I’m sorry,” he was saying, “I’m sorry that I can give you nothing
to do. The fact is, I’ve got to lay off three men at the end of the
week. My business don’t warrant my keeping them. I hope you’ll be more
fortunate elsewhere.”

A minute later we were standing waiting for the attention of a
square-shouldered, thick-necked dealer who was in angry dispute with a
subordinate. His face was still distorted when he turned upon us, and
his dilating eyes sought mine with an expression of growing impatience.

“We are looking for a job, sir,” I began. “Can you give us a chance to
work?”

“No, I can’t, ---- you! Out you go, now!” And then to a man near the
door: “---- your soul, Kelly, I’ve told you to keep these bums out of
here. If you let in another one I’ll fire you, as sure as hell.”

[Illustration: “OUT YOU GO, NOW.”]

The hour was nearly up, and there was apparently nothing for it but
to start north in accordance with Clark’s plan and in hope of better
fortune. I felt as though I could not go. I was fairly faint with
hunger, and a curious light-headedness had possessed me. The sights and
sounds about us took on a strange unreality, and I could not rid myself
of the feeling of moving and speaking in a dream. Again and again I was
conscious of a repetition of identical experience, recalling the same
circumstances in some faintly remembered past, and even before I spoke
at times, I had an eerie sense of having uttered the coming sentences
before under precisely similar conditions. The one fact to which
consciousness held with unshaken certainty was the strong craving for
food. And this was not so much a positive pain, as it was a sickening,
benumbing influence. My hand would all but go out in reach for fruit
that lay exposed about me, and the thought that the act would be wrong,
and would get me into trouble, followed the impulse afar, and was
forced into action as a checking conviction by a distinct effort of the
will.

We turned into one shop more. The pavement in front was heaped with
crates packed with oranges, and bound around the centre and the ends
with iron bands. Three high they stood on end, and four and five in a
row along the curb, while backed up against them were two empty trucks
with slats sloping capaciously at the sides.

There was confusion within the shop. A dealer and two drivers were
swearing loudly, each on a line of independent grievance. Two or three
shopmen were bustling about in zealous execution of orders. Men who may
have been customers were waiting impatiently for attention, and clerks
added to the confusion as with papers in hand they passed quickly in
and out of offices at the rear. It appeared the most unpromising place
for us that we had entered, and we were prepared for a refusal more
than commonly emphatic, when to our almost overwhelming surprise the
dealer hailed us:

“Say, you men, do you want a job? Go out and load them oranges, and
I’ll give you fifty cents apiece.”

We did not stagger nor clasp each other’s hands in an ecstasy of
relief; we simply turned without a word, and hurrying to the street, we
began to lift the heavy crates into the box of an empty truck.

Clark was the first to speak.

“Fifty cents, partner, fifty cents!” he kept repeating in an awed
undertone. He seemed to be trying to get firm hold of the fact of our
almost incredible good fortune, and then, in a voice that was thick
with a heaving sob, he said:

“We’ll feed, partner, we’ll feed!”

[Illustration: “WE’LL FEED, PARTNER, WE’LL FEED.”]

But we did not “feed” at once when the money was actually in our
possession. The first load had gone fairly well, for the certain
prospect of food nerved us to such a degree that, weakened though we
were, we scarcely felt the effort of loading, and we were quite unaware
that our bare hands were being scratched by the sharp ends of iron
bands about the boxes until we felt the flow of blood. But before the
second load was half on, our nerve began to fail us. Each succeeding
crate went on board with a greater effort. And the task itself grew
harder, as the tiers of boxes rose higher in the truck. It seemed as
though the driver would never be satisfied with the load; but at last
he called a halt, and, mounting his seat, drove off in the direction in
which the other truck had gone.

We were paid at once, Clark a half-dollar coin and I two silver
quarters. We held our money with the grip of drowning men upon a saving
support. We sat down upon a doorstep to rest. We were panting hard, and
the circles under Clark’s eyes had grown darker, and his thin bloodless
lips were quivering as with cold. But his spirits were rising, and his
eyes grew brighter every moment, and his pale face, already flushed
with exercise, glowed again with the pleasure of anticipating the sure
breaking of our fast.

When we set off, Clark was in the full swing of a provident plan.

“There’s lots of saloons,” he said, “where you can get a free lunch
with a glass of beer.” And he began to point them out to me along our
route. Large signs in front competed for the drifting trade. On one
was painted a huge schooner brimming over with frothing beer, and it
bore the legend: “The largest glass of beer for five cents in Chicago.”
Another sign claimed for its shop, “The best free lunch in the city,”
and others told of hot sausages with every drink, or a certain number
of oysters in any style, or hot stews at choice, and bread and cold
meats and cheese in unstinted abundance.

All this so exactly met our needs. And there were warmth and shelter
and companionship within the saloons, and having drunk at the bar and
eaten at the free-lunch counter, we should be free to sit at ease
about the fire. And how cheap it all was! For fifteen cents, Clark was
saying, we could get three fair meals a day, and even ten cents would
save us from the actual pain of hunger. There was no other chance
that compared with this. The utmost that five cents would buy in the
cheapest eating-houses was a cup of coffee and two small rolls. There
were ten-cent meals to be had, but they were not the equals of a
free lunch and a glass of beer. To get their equivalent in a restaurant
you must spend fifteen cents at least.

My objections were wholly unintelligible to Clark. From these he would
bring the argument back to the question of wise management, and there
he had me. Presently he lost his temper, and told me that I was a “damn
fool,” and that I might go “to a restaurant, or to hell,” as I chose,
but that for his part he was going in for a free lunch and a glass of
beer. But before we separated he was so far pacified that he agreed to
meet me in the early evening in front of the shop where we had earned
our money.

It was at the juncture of Dearborn and Madison Streets that we parted.
Not far from there I found a restaurant whose placards in the windows
offered tempting dishes at astonishingly cheap rates. “Roast beef and
baked potato, fifteen cents,” was printed on the one that lured me
most. I walked inside and sat down at a small round table, spread with
a cloth which was faultlessly clean. A long line of such tables reached
down the centre of the deep room in inviting whiteness, and was flanked
on each side by a row of others, oblong in shape, pressed close in
against the walls. To a height of several feet above these tables the
walls were wainscoted with mirrors, and the white ceiling was gay with
paper festoons. Customers were streaming in, for it was about noon.
Most of these were evidently men from neighboring business houses, but
there were workmen, too, some of them in blue jeans; and the first
fear that I felt at entering, the fear of having come to a place too
respectable to accept me as a guest, vanished completely, and gave
place to a feeling of security and comfort.

A corps of colored waiters were hurrying through the narrow passages
between the tables, bearing aloft tin trays heaped with dishes; to the
noisy clatter and hum of the diners, they added a babel of discordant
sound as they shouted in unintelligible phrase their varying orders
into the dim regions at the rear, whence answered a muffled echo to
each call.

My order came in a deep dinner-plate, a slice of roast beef, generous
and juicy, shading from brown to the rich, raw red of the centre that
oozed with a strengthening flow. With it was a large baked potato,
piping hot, and when I broke it upon the table with a blow of my fist,
the fragrant steam rose in a cloud to my face.

At the end of a fast of thirty-six hours, which had been relieved only
by a few swallows of coffee and a little bread, I knew enough to eat
slowly. But I was unprepared for the difficulty which this precaution
involved. As when one swallows cautiously in quenching a consuming
thirst, and checks by sheer force the muscles which would drink with
choking draughts, so it was only by a sustained restraint that I ate
carefully, in small morsels, until the brutish hunger was appeased. And
when all the beef and potato, and an amazing quantity of the bread,
with which the table was abundantly supplied, were gone, I could not
forego the expenditure of five cents more for a cup of coffee, by the
aid of which another deep inroad upon the bread was soon accomplished.

At the desk where I paid the amount stamped upon a check which the
waiter had left at my place, I inquired for the manager. When I
received his assurance that he could give me no work as a dishwasher,
nor, in fact, in any capacity in his restaurant, and that he knew
of no opening for me anywhere, I walked out into the streets once
more and found my way to the public reading-room of the Young Men’s
Christian Association. There I looked through the advertising columns
of the morning newspapers. Of applications for positions there was
an almost countless number, but of openings offered there were few,
and not one of these was promising to a man whose only resource was
unskilled labor. Reading on somewhat aimlessly through the day’s news
I presently fell asleep, and was soon awakened by a young secretary,
who was shaking me vigorously by the shoulder.

“Wake up, my man, wake up!” he was saying. “You can’t sleep in here.
You must keep awake, or go out.”

I went out. It was easier to keep awake in the streets than in that
warm room, and besides, I must not slacken the search for work.

By the time that I had fully recovered possession of my senses I found
that an aimless walk had taken me near to the railway station, at
whose fountain Clark and I had drunk in the morning. A crowd of newly
arrived passengers was issuing into Van Buren Street, many of them
carrying hand-luggage. With a flash of association there came to my
mind the recollection of the boys and men who follow you persistently
on Cortlandt Street between the Pennsylvania station and the elevated
railway, with importunate offers to carry your bag for a dime. I
wondered that this industry had not occurred to me before as a resource
in my present need.

In a moment I was plying it with high hope of success, but in the next
I stood agape at a fierce onslaught of street Arabs and men. One or
two had picked up stones with which they menaced me. All of them were
shouting oaths and violent abuse, and one half-grown boy, who was the
first to reach me, held a clenched fist to my face, as he screamed
hoarsely profane threats, and his keen dark eyes blazed with anger, and
his lean face worked convulsively in the strength of violent passion.
It appeared that I had trespassed upon a field which was pre-empted by
a “ring” well-organized for its possession and cultivation, and for the
further purpose of excluding competition.

[Illustration: ALL OF THEM WERE SHOUTING OATHS AND VIOLENT ABUSE.]

I fell back to a safe distance. On the opposite side of the street I
saw a gentleman carrying a heavy portmanteau. He was well past the beat
of the organized ring about the station. In an instant I was beside
him, and was offering to carry his load. He seemed disinclined to pay
any heed at first, but he stopped in a moment with the remark:

“I’ll give you a quarter to carry this bag to my hotel.”

I assented joyfully. I swung the bag to my shoulder, and passed on
ahead, while the traveller walked close behind me in the crowd, and
directed me to his hotel in Wabash Avenue, where, together with what I
already had, I was soon fifty-five cents to the good.

That afternoon yielded nothing more either in prospect of a steady job
or in the fruit of chance employment, and at dusk I stood again in
South Water Street anxiously awaiting Clark’s return. It was dark when
he came at last, and as he approached me in the fierce light of the
electric arc which gleamed from the top of the high iron post near by,
I could see that he was paler and more careworn, and deeply dejected.
We sat down for a few moments upon a doorstep. The street was nearly
deserted, and the lights shone dismally through its blackened length.
Clark began to tell me of his afternoon. No chance of work had been
revealed beyond the vague suggestion of one boss that he might need an
extra man in a week or two. Moreover Clark had found the shops so far
away that he had been obliged, both in his going and return, to take
a Lincoln Avenue cable-car, and so was out a fruitless ten cents in
fare. He said very little beyond the bare statement of his afternoon’s
experience. He was sitting with his elbows resting on his knees, with
his hands clasped, and his flaxen head bowed almost to his arms. I knew
that he was struggling with thoughts and feelings which he could not
analyze, nor in the least express, and I waited in silence beside him.

The whole experience was new to him. He had been out of work before,
but he had had a home, and in its shelter he could tide over the
depression which had cost him his job. Now his home was gone,
and he was adrift without support. But he was young and strong and
accustomed to work, and all that he sought was a chance to win his
way. And yet his very struggles for a footing seemed to sink him into
deeper difficulty. The conditions which he was forced to face seemed to
conspire against the possibility of his success.

It was the feeling inspired by this seeming truth, a dim, dull feeling
vaguely realized, yet awful, that bore hard upon him, and that loomed
portentous as with remorseless fate. He was struggling with it in an
agony of helpless discouragement, and presently he found utterance for
it in concrete form.

“One boss I struck for a job, I thought he was going to give it to me
sure,” he said. “He asked me where I’d worked before, and why I’d quit,
and how long I’d been at the trade. And just then I felt something
crawling on my neck. It was a crumb, ---- it! The boss seen it, too. He
got mad, ---- him! and he chewed a rag, and he said if he had twenty
jobs, he wouldn’t give one to a lousy hobo like me.” Clark was growing
increasingly vehement in his recital. He rose to his feet and bent over
me, while the hot words came hissing between his teeth:

“I ain’t never been like this in my life before, and, great God
Almighty! I’d be clean if I could!” After a moment he added, in a hard,
clear tone:

“We’ve got some money, partner, let’s go and get a drink.”

My extra quarter flashed into my mind as a hopeful resource. I held
out the two quarters and a nickel on the palm of my hand where the
street light would strike them. I told Clark of my windfall, and of the
possible chance of many another such to help us out in the future.

“I earned this in ten minutes,” I said, holding out a quarter, “and I
know where twenty cents of it will buy us each a hot stew and all the
bread that we can eat. And then I’ve found a lodging-house in South
Clark Street where we can each get a wash and a fairly decent bed in
good air for fifteen cents, and we’ll have enough left to keep us in
food to-morrow.”

Clark hesitated. I enlarged on the attractiveness of the restaurant
and the comfort of eating at leisure at one of its clean tables, and
the long, unbroken rest that we should have at the lodgings. Clark was
tired to the bone, and he yielded. It was my turn now to give him a
shoulder as we walked to our evening meal.

We were soon seated opposite each other at one of the side tables of
the restaurant. The lights were reproduced in myriad reflections in
the mirrors, and we seemed to be sitting near the centre of a vast
dining-hall with multitudes at its countless tables and its farther
portions fading in the perspective of dim distance. The Irish stew and
bread were indescribably good, and in the company of other diners we
felt that we were among our fellow-men and of them, and we were free
for the time from the torment of that haunting isolation which keeps
one unspeakably lonely even in the thronging crowd.

Light-hearted and full of hope again we walked to the lodging-house,
and after a wash we were soon fast asleep, each on a rough cot in a
wooden closet, the electric lights streaming in upon us through the
wire netting which was spread over the tops of long lines of such
sleeping booths, that stood separated by thin board partitions like the
bath-houses at the sea.

Friday and Saturday came and passed with the same vain search for
work, and with varying fortune in odd jobs. We took separate routes
through the day, but always agreed at parting upon an hour and place
of meeting. The Young Men’s Christian Association rooms became our
rendezvous. When we met there on Friday evening I had a quarter and
Clark was high-spirited and opulent with forty-five cents to his
credit. He was full of his good fortune. In the middle of the forenoon
he had chanced upon the job of shifting coal in the cellar of a private
house. The work having been finished he was allowed to wash himself
in the kitchen with an abundance of hot water and soap and the luxury
of a towel. And then he sat down at the kitchen-table to a dinner of
hot turkey and cranberry-sauce, and any number of vegetables, and
all the bread and coffee he wanted, and finally a towering saucer of
plum-pudding. Fifty cents was added to the dinner in payment for his
work, and, as he had had a dime left in his pocket after breakfast,
he did not hesitate at an expenditure of fifteen cents in car-fare to
facilitate his search for work.

My quarter had come, as on the day before, by way of a porter’s
service--only this time from a woman. I caught sight of her as she
was crossing the Lake Front from the station of the Illinois Central
Railroad at the head of Randolph Street. Under her left arm were
parcels of various shapes and sizes, and with some apparent effort she
carried a bag in her right hand. The parcels were troublesome, for now
and again she was obliged to rest the bag upon the pavement until she
had adjusted her arm to a surer hold upon them. She was a woman nearing
middle life, well dressed in warm, comfortable, winter garments which
bore the general marks of the prevailing mode.

So completely had the present way of living possessed me that I fear
that my first impulse at sight of her was born of the hope of a
porter’s fee and not of the thought of helpfulness. But I grew more
interested as I neared her, and increasingly embarrassed. There was
a touch of beautiful coloring in her round, full face, and about
the mouth was an expression of rare sweetness, while her dark-blue
eyes looked out through gold-rimmed spectacles with preternatural
seriousness. But my eye was drawn most by the hair that appeared
beneath her bonnet; a heavy mass it was, and tawny red like that of
Titian’s “Magdalene” in the Pitti. She might have been a shopkeeper’s
wife come to the city from the suburbs or from some provincial village,
and she was nervous in the noisy atmosphere of the unfamiliar. I had
not yet offered my services to a woman in this new capacity of street
porter, and I found myself puzzled as to how I should approach her.
But the actual situation solved the difficulty, for when we were but
a few steps apart, her bundles fell again into a state of irritating
insecurity under her arm and she was again obliged to adjust them.

Instantly I was beside her, bowing, hat in hand:

“I beg your pardon, madam; won’t you let me help you?”

She drew back and looked at me perplexed, and I could see the gathering
alarm in her wide, innocent, serious eyes.

[Illustration: SHE DREW BACK AND LOOKED AT ME PERPLEXED.]

“Oh, no, thanks!” she said, and I knew that all that she had ever heard
of bunco-steerers and of the wily crafts of the town was mingling in
terrifying confusion in her mind with thoughts of possible escape.

My distress was as great as her own. I had forgotten for the moment
how dismaying to a woman must be an unexpected offer of service from
a sudden apparition of full grown, masculine, street poverty. I felt
guilty as though I had wantonly frightened a child. A parcel had fallen
to the ground. I picked it up, and returned it to her with an apology
most spontaneous and sincere. But as I turned away in haste to escape
from the embarrassment of the situation, I found myself checked to
my great surprise by a timid question: “Perhaps you can tell me the
shortest way to number -- La Salle Street?” she said.

My hat was off at once.

“It will give me great pleasure to show you the way,” I replied, and
not waiting for a refusal, I set off with, “Won’t you follow me,
pray?” over my shoulder.

At the curb of the first crossing I waited for her.

“Keep close to me,” I said, “and I’ll see you safe across the street.”
But I ignored the parcels, which were once more awry. On the opposite
pavement she stopped.

“Would you mind holding my bag,” she asked, “while I get a better grip
on these bundles?” I accepted the bag with an assurance of the pleasure
that it gave me. It was soon followed by a parcel, the largest and
most unwieldy of the lot. She finished adjusting the others, and then
extended her free hand for the remaining parcel.

“We’ll carry this between us,” I said, “and I’ll walk with you to the
place.”

Without a word of demur she took firm hold of the stout twine with
which the parcel was tied, and thus linked we set off together down
Randolph Street to La Salle. Conversation was nearly impossible, for we
were edging our way for the most part along crowded pavements.

When we stood for a few moments at a crossing, waiting for a check in
the tide of traffic, she confided to me that she had come to Chicago
from “----ville” to see a lawyer.

“You are often in the city,” I suggested, delighted to talk on the
pleasant, easy terms which were springing up between us.

“Oh, no! I ain’t,” she said, and then she was innocently superior
to the compliment implied in my feigned surprise, and she began to
question me about myself.

“What do you do for a living, young man?”

“I am out of work, and I am looking for a job,” I said, evasively.

“What is your line of work?” she continued; for the bucolic mind was
bent on a sure footing from which to launch out into further inquiry.

“I shall be glad of any work that I can get,” I said. “Any work at
all,” I reiterated, thinking that she might put me in the way of a job.

“Where do you live when you’re to home?” and the question indicated a
new tack in the quest for certitude.

“I came out here from the East” I answered; “I have no home here.”

“I guess you ain’t been doing just right, or else you wouldn’t be
ashamed to tell,” she said, while a graver look came into her sober
eyes.

The situation was so keenly delightful that I lacked the moral strength
to do aught but prolong it.

“Ah, madam, if you but knew!” I said, and I fear that my tone conveyed
to her a tacit confession of deep depravity.

We had reached the required number in La Salle Street. I led the
way to the elevator, and found the door of the lawyer’s office. The
woman stood for a few moments in the passage; I was evidently on her
conscience.

“Haven’t you got any family or friends?” she continued, in a voice
tender with sympathy.

“I had both,” I replied.

“Then, young man, you take my advice, and just go back to your family,
and tell them you’re sorry that you done wrong, and you mean to do
better. They’ll be good to you and help you.” Her words were swift with
the energy of conviction.

“I am sure that you are right,” I agreed.

And now a well-filled open purse was in her hand, and I saw her fingers
hesitating among some loose coins. Presently she held out a quarter.

“You’ve been real nice to me,” she said, “and I want to ask you not to
make a wrong use of this money. You’ll not buy liquor with it, will
you?”

“Indeed I will not,” I assured her. “I have little temptation to do
that, for I can quench my thirst for nothing; it is food that I find it
hard to get. And, madam,” I continued, “I am deeply grateful to you for
your good advice.”

She smiled upon me, her pretty mouth and dimpled cheeks and dark blue
eyes all playing their part in the friendly salutation.

“You will go back to your friends, won’t you?” she said, persuasively.

“I will indeed,” I replied. “Already I look forward to that with
keenest pleasure.”

Then richer by a quarter and all aglow with the sense of human sympathy
I returned to the streets, and to the exhausting, dreary round of
place-hunting.

That this in itself should be such hard work is largely due, I fancy,
to the double strain, both on your strength and on your sensibilities.
Certainly it is strangely enervating. Even when you are not weakened
by the want of food, you find yourself at the far end of a fruitless
search worn out beyond the exhaustion of a hard day’s work. And then
the actual ground covered by your most persistent effort is always so
sadly disappointing. You may begin the day’s hunt rested and fed and
full of energy and resolve; you may have planned the search with care,
taking pains to find out the various forms of unskilled labor which
are employed within the chosen area; with utmost regard to systematic,
time-saving expenditure of energy, you may go carefully over the
ground, leaving no stone unturned; and yet, at the day’s end, you have
not covered half the area of your careful plan, and your whole body
aches with weariness, and your heart is heavy and sore within you. Nor
does the task grow easier with long practice. You acquire a certain
facility in search; you come, by practical acquaintance, to some
knowledge of the ins and outs of the labor market; but you must begin
each day’s quest with a greater draft upon your courage and resolution.
For the actual barriers grow greater, as the outward marks of your mode
of life become clearer upon you, and you feel yourself borne upon a
tide that you cannot stem, out from the haven of a man’s work, where
you would be, to the barren wastes, where drift to certain wreck the
lives of the destitute idle who have lost all hold upon a “sure intent.”

All the days of this vagrant living were not equally hard. Some were
harder than others. Saturday was a case in point. After an early
frugal breakfast, for which Clark paid his last penny, we separated
with an agreement to meet again at six o’clock in the evening in the
reading-room of the Young Men’s Christian Association. We were bent on
different quests. Clark was determined to find work at his trade if he
could, and I had no choice apart from unskilled labor. For odd jobs
we were each to have out an eye, and our acquaintance thus far with
such a course made us fairly confident of at least the means of bare
subsistence.

But nothing is less predictable than the outcome of this fortuitous
living. The days vary with the variability which belongs to existence.
Things “come your way” at times, and then again they have another
destination which your widest and closest search fails to reveal.

It was hard, but it was not impossible through that Saturday morning
to keep one’s purpose fairly firm. From the ebb of the city’s traffic
in the darkness before the dawn I felt it flowing to its full tide.
However destitute a man may be he cannot fail to share the quickening
to waking life of a great city. The mystery of deepest night enfolds
the place, and from out its veiling darkness the vague conformations
of streets and buildings gradually emerge to the sharp outlines of
the day’s reality. An occasional delivery wagon from the market, or
a milkman’s cart goes rattling down a street, awaking echoes as of a
deserted town, or a heavy truck laden with great rolls of white paper
for the printing-press passes slowly, drawn by gigantic horses whose
flat, hairy hoofs patiently pound the cobbles in their plodding pace,
while whiffs of white vapor puff from their nostrils with their deep,
regular breathing. The driver’s oath can be heard a square away.

Standing at the curb along an open space in front of a public building
are a few “night hawks.” The horses are heavily blanketed and their
noses buried in eating-bags. The cabmen have drawn together in social
community on the pavement, where, as they gossip in the cold, they
alternately stamp the flagging with their feet and clasp themselves
in hard, sweeping embraces of the arms to stir the sluggish blood to
swifter movement. An empty cable-car goes tearing round a “loop” with
noise to awake the dead, and sets off again to some outermost portion
of the town with a sleepy policeman on board and a newsboy, his bundle,
damp from the press, upon his lap, who is bent on being first with news
to that suburban region. The cars fill first with workingmen who are
bound for distant factories and workshops and their posts along the
lines of railways.

The streets are echoing now to the sounds of increasing traffic and
to the steps of the vanguard of workers. These are the wage-earners,
men for the most part, but there are women, too, and children. Here is
humanity in the raw, hard-handed and roughly wrought for the Atlasian
task of sustaining, by sheer physical strength and manual skill, the
towering, delicate, intricate structure of progressive civilization.

The first of the salaried workers follow these, and youth swarms
upon the streets moving with swift steps to the great co-educational
schools of practical business. There are countless “cash” children in
the throng, and office boys, and saleswomen and men, and clerks, and
secretaries, and fledgling lawyers. There are marks of poverty on the
faces and in the garments of the children, but most of the older ones
are dressed in all the warmth and comfort of the well-to-do, while
the young women who form so large a portion of the crowd step briskly
in dainty boots carrying themselves with figures erect and graceful,
clothed with the style and _chic_ which are theirs as a national trait.
Many of the men are, in contrast, markedly careless and unkempt.

All these are at work by eight o’clock, the wage-earners having been at
it an hour already. Then come, mingling in the miscellaneous concourse
of business streets which have taken on the full day’s complexity, the
superintendents and managers, and the heads of business houses and of
legal firms, and bankers, and brokers, and all the company of rare
men, whose native gifts of creative power or organizing capacity or
executive ability, joined to great energy and resolution, have placed
them in command of their co-workers, and made them responsible, as
only the few can be responsible, for the lives and well-being of their
fellows.

I recognize an eminent lawyer in the moving crowd, who, in democratic
fashion, is walking to his office. He is a nobleman by every gift of
nature, and his sensitive, expressive face, responsive to the grace of
passing thought, is an unconscious appeal to my flagging courage, and
to that, perhaps, of many another man in the pressing throng.

I see in a jolting omnibus a noted merchant, his head bowed over a
morning paper as he rides to his business house. He holds a foremost
place in business, yet it is fully equalled by his standing as a
Christian gentleman and as a wise and most efficient philanthropist.

Almost touching elbows we pass each other on the street, a
fellow-alumnus of my college and I, he an inheritor of great wealth
and of a vast enterprise far-reaching in its scope to distant portions
of the earth. And yet, so unmarred has he remained under the lavish
gifts of fortune that his is already the dominant genius in the
administration of immense productive power, and his influence is
increasingly felt as a helpful and guiding force in great educational
institutions of the land.

But this resurgence of the city’s life, while it quickens the pulses
for the time, is not an inspiration to last one through a day of
disappointing search. By noon I had been turned many times away, and
a sharp refusal to a polite request to be given a chance to work cuts
deeper than men know who have never felt its wound. You try to ignore
it at the first, and you bring greater energy to bear upon the hunt,
but your wounds are there; and, in each succeeding advance, it is a
sterner self-compulsion that forces you to lay bare again the shrinking
quick of your quivering sensibilities. How often have I loitered about
a door, passing and repassing it again and yet again before I could
summon courage for the ordeal of a simple request for work!

Early in my experience I learned never to ask after a possible vacancy.
Employers have no vacancies to be filled by such an inquirer. I simply
said that I was looking for a job, and should be glad of any work that
I could do; and that, if I could be given a chance to work, I would do
my best to earn a place.

This request in practically the same terms produced often the most
opposite effects. One man would answer with a kindliness so genuine
and a regret so evidently sincere that it was with an utmost effort at
times that I could control myself And but a few minutes later another
man might answer, if not with oaths and threats of violence, yet with a
cynical sharpness which would leave a sorer rankling.

Despondency had almost conquered hope at last, and well-nigh worn
one’s courage out, and all but brought your drooping spirits to the
brink of that abyss, where men think that they can give the struggle
up. It is marvellous how the external aspect of all things changes to
you here. The very stones beneath your feet are the hard paving of
your prison-house; the threatening winter sky above you is the vaulted
ceiling of your dungeon; the buildings towering to nearly twenty
stories about you are your prison walls, and, as by a keen refinement
of cruelty, they swarm with hiving industry, as if to mock you in your
bitter plight.

Suddenly there dawns upon you an undreamed-of significance in the
machinery of social restraint. The policeman on the crossing in his
slouching uniform bespattered with the oozing slime of the miry streets
where he controls the streams of traffic, even as the Fellaheen direct
the water of the Nile through the net-work of their irrigation ditches,
is the outstretched hand of the law ready to lay hold on you, should
you violate in your despair the rules of social order. Behind him you
see the patrol wagon and the station-house and the courts of law and
the State’s prison and enforced labor, the whole elaborate process
by means of which society would reassimilate you, an excrement, a
non-social being as a transgressor of the law, into the body politic
once more, and set you to fulfilling a functional activity as a part of
the social organism.

This result, with the means of living which it implies and the link
that it gives you to your kind, even if it be the relation of a
criminal to society, may become the object of a desire so strong that
the shame and punishment involved may lose their deterring force for
you.

There are simple means of setting all this process in motion in
your behalf. Men break shop-windows in full view of the police, or
voluntarily hold out to them hands weighted with the spoils of theft.

Perhaps it is in the moving crowds upon the pavements that one, in
such a mood, feels most of all this change in external aspect. The
loneliness, the sense of being a thing apart in the presence of your
working kind, a thing unvitalized by real contact with the streams of
life, is the seat of your worst suffering, and the pain is augmented by
what seems an actual antagonism to you as to something beyond the range
of human sympathy.

By the middle of that Saturday afternoon I had fairly given up the
search for work, and I found myself on State Street, wandering
aimlessly in the hope of an odd job. Hunger and utter weariness
were playing their part, as well as the loneliness and the sense of
imprisonment. One had the feeling that, if he could but sit down
somewhere and rest, all other troubles would vanish for the time at
least. And there were, I knew, many public rooms to which I could go in
unquestioned right or privilege, but once within their warmth, I was
well aware that to keep awake would tax all my power of will, and that,
as a sleeping lounger, I should soon be turned adrift again.

The street was coated with a murky mire, kneaded by hoofs and wheels
to the consistency of paste, and tracked by countless feet upon the
pavements, where it lay as thick almost as on the cobbles. The skyline
on both sides was a ragged _sierra_, mounting from three to five and
seven stories, then leaping suddenly on the right to the appalling
height of the Masonic Temple, and grotesque in all its length with
rearing signs and flagstaffs that pierced the smoky vapor of the upper
air, while the sagging halyards fluttered like fine threads in the icy
gusts from off the lake. Whole fronts of flamboyant architecture were
almost concealed behind huge bombastic signs, while other advertising
devices hung suspended overhead, watches three feet in diameter, and
boots and hats of a giant race.

The shop windows were draped with the scalloped fringes of idle
awnings, and merely a glance at their displays was enough to disclose a
commercial difference separated by only the width of the thoroughfare,
a difference like that between Twenty-third Street and the Bowery.

From Polk Street and State I drifted northward to the river. No longer
was there any stimulus in contact with the intermingling crowds. All
that was hard and sordid in one’s lot seemed to have blinded one to
all but the hard and sordid in the world about. Beneath its structural
veiling you could not see the warm heart of life, tender and strong
and true. Multitudes of human faces passed you, deeply marked with
the lines of baser care. Human eyes looked out of them full of the
unconscious tragic pathos of the blind, blind to all vision but the
light of common day; eyes of the money grubbers, sharpened to a
needle’s point yet incapable of deeper insight than the prospect of
gain; eyes of the haunted poor, furtive in the fear of things, and
seeing only the incalculable, threatening hand of fateful poverty;
eyes of ragged children who were selling papers on the streets, their
eyes old with the age of the ages, as though there gazed through them
the unnumbered generations of the poor who have endured “long labor
unto aged breath;” eyes of the rich, hardened by a subtler misery
in the artificial lives they lead in sternest bondage to powers in
whom all faith is gone, but whom they serve in utter fear, scourged
by convention to the acting of an unmeaning part in life, seeking
above all things escape from self in the fantastic _stimuli_ of
fashion, yet feeling ever, in the dark, the remorseless closing in of
the contracting prison walls of self-indulgence narrowing daily the
scope of self, and threatening life with its grimmest tragedy, in the
hopeless, faithless, purposeless _ennui_ of existence.

And now there passed me in the street two sisters of charity walking
side by side. Their sweet, placid faces, framed in white, reflected the
limpid purity of unselfish useful living, and their eyes, deep-seeing
into human misery and evil, were yet serene in the all-conquering
strength of goodness.

It was in some saner thought inspired by this vision that I walked on
across the river to the comparative quiet of the North Side. I needed
all the sanity that I could summon. The setting sun had broken for
a moment through snow-laden clouds, and it shone in blazing shafts
of blood-red light through the hazy lengths of westward streets. Its
rays fell warmly upon a wide, deep window as I passed, and the rich
reflection caught my eye. For some time I stood still, a prey to
conflicting feelings. Just within the window with the shades undrawn,
sat a friend in lounging ease before an open fire, absorbed in his
evening paper. There flashed before me the scene of our last encounter.
We stood at parting on a wharf in the balmy warmth of late winter in
the far South. Behind my friend was the brilliant carpeting of open
lawns and blooming beds of flowers, and beyond lay the deep olive green
of forests of live-oak with palmettos growing in dense underbrush,
and the white “shell road” gleaming in the varied play of lights and
shadows until it lost itself, in its course to the beach, in the
deepening gloom of overdrooping boughs weighted with hanging moss in an
effect of tropical luxuriance. And from out that vivid mental picture
there came again, almost articulate in its reality, the graceful urging
of my friend that I should visit him in his Western home.

It was so short a step by which I could emerge from the submerged, and
the temptation to take it was so strong and inviting. The want and
hardship and hideous squalor were bad enough, but these things could
be endured for the sake of the end in view. It was the longing for
fellowship that had grown to almost overmastering desire, the sight
of a familiar face, the sound of a familiar voice, the healing touch
of cultivated speech to feelings all raw under the brutalities of the
street vernacular.

And after all, what real purpose was my experiment to serve? I had set
out to learn and in the hope of gaining from what I learned something
worth the while of a careful investigation. I had discovered much
that was new to me, but nothing that was new to science, and the
experience of a single individual could never furnish data for a valid
generalization, and all that I had learned or could learn was already
set forth in tabulated, statistical accuracy in blue books and economic
treatises. Moreover it was impossible for me to rightly interpret even
the human conditions in which I found myself, for between me and the
actual workers was the infinite difference of necessity in relation to
any lot in which I was. How could I, who at any moment could change
my status if I chose, enter really into the life and feelings of the
destitute poor who are bound to their lot by the hardest facts of stern
reality? It was all futile and inadequate and absurd. I had learned
something, and as for further inquiry of this kind, I would better
give it up, and return to a life that was normal to me.

The sense of futility was strong upon me. Never before had the
temptation to abandon the attempt assailed me with such force. It
was no clean-cut, definite resolution that won in favor of continued
effort. Not at all. I think that when I turned away I was more than
half-resolved to give over the experiment. But even as a man, who,
contemplating suicide, allows himself to be borne upon the aimless
stream of common events past the point of many an early resolution to
the deed, so I found myself gradually awaking to the thought, “Ah,
well, I will try it a little longer.”

It was in this mood that I went to find Clark at our rendezvous. Our
eyes met in quick inquiry, and before either of us spoke, we knew
each the other’s story. But Clark wished the confirmation of actual
confession.

“Ain’t you had no luck too?” he whispered, his eyes close to mine, and
contracting with a sense of the incredibility of such a result, which
might be altered, if one would only insist strongly enough upon its
being other than it actually was.

“No,” I said, “I’ve had no luck, nor anything to eat since morning.”
We were speaking in the low tones which were permitted in the
reading-room. “Well, I’ll be ----.” And Clark’s drawling oath seemed
exactly suited to the absurdity of the situation. We both laughed
softly over our coincident dilemma, and by a mutual impulse we
walked out into the street, where we spent an agreeable half-hour in
discussing the placards in the windows of two restaurants.

There was an especial attraction for us in the lower window where there
stood a _chef_ all white from his spotless cap to where his white
garments were lost to view behind a gas-stove of ingenious contrivance,
on whose clean, polished upper surface he was turning well-browned
griddle-cakes. I do not know what the association was, and it was in
entire good-humor that Clark suddenly turned to me with the remark:

“Say, partner, we’d get all we want to eat, if we’d heave a rock
through this window.”




CHAPTER III

FINDING STEADY WORK


                           No. -- BLUE ISLAND AVENUE, CHICAGO, ILL.,
                                      December 22, 1891.

That night when Clark and I reached the head of the staircase which
descends to the basement of the station-house we found the way blocked
by men. We thought at first that a prisoner was being booked, but a
second glance revealed the fact that the door of iron grating was wide
open. With his back against it stood an officer. The lodgers were
passing him in slow order, and, as they filed by, the policeman held
each in sharp examination for a moment. Soon I could see him clearly.
He stood, obstructing the exit from the stairs, a straight, massive
figure well on to two hundred and fifty pounds. A side-view was toward
us, and I took delight in the clean-shaven face with the well-chiselled
Grecian profile, the eye deep-set and widening to the upward lift of
the lashes, and the dark, abundant hair rising in short, crisp curls
from under the pressure of his cap-rim.

He was putting the men through a catechism respecting their
nationalities, their homes and occupations, and their motives in coming
to Chicago. Beside him stood two men, the elder a man past middle
life, of sober, dignified appearance, and with an air of philosophical
interest in what he saw. The younger was a callow youth, just grown
to manhood, and he may have been the other’s son. They were out
“slumming,” evidently, and the officer had been detailed as their
guide. Their purpose may have been a good one, but the boy’s face, as
I watched it, seemed to me to show plainly the marks of an unwholesome
curiosity. And certainly as they stood there in well-dressed, well-fed
comfort, eying at leisure, as though it were exhibited for their
diversion, this company of homeless, ragged, needful men, there was to
my mind a deliberate insult in the attitude sharper than the sting of a
blow in the face. I thought at first that I might be alone in feeling
this, until I heard a man behind me say, as the cause of the delay
became clear to him:

[Illustration: HE WAS PUTTING THE MEN THROUGH A CATECHISM RESPECTING
THEIR NATIONALITIES, THEIR HOMES AND OCCUPATIONS, AND THEIR
MOTIVES IN COMING TO CHICAGO.]

“Who is them jays, and what business have they inspectin’ us?”

On the step below me was as good a vagrant type as the slowly moving
line on the staircase disclosed. I could not see his face, but I
could guess at its effect from the dark, bristling, unkempt beard that
sprouted in tangled, wiry masses from his cheeks and throat, and the
heavy, cohering hair that lay long and thick about his ears and on his
neck. There was an unnatural corpulence about the figure, the reality
of which was belied by the lean, sharp lines that appeared beneath a
bulging collar and in the emaciated arms that were red, and raw, and
almost bare below the elbows, where the ragged sleeves hung in fraying
ribbons.

The obesity was purely artificial. The tramp had on three flannel
shirts, at least, besides several heavy waistcoats and two pairs of
trousers and as many coats, with a possibility of there being three.
The outer garments were quaint mosaics of patches, positively ingenious
in their interlacing adherence to one another and in their rude
preservation of original outlines of dress. From him came the pungent
reek of bad whiskey and stale tobacco.

It was as though the man stood clothed in outward and visible signs of
unseen realities, enveloped in the rigid habit of his own wrong-doing,
draped in the mystery of inherited tendencies, and cloaked in the stern
facts of a hard environment. And yet, as beneath the filthy outer
covering there was a human being, so under these veiling, unseen
vestures was a man, a living soul created by the Almighty.

I could hear him muttering gruffly to himself as he slowly descended to
his turn at the foot of the steps.

“Well, Weary, where are you from? A hobo from Hoboville, I guess,” and
the officer’s voice rang strong and clear up the staircase to the dim
landing, where stood the waiting line of men.

The two slummers laughed aloud.

“From Maine,” said the tramp. The voice came hoarse and thin and
broken-winded from a throat eaten out by disease.

“Well, you’re a rare one, if you’re a Yankee. But what brought you to
Chicago?”

“Lookin’ for work at the World’s Fair.”

“You lie, you lazy loafer. The last thing you’re looking for is work.
You all tell that World’s Fair lie. There’s been as many of you in
Chicago every winter for the last ten years as there is this winter.”

The man was stung.

“I’ve as good a right here as you,” he said.

“You have, have you!” cried the officer in quick rejoinder, but with
no loss of temper. “Look at me, you filthy hobo,” he added, drawing
himself to his full, imposing height. “I’m a police officer. I’ve held
my job for eleven years, and got my promotions. I’m earning eighty
dollars a month, do you see? Now go down there where you belong,” and
he pointed imperiously to the far end of the corridor.

My turn came next.

“Here’s another whiskers,” announced the officer in explanation to his
charges; “same kind, only younger and newer to the business.” And then
to me, “Where are you from?” he said.

I replied with some inanity in mock German. “Oh, he’s a Dutchman. We
get a few of them. But they’re mostly older men, and kind of moody, and
they tramp alone a good bit. Can’t you talk English?”

I said something in very bad French.

“Oh, I guess he’s a Frenchy. That’s very uncommon----”

I interrupted his information with a line from Virgil, spoken with an
inflection of inquiry.

“He may be a Dago, or a--ah----” he hesitated.

I broke in with a sentence in Greek.

“Or a Russian,” concluded the officer.

I thought that I could mystify him finally, and so I pronounced a verse
from Genesis in Hebrew. But he was equal to the emergence.

“I’ve got it,” he exclaimed, with a note of exultation; “he’s a
Sheeny!” And free to go I walked down the corridor, feeling that I had
come rather badly out of that encounter.

None of us, I think, resented much the action of the officer. The
policemen understand us perfectly, and in a certain broad, human sense
we know them for our friends. I have been much impressed with this
quality of natural _bonhomie_ in the relation of the police officers
to the vagrant and criminal classes. It seems to be the outcome of
sturdy common sense and genuine knowledge and human sympathy. It would
be difficult, I fancy, seriously to deceive an average officer of good
experience. He may not know his man personally in every case, but he
knows his type, and he takes his measure with admirable accuracy. He
is not far misled by either his virtue or his vice. He knows him for a
human being, even if he be a vagrant or a criminal, and he has come by
practical experience to a fair acquaintance with human limitations in
these spheres of life.

The sympathy of which I have spoken is conspicuously innocent of
sentimentality. It comes from a saner source, and is of a hardier
fibre. Unfortunately it lays open a way of corruption to corrupt men
on the force, but it is the basis, too, of high practical efficiency
in the difficult task of locating crime and keeping it within control.
And it has another value little suspected, perhaps. I have met more
than one workingman at work who owed his job to the friendly aid of a
policeman, who had singled him out from the ranks of the unemployed as
being worthy of his help. And this sort of timely succor is bounded,
I judge, only by the limits of opportunity. Certainly I shall never
forget the kindness of an officer who had evidently grown familiar with
me on the streets, and who to my great surprise stopped me suddenly one
day with the question:

“Ain’t yous got a job yet?”

“No,” I said, as I stood looking up in deep admiration of his height
and breadth and ruddy, wholesome face and generous Irish brogue.

“Well, that is hard luck,” he went on. “There isn’t many jobs ever at
this season of the year, but just yous come around this way now and
again, and I’ll tell yous, if I hears of anything.”

That was only a day or two before I found work, and when I had a chance
to tell him of my success, his pleasure seemed as genuine as my own.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sunday morning was all that Clark and I could wish. To the pallor of
the earliest dawn was added a soft, white muffling of snow. It lay
almost untracked over the filthy streets and upon the pavements, and in
dainty cones it capped the fence-palings, and roofed in pure white the
sheds and flat-cars in the railway station yard.

Clark and I walked rapidly across Wabash Avenue, then south to
Twentieth Street, and then east again across Michigan and Indiana
to Prairie Avenue. Here we were in the midst of a wealthy residence
quarter. Most hopefully we wandered about in anxious waiting for some
signs of life. From the first house at which we could apply we were
turned away with the assurance that there was a man on the place whose
duties included the cleaning of the pavements, and that, therefore, our
services were not needed. We had expected this to be the case in the
majority of instances; it was of the possible exception that we were
in search. Soon we began to fear that there were no exceptions. Our
spirits had fallen low under repeated refusals, when suddenly they rose
with a bound, when we finally got a pavement to clean, and twenty-five
cents each in payment.

The temptation to quit at once and get something to eat was strong, for
the swallow of coffee and piece of bread at the station-house had not
gone far toward satisfying an appetite which was of twenty-four hours’
growth. But then in another hour or two all further chance of work
like this would be gone, and so we stuck at it. Our reward was almost
instant.

Not only were we given a job at sweeping snow, and paid another quarter
each for it, but we were asked whether we had breakfasted, and were
invited to a meal in the kitchen. I think that the cook thoroughly
enjoyed feeding us, we did such ample justice to her fare. After two
large bowls of steaming porridge, we began on omelettes and beefsteak
and crisp potatoes and fresh bread, drinking the while great quantities
of coffee, not the flat, bitter, diluted wash of the cheap restaurants,
but the hot, creamy, fragrant beverage which tones one for the day.

[Illustration: I THINK THAT THE COOK THOROUGHLY ENJOYED FEEDING US.]

We had little time to talk, and very selfishly I left our end of the
conversation wholly to Clark. The cook drew from him some of the facts
of our position, and the further fact of our having been so long
without food. This made her very indignant, not at us, but at the
existing order of things.

“There should be a law,” she said, emphatically, “a law to give a job
to every decent man that’s out of work.” Then, with the sweet facility
of feminine remedy, “And another law,” she added, “to keep all them
I-talians from comin’ in and takin’ the bread out of the mouths of
honest people. They ain’t no better than heathens anyway, and they
do tell me that they’ll work for what a Christian dog wouldn’t live on.
Why, there’s me own cousin as come over from County Down a month ago
last Tuesday, and he ain’t got a job yet, and I be obliged to support
him, and all on account of them unclean I-talians.”

There seemed to be no end to our good luck that morning. After a right
royal breakfast we got still another belated pavement to clean, and
when we had finished that our joint earnings made the sumptuous total
of one dollar and fifty cents, and we were not hungry.

It was a delightful walk back to the familiar lodging-house, where we
paid for a night’s lodging in advance, and so secured immediate access
to the washing and cleaning facilities of the establishment.

When we set forth again Clark looked fairly trim. His clothes were
well brushed and his boots were clean. He had been shaven, and his
face glowed with healthful exercise and the effects of nourishing,
sustaining food. We had been in conversation on the subject of going to
church. Clark opposed it warmly; besides, he had another plan. There
were certain foremen whom he was bent on seeing in the unoccupied quiet
of Sunday, in relation to the matter of a possible job.

“And I don’t take no stock in church, anyway,” he explained. “Fellows
like us ain’t expected there, and we ain’t wanted. If you ain’t dressed
in the style, you’re different from everybody else that’s there,
and there ain’t no fun in that. And if you do go, what do you hear?
Sometimes a preacher talks sense, and makes things reasonable to you,
but most of them talks rot, that you don’t believe nor they either.
I’d sooner read Tom Paine than hear all the preachers in this town. He
talks to you straight, in a way you can understand.”

I pleaded my knowledge of a preacher who would talk to us as “straight”
as Tom Paine, but to no purpose, for there remained the question
of dress. Then I urged our going to mass, where we should not be
embarrassed by our singularity; but this plea met with no favor at all,
and I was obliged to go alone to church, and did not see Clark again
until we met late in the evening at the lodging-house.

It was snowing fast at the end of the service-hour, giving high
promise of abundant work in the morning. On the strength of it I ate
a fifteen-cent dinner with a twofold feeling of satisfaction. Then I
began a diligent search for the place of meeting of the Socialists.
Sunday afternoon, I had learned, was their time of meeting. A
knowledge of the place was wanting, but only because it had not
occurred to me to look for an announcement of it in the newspapers of
the day before. And this was wholly indicative of my general frame of
mind in the connection. My preconceptions were strong. I had vision
of a bare, dimly lighted room in the far recess of an unfrequented
building, a room reached by dusty stairs and long, dark corridors,
closely guarded by sentries, whose duty was to demand the countersign
from those who entered and to give warning of danger in an emergency,
so that the inmates might escape by secret passages to the street.

I had made frequent inquiries of the men whom I met, and it was from
one of these that I learned that the time was Sunday afternoon; but
none of them knew the place nor seemed to take the smallest interest
in the matter. I thought that a policeman might be able to put me on
the track of the meeting, if he chose, but then I feared that there
were even chances that he would “run me in” as a revolutionary, upon
hearing my request. I concluded that if I should be so fortunate as
to find the place, it would be by some happy chance; and that if I
gained admission, it would be by a happier one, due largely to my
rough appearance.

I pictured this rude hall thronged with men, grizzled, bearded men,
with eyes aflame and hair dishevelled, listening in high excitement to
leaders whose inflammatory speeches lashed them into fury against all
established order. Curiosity kindled to liveliest interest under the
free play of imagination. In my eagerness I grew bolder. Repeatedly I
stopped workingmen upon the street, and asked to be directed. No one
knew, until I chanced upon a man who had a vague suspicion that the
Socialists met in a hall over a saloon somewhere in West Lake Street.

I crossed the river and passed under the dark-steel framework of the
elevated railway. The snow was falling through the still, sooty air
in heavy flakes, which clung to every exposed surface, and turned the
street-slime into a dark, granular slush. It seemed to be a region of
warehouses and cheap shops, but chiefly of saloons; scarcely a soul
was to be seen on the pavements; and brooding over the long, deserted
street was the decorous quiet of Sunday.

I quickened my pace to overtake three men in front of me. Before I
caught up with them they disappeared through a door which opened on
the pavement. It was that of a saloon. The shades were drawn, and
the place, like all the others of its kind, had every appearance
of being closed for the day. I tried the door, and, finding it
unlocked, followed the men inside. They had already mingled in a group
of workingmen who sat about a large stove in the far corner of the
bar-room, drinking beer and talking quietly.

They did not notice me until the one of whom I inquired appealed to
the others for some knowledge of the question. Then there was a moment
of passing the inquiry from one to another, until a good-looking young
workman spoke up.

“Why, I know,” he said; “I’ve just come from there. It’s over in
Waverley Hall, corner of Lake and Clark.”

“Will you help me to get into the meeting?” I asked. “I am a stranger
here, and I should very much like to go.”

“There ain’t no trouble,” he responded; “you just go up two flights of
steps from the street, and walk right in.”

It was even as he said. At the level of the first landing was a
restaurant, with a strikingly fine portrait of Burns near the entrance.
My curiosity was at a high pitch when I reached the second landing. It
was ill-lighted, and it opened first into an almost dark store-room,
in whose deep recesses were great stacks of chairs. But a single step
to the right brought one to the wide-open door of Waverley Hall and a
company of Socialists in full session. A man sat beside the door with
a small table before him, on which in neat array were some attractive
paper editions for sale. My eye fell in passing upon “The Fabian
Essays,” and Thorold Rogers’s “Six Centuries of Work and Wages,” and an
English version of Schäffle’s “Quintessence of Socialism.”

“May I go in?” I asked of the man.

“Oh, certainly,” he replied. “Walk right in, and take any vacant seat
you choose.”

I thanked him, and walked up a central aisle with rows of seats on
either side, where sat from two or three hundred men and a few women.
By the time that I had found a seat half way to the daïs, at the far
end of the hall, where sat the chairman of the meeting, I was already
deeply interested in the speech of a man who stood facing the company
from the side, with his back against the wall. Slender and of medium
height, with sandy hair slightly touched with gray, with an expression
of ready alertness on his intelligent face, he was speaking fluently in
good, well articulated English, and with deep conviction his evident
inspiration.

“What we want is education,” he was saying; “an education which will
enlighten the capitalistic class as well as our own. We serve no useful
end in denouncing the capitalists. They, like us, are simply a product
of the competitive system, and individually many of them are good and
generous men. But we shall be furthering the cause of Socialism in
trying to show them their share of the evils under which we all live.
How that, for example, owing to the present organization of society, in
spite of all the safeguards which entrench private property, not even a
capitalist can feel assured that his children or grandchildren may not
be beggars upon the streets.”

Such views, it seemed to me, at least suggested some catholicity of
mind in “the Peddler,” as the speaker afterward declared himself to
be. When he took his seat several men were on their feet at once,
appealing to the chair, and I saw that the meeting was well in hand,
for the chairman instantly singled out one for the privilege of the
floor, addressing him politely by name, prefixing, however, the title
“Comrade,” much as “Citizen” was used in the French Revolution and
after.

The well-grown muscular, intelligent workingman was the dominant type
among them, but the general average in point of respectability was so
high that it gave to the company rather the appearance of a gathering
of the _bourgeoisie_ than of proletarians. Had the proportion between
men and women been reversed, without change of average status, I might
have been in a prayer-meeting. But the prayer-meeting in sustaining the
resemblance would have been one of marked vitality.

Speeches were following one another in quick succession. Some were
good and some were vapid; some were in broken English, and others were
in English more than broken; but all were surcharged with the kind of
earnestness which captivates attention. Irresistibly at times one was
reminded of the propaganda of a new faith. Much was said the meaning of
which I could not catch, but the spirit of it all was not far to seek.
Here there was no cant; there was room for none. These men believed
that they had hold of a truth which is regenerating society. In the
face of a world deep-rooted in an individualistic organization of
industry and of social order, they preached a gospel of collectivism,
with unbounded belief in its ultimate triumph.

At times there was a malignant animus in what they said, when argument
was enforced from sources of personal experience; for men would speak
with the intensity of feeling of those who know what hunger is and what
it is to hear their children cry for bread, while within their sight
is the wasteful luxury of the rich. But a certain earnest moderateness
of speech was far more common, and it sometimes revealed a breadth of
view and an acquaintance with economics which to me were astonishing.

Yet, after all, it was the personal note that they touched most
effectively in what they said. Strong, sturdy men, with every mark
upon them of workmanlike efficiency, spoke feelingly of the relation,
which they said, was growing up between what they called “the two great
classes of society,” the employing and the employed. They declared the
wage-earner essentially a “wage-slave” under present conditions, and
they contrasted his lot unfavorably with that of an actual bondsman.
The chattel-slave, they said, his master buys outright, and having
made him thus a part of his invested capital, he shields him, out of a
purely selfish motive, it is true, yet shields him, from bodily harm.
But not the body of an industrial slave, merely his capacity for work,
his employer buys, and he may drive him to the exhaustion of his last
power of endurance, knowing perfectly well that, should he wreck him
physically, the labor market would instantly supply a hundred men eager
to take the vacant place on the same terms. And it is little relief
to the feelings of the wage-slave, they added, to be assured that he
is not sold, but is free to sell his labor in the open market, when
he recalls the hard necessity that conditions that freedom. It was
interesting to find them paraphrasing, as Old Pete had done in the
logging camp, the dictum of Carlyle--

“Liberty, I am told, is a divine thing. Liberty, when it becomes the
liberty to die by starvation, is not so divine.”

Then, as an expression of the belief of the gathering, a member
introduced a resolution which pronounced it to be a truth in the
relation of the individual to society, that “in case a man, acting upon
the theory that society owes him a living, should refuse to work, and
should steal, _he_ would be a criminal, and ought to be deprived of his
personal liberty and be forced to work. But in case a man, acting upon
the theory that society owes him a chance to earn a living, should find
no opportunity, and should, therefore, be forced to steal, _society_
would be the criminal, and ought to furnish the remedy.”

The resolution was passed unanimously and with much show of approval.
But I was more interested in its introducer. He was a curious departure
from the prevailing type; short and straight and slender, with a small,
thin face whose skin was like old, exquisite, wrinkled parchment.
His bright eyes, set close together, moved ceaselessly as though
sensitive to a certain mental restlessness; a thin aquiline nose
curved delicately in the nostrils above a gray mustache which half
concealed a thin-lipped mouth of uncertain drawing. Over all was a
really fine, dome-like brow, quite bald and polished, while from the
sides and back of his head there grew a mass of iron-gray hair which
fell curling to his shoulders. I shall take the liberty of calling
him “the Poet.” There was a nervous grace in his movements, and a
thorough self-possession in his manner, and a quality of cultivation
and refinement in his voice and speech, which were clearly indicative
of breeding and education and of native talent. Yet his position
among the Socialists seemed not at all that of a distinctive leader;
he was simply one of the company, on terms of perfect equality, and
he addressed the others and was himself addressed with the fraternal
“Comrade” in all the intimacy of primitive Christianity. It was with
instant anticipation of the pleasure of it that I learned from the
announcements that the Poet would read, in an early meeting, a paper on
the burning question of the opening of the World’s Fair on Sundays.

A woman sat near the front. I had seen her in frequent whispered
consultation with the chairman, whom I shall call “the Leader,” and
with the Poet and the Peddler and other members who sat about her, and
I judged that she was high in the councils of the Socialists, and I
shall name her “the Citizeness.”

In the midst of the applause which marked the passage of the
resolution, she was on her feet--a dark, portly woman of middle
age, dressed very simply in black, bearing herself with an air of
accustomedness which showed that she was by no means a novice on the
floor, and speaking, when quiet was restored, with a directness and
an unaffected ease which had in them no loss of femininity. But you
had only to watch closely in order to see nature avenge herself in a
certain self-assertation which the Citizeness felt forced at times
to assume, for the sake of emphasis, and in a certain very feminine
straining after the sarcastic.

[Illustration: IN THE MIDST OF THE APPLAUSE WHICH MARKED THE PASSAGE OF
THE RESOLUTION, SHE WAS ON HER FEET.]

She held a newspaper in her hand, and from it, she said, she wished to
read a fragment of a speech made by Mr. ---- to a large gathering of
his subordinates in the administration of a railway system of which he
is the president.

It was a short paragraph, in the characteristic, oratorical English of
that genial railway president when he becomes serious, and its purport
was simply a charge to those who bear to workingmen the relation of
authoritative direction to treat them with the utmost consideration.
“These are anxious times,” he said, substantially, “and there are grave
indications which go to show that workingmen are increasingly regarding
themselves as a class apart and their interests as being antagonized
by those of their employers. All employers and directors of labor in
all personal contact with their men should, therefore, exercise the
greatest care in their treatment of them, to the end that these men may
not be made to feel unnecessarily what is distasteful to them in their
condition of subordination.”

“That,” said the Citizeness, “is a significant sign of the times. I
have rarely seen words which indicate more clearly the growing frame of
mind of the capitalists. They are beginning to wake up to the fact of
danger. Oh, yes, when it begins to be a question of self-preservation
they show signs of some knowledge of the actual situation! But just
see how foxy they are. Mr. ---- does not tell his fellow-employers to
treat their men well because they ought to, and he doesn’t talk any
foolishness about the interests of labor and capital being identical.
He knows better than that. He knows perfectly well that the men in the
employ of his corporation are wage-slaves. He knows it a good deal
better than most of the men themselves know it. And what he is telling
his fellow-capitalists, who are beginning to feel alarm over the
situation, is this, that in all their treatment of their men they must
make a point of disguising from them their real condition of servitude.
Keep them in servitude, of course, but by all possible means keep them
in ignorance of it, for the greatest danger to the existing order of
things lies in an awakening of workingmen, and already there are signs
of such an awakening, and ‘the times’ are, therefore, ‘anxious.’”

Tumultuous applause followed this sally. It expressed the prevalent
thought as no word of the afternoon had done. “Capital conspiring to
maintain the existing bondage of labor--growing anxious at symptoms
of dawning intelligence among its slaves, and disclosing, in a moment
of unguarded anxiety, its real spirit through a feigned one!” “What
clearer proof of the truth could be asked?” men seemed to say, as they
looked eagerly into one another’s faces, and kept on applauding.

Before the noise subsided the Peddler again had gained the floor. He
harked back to his original theme of “education,” and was showing its
applicability to the situation from the new point of view.

“The greatest obstacle to Socialism,” he exclaimed, with
some vehemence, “is the brute ignorance among ourselves, the
working-classes. And the greatest bulwark of the cruel, crushing,
competitive anarchy under which we suffer and die is this same
ignorance of the workers. It is not organized capital that blocks the
way of Socialism, for organized capital is unconsciously hastening
the day when all capital will be organized under the common ownership
of all the people. It is the dead weight of poor, blinded, befooled
wage-slaves which hangs like an incubus about the neck of Socialism.
It is through this that the truth must make its way, and will make its
way, until workingmen at last awake to an acceptance of that which so
long has been striving with them to get itself accepted.

“But alas! alas! how slow the process is! And through what density of
ignorance and indifference and prejudice must the light shine!

“Sitting in the street-car beside me, as I rode down this afternoon,
was a workingman whom I know well. I invited him to come to this
meeting with me. I told him that we were going to talk about matters
which concerned him deeply. And what did he say? Why, he laughed in
my face, and said that he did not see much sense in talking about
such things, and that he preferred putting in his Sunday afternoon
at the ‘mat-in-ee,’ and having a good laugh. Poor, miserable wretch!
working like a galley-slave through the week, and caring for nothing
on his day of rest but an extra allowance of sleep, and then further
forgetfulness of his daily lot in the crowds and the lights and the
illusions and heart-breaking fun of the cheap theatres. All that
remains for him then is to go home drunk, and get up the next morning
to the twofold hell of his common life.”

It was growing dark within the hall, and the meeting was quietly
adjourned until the next Sunday. But the members were slow in leaving.
They formed into small groups, and went on discussing earnestly the
topics of the afternoon, as they stood among the benches, or moved
slowly toward the door.

The street-lights were burning with flickering, dancing effect through
the falling snow, and under them great crowds of working-people came
streaming through the wide-open doors of the theatres, swarming upon
the pavements and in the street-cars, well-dressed, and quiet in the
pre-occupation of pleasure-seekers homeward bound, and not a little
impatient for early transportation.

I walked alone in the direction of the lodging-house. Deep is the
spell of real conviction, and the thoughts of these working-people,
all alive with belief, were passing warm and glowing through my mind.
That there are multitudes of workers who are looking earnestly for a
better social order, and who intelligently and firmly believe in its
possibility, I had known, but never before had I felt the inspiration
of actual contact with them.

And the fascination of their point of view! “A world full of want
and misery and cruelty, by reason, most of all, of the wasteful war
of competition between man and his brother man in the wilderness of
anarchical production in which the people blindly wander; while over
against them, awaiting their occupation, is a promised land of peace
and plenty, where poverty and want, and their attendant miseries and
tendencies to moral evil, will be unknown, if men can but be induced to
cross the Jordan which separates lawless competition from intelligent
and provident co-operation.”

How quick and sure is such an appeal to the human heart! It is the
world-old charm, charming men anew. A royal road at last, a wide gate
and a broad way leading unto life! The way of salvation made easy! It
is the Patriarchs again trusting to their sacrifices; the old Jews
to circumcision and the blood of Abraham; the spiritually blinded
Christians to their outward symbols; and all of them deaf to that
truest word of all philosophy, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.”

It is so easy to conceive of some change in outward conditions, some
“remedy,” some “solution” for the ills from which we suffer, and
which, having been accepted, would lift life to a plane of harmonious
and frictionless movement, and set us free henceforth to follow our
own wills and purposes and desires. And it is so supremely difficult
to realize that the way of life lies not that way at all, not in the
pursuit of happiness nor in the fulfilment of our own wills, but in
realizing that the universe is governed by laws of right and justice
and truth, and in bringing our wills into subjection to those laws and
our actions into harmony with them.

One of these laws, I take it, is the law “the universal brotherhood of
man.” And it is by the practical denial of this law in the dealing of
men with their fellow-men that much of the world’s cruelest misery has
been caused, and much of the seed of terrible retribution has been sown.

It was their firm belief in the truth of brotherhood which gave to
the words of the Socialists their greatest strength and charm. It was
plainly fundamental to all their views. Ignorance and prejudice and
unphilosophical thinking warped their expressed ideas and made their
speeches very human, but yet in them all was this saving hold on
truth, a living belief in the solidarity of the human race and in the
responsibilities which grow out of the bond of universal kinship.

At the corner near my lodging-house I stood still for a few moments
watching the deft movements of two young children who were busy near
the curb. The long, wide street lay a field of glistening diamonds
where the blue-white electric light was reflected from the snow. A
drunken man reeled past me, tracking the untrodden snow at the sides
of the beaten path along the centre of the pavement. A dim alley at
my right lost itself in almost impenetrable darkness, on the verge of
which a small wooden house appeared tottering to ruin and as though the
weight of the falling snow were hastening its end. From out the alley
came the figures of three young women who were laughing gayly as they
crossed the street in company and walked on toward the post-office.
The street was very still and lonely for that quarter, and the two
little girls worked diligently, talking to each other, but oblivious
apparently to everything but their task. I drew nearer to see what they
were doing. A street-light shone strong and clear above them, and they
were in the path of a broad stream of yellow glare that poured from the
windows of a cheap chop-house. They were at work about a barrel which
stood on the curb. I could see that it was full of the refuse of the
eating-house. Scraps of meat and half-eaten fragments of bread and of
vegetables lay mixed with bones and egg-shells and vegetable skins in a
pulpy ooze, rising to the barrel rim and overflowing upon the pavement
and in the gutter. An old wicker basket, with paper covering its ragged
holes, rested between the children, and into this they dropped selected
morsels of food. The larger girl was tall enough to see over the top
of the barrel, and so she worked there, and I saw her little hands
dive into the soft, glutinous mass after new treasures. The smaller
one could only crouch upon the pavement and gather thence and from the
gutter what edible fragments she could find. I watched them closely.
The older child was dressed in thin, ragged cotton, black with filth,
and her matted, stringy hair fell from her uncovered head about a lean,
peaked face that was as dirty almost as her dress. She wore both shoes
and stockings, but the shoes were far too large for her, and through
their gaping holes the cold and wet entered freely. Her sister was
more interesting to me. She was a child of four or five. The snow was
falling upon her bare brown curls and upon the soft white flesh of her
neck, and over the damp, clinging, threadbare dress, through which
I could trace the delicate outlines of an infant’s figure. Her warm
breath passed hissing through chattering teeth in the intervals between
outbursts of a deep, hoarse cough which shook her frame. Through the
streaking dirt upon her hands appeared in childish movement the dimples
above the knuckles, and the dainty fingers, red and cold and washed
clean at their tips in the melting snow, had in them all the power and
mystery of the waxen baby touch.

With the quick illusion of childhood they had turned their task into a
game, and they would break into exclamations of delight as they held up
to each other’s view some discovered morsel which the finder claimed to
be the best.

“What are you going to do with these scraps?” I asked of the older
child.

Her bloodless lips were trembling with the cold, and her small, dark
eyes appeared among the shreds of tangled hair with an expression
in them of a starved pariah whose cherished bone is threatened. She
clasped the basket with both hands and half covered it with her little
body.

“Don’t you touch it!” she said, fiercely, while her anxious eyes
searched the street in hope of succor.

[Illustration: “DON’T YOU TOUCH IT!” SHE SAID, FIERCELY.]

It was easy to reassure her, and then she spoke freely.

“Ma sent us to get some grub for supper,” she explained. “Ma’s got
three boarders, only two of ’em ain’t paid nothing for a month, and pa,
he’s drunk. He ain’t got no job, but he went out to shovel snow to-day,
and ma thought he’d bring her some money, but he came home drunk. She’s
mindin’ the baby, and she sent us for grub. She’d lick us if we didn’t
find none; but I guess she won’t lick us now, will she? That’s where
we live,” and one little chapped finger pointed down the alley to the
crumbling hovel in the dark.

The children were ready to go home, and I lifted the younger girl into
my arms. Her sister walked beside us with the basket in her hand. The
little one lay soft and warm against me. After the first moment of
surprise, she had relaxed with the gentle yielding of a little child,
and I could feel her nestle close to me with the trustful ease which
thrills one’s inmost heart with feeling for which there are no words.

We opened the shanty door. It was difficult at first to make out the
room’s interior. Dense banks of tobacco-smoke drifted lazily through
foul air in the cheerful light of a small oil-lamp. Shreds of old
wall-paper hung from dark, greasy plaster, which was crumbling from
the walls and ceiling and which lay in accumulations of lime-dust
upon a rotting wooden floor. A baby of pallid, putty flesh was crying
fretfully in the arms of a haggard, slatternly woman of less than
thirty years, who sat in a broken chair, rocking the baby in her arms
beside a dirty wooden table, on which were strewn fragments of broken
pottery and unwashed forks and spoons and knives. A rough workman,
stripped to his shirt and trousers, sat smoking a clay pipe, his bare
feet resting in the oven of a rusty cooking-stove in which a fire was
smouldering. Upon a heap of rags in one corner lay a drunken man asleep.

“We’ve got some grub, ma!” cried the older child, in a tone of success,
as she ran up to her mother with the basket. “Riley’s barrel was full
to-night.”

[Illustration: “WE’VE GOT SOME GRUB, MA!” CRIED THE OLDER CHILD, IN A
TONE OF SUCCESS, AS SHE RAN UP TO HER MOTHER WITH THE BASKET. “RILEY’S
BARREL WAS FULL TO-NIGHT.”]

       *       *       *       *       *

In the continued search for work through the succeeding day it was
natural to drift early into the employment bureaus. Clark and I made
a careful round of these, he in search of employment at his trade and
I of any job that offered. Here, too, however, we were but units in
the great number of seekers. Some of the agencies offered for a small
fee and a nominal price of transportation to ship us to the farther
West or to the Northwest and insure us employment with gangs of
day-laborers, but of work in Chicago they could promise none.

In the course of a day last week, as I was going about alone, I was
attracted by the prominent sign of an employment bureau, on the
West Side, which we had not visited so far. It was the conventional
bureau, much like the office of a steamship company. It occupied
the floor above the basement, reached by a flight of steps from the
pavement; a row of wooden chairs stood along the outer wall; a wooden
partition extended down the centre of the room, with a door and two
windows in it. The hour was noon and the office was deserted but for a
comparatively young man of florid face and close-set, light-brown eyes,
thin hair, and a bristling mustache clipped close above his mouth. He
was at work upon his books behind one of the windows. With a direct,
matter-of-fact glance he looked me over, and then his eye sought the
place on the open page held by his finger.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“I am looking for work,” I said. “Have you any employment to offer?”

“What kind of work?”

“I am a day-laborer,” I replied.

“Nothing,” he said, laconically, and his eye followed the finger as
it moved across the open page.

I waited for a moment, thinking that he might say more, but he remained
silent at his work.

“If not in Chicago, perhaps you can put me in the way of work near
here,” I ventured.

“Young man,” he said, and his clear, cold eyes were looking straight
into mine, “Young man, we can’t get enough of you fellows in the spring
and summer time; we have to go to you and beg you to go to work. You’re
mighty independent then, and you don’t give a damn for us. But it’s our
turn now. You can do some begging now and see how you like it. It’s
good enough for you. No, there ain’t a job that I know of in Chicago
that you can get, unless it is in the sewers, and you ain’t fit for
that.”

“But give me a chance at it,” I urged.

“I wouldn’t take the responsibility,” he answered. “It would kill a man
of your build in a week, and you couldn’t pass the first inspection,
anyway.” And so ended my efforts through the employment agencies.

The newspapers are always an unfailing resort, as a hopeful source of
information of any demand for labor. A newspaper in the very early
morning, before the city is astir, is a treasure, for any clew to work
can then be promptly followed up with some chance of one’s being the
first to apply. Papers are to be had in abundance later in the day in
public reading-rooms and about railway stations and hotel-corridors.
It is, however, the newspaper damp from press that is most valuable
to us, and between us and its possession is often the insuperable
barrier of its price. The journals which early post their issues upon
bulletin-boards are public benefactors, and about these boards in the
early dawn often there are groups of men who study closely the “want
columns.”

A very little experience was enough to disclose the fact that there
is a wide difference in the character of these notices in different
newspapers. In some issues the want-column is very short, but the
statements bear every mark of genuineness; in others it is promisingly
long, but, when carefully analyzed, it proves to be chiefly a
collection of decoys for the unwary. The city seems to be full of men
and women seeking employment. Not only are there the penniless common
workmen of my class, whose number must be reckoned in many thousands,
and among whom the professionally idle form, of course, a large
percentage, but there are multitudes of mechanics and skilled workers,
of whom Clark is a type. And beyond these is an army of seekers after
salaried posts like those of clerks and bookkeepers and the various
subordinate positions of business and professional life. Not all were
penniless when they began their search for work there. Hundreds of
them had a little store of money when their last employment gave out,
or they brought with them when they came their savings, which they
hopefully counted upon to last until a new place had been found.

How large a body of sharpers live by preying upon the credulity of
these classes it would be difficult to discover, as it also would be
difficult to discover all the tricks of their trade. The craft of
the bunco-steerers is certainly well known, and yet it perennially
finds its victims, and largely, no doubt, among the classes of whom
I am speaking. But there are other snares, less sudden but quite as
disastrous as those of the bunco-steerers, and far more insidious,
since they have about them the apparent sanction of legitimate
business. It is these that make most open use of the want-columns of
certain of the newspapers. Agencies are advertised, and in them, after
the payment of a small fee and the purchase of the needed outfit, large
earnings are guaranteed as the result of putting some product upon
the market. Opportunities are offered for the investment of a little
capital--sums as low as five and ten dollars are solicited--and immense
returns are promised. Requests for men are made in urgent terms:
“Wanted--three--five--seven men at once. Steady employment guaranteed;
good pay. No previous experience necessary. Apply at No. -- ----
Street, second floor front.”

One morning I marked a dozen or more of these notices in one newspaper,
and carefully made the rounds of the addresses given. In every case
I found an establishment which purported to do business at coloring
photographs. I was offered employment in each instance. The conditions
were as uniform as those governing a regular market. Two dollars was
the invariable fee for being taught the secret of the process. One
dollar would purchase the needed materials.

There was always a strong demand, enough to insure abundant work until
spring. “Our agents are sending in large orders all the time,” was
the conventional explanation. “You can soon learn to color ten or
twelve photographs in a day, and we will pay you at the rate of three
dollars a dozen for them.” The discovery that I had no money invariably
brought the interview abruptly to an end in an atmosphere which cooled
suddenly. I met many actual victims of these devices; one will serve as
a type.

We both had been sitting for some time on a crowded bench in the lobby
of a lodging-house. Each was absorbed in his own “bitterness,” and
oblivious to the presence of other men and to the tumult of the room.
My companion was cheerfully responsive when I spoke to him, and we
both accepted gladly the relief of an interchange of confidence. He
was three days beyond the end of his resources. So far he had been
fortunate in securing the cost of food and the price of a ten-cent
lodging, and had not yet been forced to the station-house. But on that
evening, for the first time, he had learned of the station lodging. It
loomed for him as the logic of events, and he dreaded it. It was of
this that he was thinking gloomily when I spoke to him.

Born and bred in the country, he had grown up in ignorance, not of
hard, honest work, nor altogether of books, but of the world. He had
lived at home and worked on his father’s farm and attended the winter
sessions of the district school until he was sixteen, when his father
and mother died, and the farm and all of their possessions were sold to
pay the mortgage, and he was left penniless. Then he worked for other
farmers for two years, and studied as best he could. Finally he secured
a “second-grade certificate” to teach school, and he had taught in
the winter sessions for two years, working as a farm-hand through the
summers.

His coming to Chicago was a stroke of ambition. A post as a salesman
or a bookkeeper could be got, he had felt sure, if he was persistent
enough in his search, and this, he thought, would serve him as a
starting-point to a business career. He had counted upon a long, hard
search for place, and so he had come forearmed with his savings, which,
when he reached Chicago, more than two months before this evening,
amounted to a little over fifty dollars when he found himself in
lodgings in a decent flat on Division Street.

He paid at first two dollars a week for a room which contained a bed
and bureau and a wash-stand, and which was warmed by a small oil-stove.
There was a strip of carpet on the floor, and a shade at the window
which looked out upon an alley and the blank brick wall of a house
opposite. The bed-linen was changed once in two weeks. In addition
to that outlay he was spending, on an average, fifty cents a day for
food and an occasional dime in car-fare. All this was luxury. His last
lodging, before he was forced upon the street, was a seventy-five-cent
closet in a house on Meridian Street, on the West Side. The room
contained a cot with an old mattress and some blankets, and there was a
soap-box on end which would hold a lamp. He was obliged to wash himself
at the sink in the public passage.

There had been an analogous change in the range of employment sought.
All idea of a mercantile post had been at last abandoned, and he was in
for any honest living to which his hands could help him.

It was when he had broken his last five-dollar note that he made
once more the rounds of the doubtful offices which offer work. A
photograph-coloring establishment was his final choice. He paid the
fee of two dollars, received the instructions, which were very simple,
purchased for a dollar a box of materials, accepted half a dozen
photographs to begin upon, and then went to his room with his mind made
up to succeed at the work if there was any success in it.

With utmost patience and care he practised upon the pictures.
Difficulties in the process arose against which he had not been warned.
He went for further instructions and was given them willingly. After
nearly three days of almost constant industry he finished the six
photographs. These were to yield him a dollar and a half, and he took
them with a sense of achievement to the office. His employer examined
them and good-naturedly pointed out certain defects which he was asked
to remedy. The remedy seemed simple, but he saw at a glance that, in
reality, it would require his undoing practically all his work and
performing it over again, at a great risk of ruining the photographs in
the attempt.

He thought that he saw an escape from that, so he proposed to his
employer that the alterations should be made at the establishment;
that he himself should be paid nothing for the first work, but that
he should be given a second lot of pictures to color. The man agreed
instantly, and handed to him a fresh package containing half a dozen
photographs. These he carried back to his room. When he undid the
wrapper he found that he had been given a job which would require at
least a week to finish. Each photograph was unlike the others. Besides
one or two more or less difficult human figures in each, there were
elaborate backgrounds of draperies and rustic benches and potted
plants. He took the package back and asked for something simpler--more
within his power as a beginner. His employer explained to him
cheerfully that he had nothing else just then, but that he was sure of
easier work for him by the time that he had finished this.

The poor fellow walked out into the street knowing that he had been
swindled out of three dollars and three days’ hard work, and that
penniless now, he must take up the search again, and that there was no
redress for him.

Several times after this I saw him and I pressed upon him each time
the plan of returning to his former home in northern Indiana, or
striking out anywhere into the open country, where his intelligence and
his former experience would stand him in good stead, and where he would
probably not have to look long for a job. This was keenly distasteful
to him, for it would be a tacit acknowledgment of defeat, and the man
was not without courage and pluck. I met him last one early morning
after his first night as a lodger in a station-house. His eyes were
starting from his head, and he wore the wild, hunted look which I had
watched with alarm in Clark. He would scarcely stop to talk. He was off
for the open country and his former home.

       *       *       *       *       *

Before many days had passed Clark and I began to lose the sense of
being recruits in the army of the unemployed. We soon acquired the
feeling of veterans, and with it a certain naturalness as of long
habit. It is not a little strange how swift this adjustment is. We
fell into some of the ways of the other men with an ease which seemed
to imply a long antecedent wont. This was after Clark had despaired of
work in a foundry, and had reached the level of willingness to sweep a
crossing for a living, if only he could get the job.

One of the habits which came most readily to us was to join the crowds
which stand in the early morning about the gates of large productive
institutions. Sometimes a superintendent finds himself short-handed of
common labor in a permanent department of the work or for an emergency,
and he sends a foreman out to the gates to secure the needed men. This
happens very rarely, if I may judge from our experience; and yet, upon
so slender a chance as this, hundreds of men stand each day in the
market-places for labor, waiting hopefully for some husbandman in want
of workers.

Clark and I soon made a considerable round. One morning we were at the
gates of the Exposition grounds, another at the Stock-yards, and then
at various factory gates on the West Side.

We were up at five one clear, cold morning near the middle of December,
in order to try our luck at the gates of a factory which lies four
miles or more from the heart of the city. It was no great hardship to
set off without a breakfast, for we had supped heartily on the night
before, and had gladly spent our remaining cash for beds in preference
to sleeping in the station-house.

Out of a cloudless sky blew a strong, dry, northwest wind across the
snowless prairies, and it cut sharply, at right angles, through the
long diagonal street which we followed to the far southwest. We did
not loiter, for it took our fastest gait to keep us warm. The buildings
shielded us in part, but around the corners the wind caught us with its
unchecked force, and enveloped us often in clouds of driven dust which
rose from the surface of the frozen streets. There was exhilaration in
the walk; when we reached the centre of the viaduct which carries Blue
Island Avenue across the various lines of railway which enter the city
between Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets, we were in the full, unimpeded
gale, and looking back we could see across the dark city the first
slender shafts of light dimming the eastern stars.

It was still dark when we reached the factory gates, for the better
part of an hour remained before the sun would be well up, and it was
almost half an hour before the beginning of the day’s work. We were
not the first to be on hand. Already there were groups of men who
stood before the fast-closed gate, or stamped slowly up and down on
the sleepers of the railway which enters the factory yard, or gathered
for shelter behind the walls of neighboring buildings. The number of
these men was growing fast. I thought at first that many of them were
employees waiting for the morning opening of the factory. But when
the heavy gate moved down its groove in answer to the keeper’s push,
disclosing the open area of the factory yard and the long platforms
flanking the warehouses, this company of waiting men, grown now to
eighty or a hundred strong, stood against the high board fence and
along the edges of a great stream of workingmen, which began to pour
with increasing volume through the narrow way. A bell sounded from
the factory tower, and you could hear the first slow movements of the
piston-rods, and the answering stir among the fly-wheels as they warmed
to swifter motion, and the straps and pulleys tuning up to the canticle
of the working-day.

[Illustration: WAITING FOR A JOB OUTSIDE THE FACTORY GATES.]

The sudden on-rush of factory-hands was almost a miracle. Men seemed
to rise as by magic from the soil. They streamed from neighboring
tenements, and along the wooden sidewalks, and from out the horse-cars
which came down the streets loaded to the couplers. They had grown
to the number of an army, and in rough, uneven, changing ranks they
walked briskly, five, six, nine men abreast, while the bell tapped
off nervously the swift approach of seven o’clock. Two men seated in
a buggy drove their horse slowly into the thick of the crowd, which
deflected at the gate to let them pass, and then closed in behind with
increased momentum. The superintendent of the factory stepped down
from the buggy and climbed the staircase to his office.

The converging lines of workmen made denser the mass that pressed
quickly through the gate. There was little speech among them, and the
noise they made was the shuffling, broken step of an unorganized crowd.
But there was not wanting the inspiration of a moving throng of men.
Some of them were old and much bent with pain and labor, and there were
boys in the crowd who could be but little beyond their first decade
of life, but the great body of the hands were young men between the
ages of twenty and thirty-five. One could trace upon these faces all
the stages of life’s handicraft, in distorting human countenances into
grotesque variations from all normal types of beauty, and bringing out
upon them, in infinite variety, individual expressions of aggressive
power and the strength which comes of long endurance. Ah, the hideous
ugliness of the race to which we belong, and yet the more than beauty
of it in the strong lines it bears of honest work faithfully done and
of pain and sorrow bravely borne!

With the last sharp ringing of the bell there was a sudden rush of
the living stream of workers, and then it abruptly ceased, and we,
the unemployed, stood at both sides along the high board fence, like
so much useless foam tossed off by the swift current which had poured
through the narrow gate. The keeper began a monotonous march up and
down the opening before his sentry-box. He was a muscular, blue-eyed
Irishman of fifty-five or sixty, and he was in no wise ignorant of
his business. There was nothing to indicate that he was aware of the
presence of the crowd of expectant men, until some of us pressed too
near to the gate in our anxiety to catch sight of a foreman in search
of extra hands, and then he ordered us back with a violence which
showed that we were one of the pests of his existence.

From some unseen quarter of the factory yard a closely covered
wagon suddenly appeared. The paymaster presently descended from the
superintendent’s office, and entering the wagon, he was driven to the
gate, where a halt was made while two loaded revolvers were handed to
him by the porter, in full view of the idle men, and then he was driven
rapidly up the avenue toward the city.

It was the usual heterogeneous crowd that lingered there about the
gate. Most of them were Irishmen, I think, and there were certainly
Italians and Scandinavians and some Welshmen, and even a few Polish
Jews, while Clark and I, so far as I could judge, were the only native
born. Not all of them could have been in the homeless plight in which
we were, and there was scarcely a case of insufficient clothing among
them, while many seemed to be habitual workmen who knew the decencies
of home and of some home comfort. But there were not wanting men who,
like us, were evidently upon the streets, and not only in dress, but
in face, they suggested those who, if not already of that class, are
swiftly approximating to professional tramps.

There was wonderful stillness in the crowd, which now had broken into
small groups. A conscious tension possessed us, as of nervous watching
for an uncertain event. Men spoke to one another in low tones scarcely
above a whisper. An hour passed with nothing to break the monotony of
its long anxiety. We were fairly shielded from the wind, and the sun
had risen high and had begun to lend a generous aid to our efforts at
keeping warm in the frost-bit air. The pale crescent of the waning moon
had almost faded into the clear blue of the western sky. We soon were
aware of the relaxing of tension, and then the men began to drift away
toward other factories, or, disappointed, to their homes, or back to
the aimless living of the streets.

Just then a young Hungarian came among us--a man of twenty-five,
perhaps, short and erect and stocky, with an appearance of great
muscular strength and a nervous quickness of step which was in full
keeping with the wide-eyed inquisitiveness of his round, swarthy face.
He was looking inquiringly at the clusters of loitering men and the
open gate and the stolid porter in apparently heedless guard before it.
I saw his eye sweep the crowd in seeking for a fellow-countryman, for
it was written plain upon him that he was an immigrant and innocent of
any language but his own. One could fairly see his mental process, it
was all so clear: “I am looking for a job in this wide land of freedom
to workingmen. Here is a great factory, and the open gate invites me.
Why waste the time outside? For my part I shall go in at once and see
the boss, and then go quickly on with no loss of time, if I should not
be wanted here.” One foot was just over the steel rail upon which the
sliding gate moves, when, with the swiftness of the spring of a panther
which has been crouching for its prey, the heavy hands of the seemingly
careless watchman were upon his shoulders, and the man was held, amazed
and paralyzed, in a vice-like grip.

“What are you after?” roared the porter in his face.

There was a murmured attempt at speech, and then the laborer was faced
about with a suddenness and force that set his teeth to rattling in
his head, and the porter turned him loose with successive parting
kicks, which seemed to lift the fellow from the ground.

He was tingling with pain as he slunk in among us, but the expression
which he wore was one of strong, appealing bewilderment at the meaning
of it all.

It was over in a moment, and then the cold, cowering, hungry mass of
unhuman humanity at the gate broke into a low, gruff laugh.

It must have been this laugh that stung me to hot fury, for in an
instant I had lost all sense of cold and weariness and hunger, and I
was strong and warm in the wild joy of the lust for blood. With one
hand gripping his hairy throat I was pounding the porter’s eyes with
my right fist in blows whose frequency and precision surprised me into
greater joy. But there was a sudden end of clear memory when, with a
full-armed swing of his huge fist the keeper struck me in the face and
knocked me, limp and almost senseless, upon the planks, where I lay
choking down gulps of blood which flowed from a cut against my teeth.

[Illustration: I WAS STRONG AND WARM IN THE WILD JOY OF THE LUST FOR
BLOOD.]

Clark was bending over me.

“What in -- did you hit him for, you -- fool?” he hissed at me.

“I had a jolly good time doing it,” I explained; and I was sufficiently
recovered to laugh a little at the momentary sport which I had had in
making a fool of myself.

Clark helped me to my feet, and we walked off together, only I could
not walk very far at a stretch. He did not desert me, and he would not
leave the subject of my folly. But he changed his point of view at
length, and acknowledged, finally, that he was “glad that I had got in
a few licks on the porter’s eye,” an emotion which I warmly shared.

That day was chiefly memorable because of Clark’s final success in
finding work. It came from a most unexpected quarter. We were walking
together through Adams Street when a man touched Clark upon the
shoulder and withdrew to the doorway of a shop. Clark recognized him at
once as a foundry superintendent with whom he had been importunate for
work, and his face lighted up with a hopefulness which made the moment
almost tragic. I stood at the doorstep and listened.

“Ain’t you found a job yet?” began the superintendent.

“No.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about your case,” he continued. “We ain’t got
a job for you at the foundry,” he hastened to explain, “but I’ve heard
from a friend of mine in Milwaukee, and they’re short of men in your
line. Could you go up there?”

“I could walk,” said Clark.

“Well, that ain’t necessary. I--I’m good for a ticket,” added the
superintendent, with a look of embarrassment.

And he was as good as his word, for he went with Clark to the station,
where he added to the ticket a dollar, both of which were accepted as a
loan.

Clark was nearly mad with suppressed delight when he met me in the
entrance of the post-office, where he had asked me to await his return.
With his usual generosity he shared his good fortune with me, and,
before we went to the railway station together we had a farewell dinner
on beefsteak and onions and unlimited coffee and bread.

My own success followed Clark’s by only a few days, when I was taken
on as a hand-truckman in a factory on the West Side; but there is one
intervening experience which belongs distinctively to this part of the
general experiment.

I found, one early morning, among a lot of “fake” advertisements, which
I had come to recognize with ease, one notice of “a man wanted” which
rang with genuineness. Applicants were told to report at a certain shop
just without the Stock-yards at twelve o’clock that day. In ample time
I crossed over to Halsted Street and walked in a leisurely way down
that marvellous thoroughfare. It was not new to me, and I was missing
Clark sorely and was experiencing a new phase of the loneliness of
being “left behind.” And yet I could but mark again with fresh interest
the wonders of this great artery of the West Side in the five miles
of its length through which I walked to the appointed number. It is
essentially a cheap street: cheap buildings line it, in which tenants
rent cheap lodgings and shop-keepers employ cheap labor and sell cheap
wares of every kind to those of the poor “whose destruction is their
poverty.” Every sort of structural flimsiness looks down upon you as
you pass: ghastly imitations in stone of real, substantial buildings;
the unblinking fronts of glaring red-brick shells, whose shoddiness is
the more apparent in gaudy shops and in “all the modern improvements”
and in the heavy cotton-lace at the upper windows. And there are wooden
shanties with “false fronts,” after the manner of frontier “cities,”
and wooden hovels with sloping roofs which are far along in process of
decay, and here and there a substantial house which was built upon the
open prairie, and which looks with amazement upon the fungus growth
about it, while struggling pitifully to maintain its dignity in the
uncongenial company which it is forced to keep.

Down miles of such a street I went on sidewalks which were chiefly
rotting planks, with black mire, as of a pig-sty, straining through
the cracks under the pressure of passing feet. The street itself is
paved with cylindrical blocks of wood, ill laid at the beginning, and
having now closely pounded filth between them, while the whole surface
presents an infinite variety of concavities, in which, especially along
the gutters, lay garbage in frozen, shallow cesspools.

A saloon stood on almost every corner, and sometimes I counted seven
pawnbrokers’ signs within the limits of a square. It was interesting
to watch the run of “loan agencies,” and “collateral banks,” and other
euphemisms under which the business was disguised.

Large quantities of provisions lay heaped in baskets and measures
along the pavements in front of grocers’ shops, catching the soot
and the floating dust of the open street. Cheap ready-made and
second-hand garments hung flapping like scare-crows overhead, or
clothed grotesque wooden dummies which stood chained to the shop doors
or to the wood-work below the show-windows. Scores of idle men, with
the unvarying leaden eye and soggy droop of their kind, loungingly
exchanged the comfort of a mutual support with doorposts, chiefly of
saloons. Little children in every stage of condition, from decent
warmth to utter rags, and from wholesome cleanliness to dirt grown
clean in unconsciousness of itself, played about the pavements and in
the gutters, or ran screaming with delight across the street-car lines,
along which the trams moved slowly, drawn by horses with bells tinkling
from the harness.

The first sight of my destination was very reassuring. It was evidently
a shop of the first class. A second glance was disheartening, for
already there were fully thirty men before me, and the number was
increasing. From one of the men employed in the shop I learned that a
man from the packing-house of the firm would be out to see us at the
appointed hour. The appointed hour came and passed, and we waited on,
our numbers grown now to nearly fifty. It was not far from two o’clock
when the man appeared who had been commissioned to see us.

There is no tyranny like the tyranny of a hireling who is puffed up
with momentary authority but who knows nothing of responsibility.
The man who finally came among us was a clerical subordinate, sleek,
clean-shaven, overfed; a man of thirty, dressed as any like Johnnie
of the town, and, except for his slender hold upon the means of
livelihood, no better than most of the men who now hung breathless upon
his words.

He swaggered in among us with a leer and a call across the shop to a
fellow-employee.

“Say, Jim, how’s this for a collection of freaks, all out for a
fifteen-dollar job?”

Jim was silent; he did not see the joke any better than did we, who now
crowded about the clerk.

“Stand off,” he ordered us, with a gesture of impatience and an oath.
“Don’t you fellows come so near. I guess most of you need water more
than you need a job.”

There followed some minutes of such banter, while the clerk looked us
over and examined hastily some letters of recommendation which were
held out to him. Then abruptly, with the air of a busy man chafing at
the useless waste of his valuable time, he withdrew a step or two from
the crowd, and from this coign of vantage he arbitrarily singled out
four men. Having called them aside he ordered them to report at ten
o’clock on the next morning at the packing-house, where a member of the
firm would see them and select one of them for the place, which was
that of general utility man about a private house, at a wage of board
and lodging and fifteen dollars a month.

I was not one of the number. In a few moments the men had all gone
their several ways, but I waited behind, and seeing a chance of
speaking to the clerk alone, I went up to him.

“Would you mind looking at these references?” I asked, and handed out
two, one from the proprietor of the “---- House,” where I had served as
porter, and another from Mr. Hill, the farmer.

“Certainly not,” he said, good-naturedly; and when he had read them he
handed them back to me with the remark that I, too, might call with the
others at ten o’clock.

Under the stone arch which spans the entrance to the Union Stock-yards
I passed unchallenged the next morning. A wooden sidewalk led me
along a miry road which seemed to pierce the centre of the yards. Men
of widely varying ages passed and repassed me, mounted upon branded
mustangs. They were riders who cared nothing for appearance in either
kit or form, but rode with the free grace of cowboys. On every side
were scores of acres of open pens enclosed by stout wooden fences six
palings high, with water and fodder troughs along the sides. From
them came the deep, far lowing of a thousand herds of cattle which
stood crowded in the pens or thinned to a few remaining, all of them
patiently awaiting death. From great covered sheds you could hear the
ceaseless bleating of countless flocks of sheep. From long covered
passages overhead, each an awful bridge of sighs, there came the sharp
clatter of cloven hoofs on wooden planks, along which droves of cattle
were being driven to slaughter. In the distance beyond all this loomed
high the unsightly packing-houses, where, with scientific efficiency
and carefulest economy of materials, daily hecatombs are offered up for
human life.

I soon found my way to the desired office. It was ten o’clock exactly,
and to my great surprise I alone of the five selected men was on hand.
I was told to wait, and a corner near a high desk was indicated as a
place where I might stand. It was in a wide passage along which ranged
inner offices enclosed by ground-glass partitions. Clerks were passing
constantly from one office to another and meeting the requirements of
business errands as they came in. Presently one of them spoke to me,
and learning that I had received no reply from the clerk to whom I had
first made my purpose known, he politely volunteered his services, and
soon brought back word that Mr. ---- would see me in a few minutes.

The few minutes had grown to thirty, when one of the other five men
appeared. He was a fair-haired Swede of five-and-twenty, rather stout
in frame, and dressed all in black, his coat, of the “Prince Albert”
type, falling short of his knees, and disclosing about his neck and
wrists the white of neat linen. With his hair brushed smooth, and one
black-gloved hand grasping a fat umbrella and the other a soft felt
hat, he might have been a divinity student.

We nodded to each other as he took up his stand in another
out-of-the-way quarter of the hall and joined me in waiting for a
summons. Among the passing clerks there presently appeared the one who
had met us on the day before. He was not in bantering mood now, so he
asserted his superiority by ignoring us. The one who had already spoken
to me lost no opportunity as he passed of saying an encouraging word,
assuring us that Mr. ---- would certainly see us before long.

It was a little after twelve when I was finally called into the private
office of Mr. ----. I was rather faint from hunger and stiff from
standing still so long after a long walk.

Mr. ---- sat with his back to a window, in whose full light I stood,
hat in hand.

“You’re after this job I advertised, I understand,” he began.

“Yes.”

“Well, it ain’t no great job; it’s just doin’ chores round the house,
and I can’t afford to pay much for it. Have you ever done work like
that?”

“I have been a porter at a hotel.”

“Have you any recommends?” he asked, sharply. I handed to him the
two already mentioned, and as he read them I watched him with close
interest. Young, alert, intensely energetic, at the head, or near it,
of a prominent house, the controller, in part at least, of an enormous
enterprise, and a considerable personage, no doubt, in his own social
circle, yet his wholesale butchery of swine could scarcely be a
ghastlier slaughter than was his treatment of his mother-tongue.

He looked up at me.

“Say, young fellow, is them all the recommends you have? You was a very
short time at both of them places.”

This fatal defect in my references had never occurred to me, and I
began to stammer explanations which only served to get me into deeper
water. Mr. ---- interrupted me, and handing back my letters, he said:

“You’ll have to bring me something more satisfactory than them,” and
went on with his work.

The young Swede followed me out of the passage.

“Did you get the job?” he asked, in good English.

“No,” I said, “not yet. You have a good chance; you would better wait
until the boss sends for you.”

“I guess not to-day,” he answered, and he stolidly refused my advice,
and I saw him disappear by another way from the Stock-yards.




CHAPTER IV

A HAND-TRUCKMAN IN A FACTORY


                               No. -- BLUE ISLAND AVENUE, CHICAGO,
                                   Wednesday, February 3, 1892.

At half-past five this afternoon I completed seven weeks of service as
a hand-truckman in a factory. Mrs. Schultz, my landlady, tells me that
she is sorry that I am going away; and now that the long-looked-for end
is come, I am not in the least elated, as I thought that I should be.
But the days are lengthening markedly with the promise of the coming
spring, and I am forcefully reminded that the time grows short for the
study at close range of much that still awaits me in this great working
city before I can well set out again upon my westward journey.

Seven weeks as a factory-hand is very little. Like all phases of my
experiment, it is but the lightest touch upon the surface of the life
which I seek to understand. Strong and infinitely appealing are the
basal elements of existence, and yet mysterious, evasive, receding like
a spectre from your craving grasp. And in the secret of its veiled
presence speaks a Voice: “Only through living is it given unto men to
know; none but the heaven-sent may know otherwise. Not by experiment,
but only through the poignancy of real agony and joy is my secret
learned.”

As a witness of certain external conditions and as a sharer in them,
I may tell nothing but the truth, and yet the whole truth reaches far
beyond the compass of my vision--the joys and creature comforts of
men whose birth and breeding and life-long training fit them smoothly
to circumstances which seem to me all friction; the blind human agony
of these men, as necessity bears hard upon them, and, helpless, they
watch the sufferings of their wives and children, and have no hope
nor any escape but death; the unconscious delight in living intensely
in the present with easy adjustment to homely surroundings, and no
anxious thought for the future and no morbid introspection; the sharply
conscious endurance of grim realities, which baffle the untrained
reason and paralyze the will, and make of a strong man a terrified
child in the grip of the superstitious horrors of disease, and loss of
work, and the “bad luck” which plays so large a part in that sordid
thing which he calls life.

For seven weeks I have worked daily in the company of two thousand
hands, and have lived with half a score of them in a tenement-house
near the factory, and yet I am leaving them with but the slenderest
knowledge of their lives.

It was one bitter cold morning a little past the middle of December
that I was taken on. I had had a good supper on the night before and a
sound night’s sleep; and the pleasure of being set to work once more,
of being caught up again into the meaningful movement of men, was
tempered only by a lack of breakfast and a long walk through the cold
gray dawn.

Crist was my boss. Crist is foreman of the gangs of men who load the
box-cars which flank the long platforms beside the warehouses of the
factory. Wide sloping eaves project from the buildings’ sides to a
point nearly over the edge of the platforms, and under these are stored
the new mowers and reapers and harvesters, gay in gorgeous paint, and
reduced to the point of easiest handling, their subordinate parts near
by in compact crates and boxes, all ready for immediate shipment.

The proper loading of the cars is a work requiring great skill and
ingenuity on Crist’s part; for the men it is the mere muscular carrying
out of his directions. Under Crist’s guidance the superficial area of
a car is made to hold an incredible amount. By long practice he has
learned the greatest possible economy of space, in the nice adjustments
of varying bulks, so that each load is a maximum, in point of number,
of complete machines.

[Illustration: LOADING THE BOX-CARS UNDER CRIST’S GUIDANCE.]

There was like shrewdness, I thought, in his handling of the men.
After his first orders to me I came almost not at all under his direct
control through the few days in which I worked in his department. But
I had many opportunities then and later, too, of observing him. A
tall, old, lithe Norwegian, with a certain awkward, lanky efficiency
of movement, he had the mild manner and the soft, low speech of the
hard-of-hearing. He never blustered, certainly, and apparently he never
swore, but the men under him worked without hurry and without intervals
in a way which told superbly in the total work accomplished.

A gang of six or eight laborers under his direction was just beginning
the loading of an empty box-car when I was taken on. They were
stalwart, hardy workmen for the most part, their faces aglow in the
cold, their muscular bodies warmly clothed, and the folded rims of
their heavy woollen caps drawn down to protect their ears. Over their
work-stained overalls some of them wore thick leather aprons which were
darkened and polished by wear to the appearance of well-seasoned
razor-strops, and on their hands they all wore stout gloves or mittens,
which, through long use, had reached a perfect flexibility and fitness
to their work.

“John,” said Crist, addressing one of the gang, a short, rather slender
Irishman, with a smooth-shaven, sallow face, “John, you take this
man and fetch down the dry tongues from the paint-shop. There’s the
wagon-truck,” and he pointed to a vehicle whose heavy box, open at both
ends, and rising at the sides to a height of three feet, was supported
on two small iron wheels, while an iron leg under the heavier end kept
the bottom of the truck horizontal.

“Yes, sir,” came instantly from John, as he stepped alertly from among
the men and joined me, his small, gray eyes looking inquisitively into
mine and showing in their sudden light the pleasure which he felt in
being thus singled out for special work and put in charge of a new hand.

“Come this way,” he said to me. “Me and you is partners. What’s your
name? My name’s John, John Barry. Some calls me Jake, but my name’s
John,” he concluded, with an emphasis which made it clear that he had a
rooted objection to “Jake.”

Barry’s Christian name I considered a poaching upon my preserve, and I
was feeling about for a new handy prænomen; but without waiting for an
answer he continued swiftly on his loquacious way, calling me “partner”
the while, as Clark had done, and “partner” I remained through the days
of our co-labor.

Barry was an old hand; he knew his way about the factory perfectly.
We pushed the truck before us into a warehouse and through a long,
dim passage between piles of various portions of the various machines
which rose to the ceiling in compact stacks on both sides of us as we
walked the great length of the building. It was as dark as a tunnel,
except where an occasional gas-jet burned brightly in the centre of
a misty halo. The cold, unchanging air that never knew the sunlight
chilled us to the bone, and near the gas we could see our breath rising
in clouds of white vapor. We came at last to an elevator, and, having
pushed our truck aboard, we rose to the next landing. Then down another
long, dark, damp passage we passed until we reached a covered bridge, a
run-way, as the men call it, which sloped upward to the paint-shop in
the main building of the factory.

The spring-doors at the head of the bridge flew open to the sharp ram
of our truck, and we followed into a large room which was flooded with
sunlight from its serried windows. There appeared to be hundreds
of “binders” in the room, all painted white and extending in long,
straight rows on wooden supports which held them a few feet from the
floor. Among these rows moved the men who “stripe” the binders. Their
hands and clothing were daubed with paint, and even as we passed we
could see the slender, even lines of brilliant color appearing as by
magic along the white surface of the machines under the swift, sure
stroke of these skilled painters.

This is their sole occupation. Along a side-wall of the room moves
slowly, on a ceiling-trolley, a long line of steel binders, all grimy
from the hands of the men who join the different parts. In one corner
is a tank of white paint, and by a system of pulleys each binder, as
it passes, is lowered to the bath, completely immersed, and then drawn
dripping back to the trolley. Presently it is lowered to a support, and
is there allowed to dry. The stripers move down the lines, following
close upon the drying of the paint, and the machines, soon ready for
shipment from their hands, are transferred to the packing-rooms, the
vacant places being quickly occupied by binders fresh from the bath.
This is one phase of the endless chain of factory production under high
division of labor.

Barry and I passed on through a communicating door to another room of
about equal size and of equal light and airiness with the last. The
temperate air was pungent with the smell of varnish and new paint.
It passed with a pleasant sense of stinging freshness down into our
lungs. We had reached our destination; for large sections of the room
were closely stacked with tongues of various sizes, all standing on
end in an ingenious system of grooves on the floor and ceiling. Some
were newly come from the turning-mill; others had been painted, and now
awaited varnishing; some had passed both of these processes, and were
ready for the stripers; while in one corner stood those which had been
painted and varnished and striped, and which were dry and ready to be
taken to the platform, where Crist had ordered Barry and me to stack
them.

[Illustration: IN THE FACTORY.]

Barry soon taught me how to load them properly, and, having filled the
truck, we descended by an elevator to the ground-floor and passed out
again into the bracing air of the open platforms, where we carefully
stacked the tongues under the eaves, convenient to the loading of the
cars. Round after round we made, going always and returning by the same
course, loading the truck and stacking the tongues as quickly as we
could. The work was not hard. There was a knack in the proper handling
of the tongues, but it was readily acquired, and then one could
settle down easily to the routine of work, whose monotony was broken by
the recurring trips.

One incident checked us in the way. It was our happening to meet the
timekeeper on his rounds. Barry dropped everything until he had made
assurance doubly sure that his presence had been duly noted in the
book. Seeing that I was a new hand the timekeeper quickly took my
name, and then passed on with a parting word of caution to me about the
proper record of my time.

Barry was evidently in high enjoyment of the situation. The work suited
him, and the directing of a novice was hugely to his taste. There was
little stay in the even current of his talk. I began to feel not unlike
a “new boy” at school, for, with the air of a mentor, he pointed out
to me all the sections of the factory, and the different occupations
of the men, and the individual foremen as we chanced to see them.
Once, as we were busily stacking tongues, his voice fell suddenly to a
confidential tone, and his task was plied with tenser energy.

“Do you see that man talking to Crist?” he said to me, almost in a
whisper, and with his eyes intent upon his work.

I had noticed someone who seemed to be a member of the managing staff.

“That’s Mr. Adams,” Barry continued. “He ain’t the head boss, but he’s
next to the head. He’s an awful nice man. He was a workingman himself
once. I’ve heard that he was a carpenter in the factory when the old
man was alive, and that he was promoted to be next to the head boss. He
knows what work is, and he’s awful nice to the men, but you don’t never
want to let him catch you idle.”

We had just finished stacking the load and had started again for the
warehouse, when we caught sight of a neatly dressed man of medium
height who was crossing a temporary bridge, which joined the platform
by the main building over the railway-track to the one where we were at
work. I felt the truck shoot forward at a speed which I had to follow
almost at a run. In the dark passage of the warehouse Barry was soon
talking again, and again in an awed undertone.

“That was the head boss,” he said, impressively. “That was Mr. Young
himself.” And he looked surprised that I did not stagger under the
announcement, although, to do him justice, I did feel a good deal as
the new boy might, brought unexpectedly for the first time into the
presence of the head master.

“He ain’t never worked a day in his life,” Barry was continuing. “Only
he’s a terrible fine superintendent. You bet he gets big wages. They
say he can see when he ain’t looking, and he comes down like a thousand
of brick on any man who shirks his work. He ain’t never worked himself,
and so he don’t know what it is.”

The noon-whistle sounded soon after this, to my great relief, for a
fast of eighteen hours was telling on me. Barry left the truck where
it stood, and broke into a run. I followed him. In a moment the whole
building and the outer platforms were echoing to the tread of running
feet. When I reached the factory yard I found crowds of men streaming
from every door and pressing swiftly through the gate. A stranger to
the scene might at first sight have supposed the building to be on
fire and that the men were escaping, but a second glance would have
corrected the idea. There was no excitement in their mood; nor was
there any playfulness; but with set, serious faces they were running
for the careful economy of time. Barry had explained to me that, in
order to quit the day’s work at half-past five, the hands take but half
an hour for their mid-day meal, and that I must, therefore, be careful
to be within the factory gates by half-past twelve.

[Illustration: CROWDS OF MEN STREAMING FROM EVERY DOOR AND PRESSING
SWIFTLY THROUGH THE GATE.]

Interesting as was the scene, I had no time to note it carefully, for I
had caught the contagion of feverish hurry, and with the greater need
on my part, for in that half hour I must get food if I was to return to
work.

The situation was a little difficult. I had no money and no knowledge
of any neighboring boarding-house. On the avenue, immediately opposite
the wide entrance of the factory, was a line of cheap three-storied
wooden tenements, the ground-floors occupied by saloons or shops, and
the upper ones used evidently as the homes of factory-hands, for I
could see the men entering the dark passages where narrow staircases
connected the dwelling-rooms with the street.

Quite at random I walked into a barber-shop.

“Can you direct me to a boarding-house near by?” I asked the barber,
who, dressed in soiled white, sat reading a newspaper beside the stove.

“Sure,” he said, obligingly, as he rose to his feet and came to the
door and opened it. “You just go up them steps,” he added, pointing to
the entry next door, “and you’ll find a lady that keeps boarders. Her
name’s Mrs. Schulz. You tell her that I sent you.”

At the head of the landing I stood irresolute for a moment. It was
dark after the unclouded mid-day. The light that entered came through
the narrow opening of a door at the end of the passage, which stood
ajar and which communicated with a front room, where there seemed to
be a flood of sunlight. The prospect in the other direction was not
so bright. I was beginning to see faintly, and could eventually make
out the figures of a dozen or more workingmen, who sat about a table
in a dim dining-room, eating hurriedly their dinner, with a noise of
much clatter, and with bursts of loud talk and of hearty laughter. In
a deeper recess, and through a short, dark, communicating passage, was
a kitchen full of steam and the vapors of cooking food, through which
came the light from the rear windows with the effect of shining vaguely
through a fog.

Summoned, I know not how, Mrs. Schulz stepped out into the passage.
I knew instantly that I should be provided for. I could not see her
clearly, but her quiet, self-respecting manner was reassuring from the
start.

“I’ve just got a job in the factory,” I explained at once. “Can you
take me as a boarder?”

“I guess I can,” she answered, cordially. “Do you want your dinner?”

“Yes,” I said, and tried not to say it too eagerly.

“Then come right in. You haven’t any too much time,” she added,
considerately.

At the vacant place which she indicated for me at the table I sat
down between a workman of my own age and a hunchback operative who was
probably ten years our senior.

“How are you?” said the first man, in the midst of the momentary lull
which fell upon the room, while I passed my first inspection.

My reply was drowned for farther ears than his in the recurrent flow
of talk about the table. The men had just finished their first course,
but Mrs. Schulz brought in for me a plate of hot vegetable soup,
steaming with a savoriness which was reviving in itself. My cordial
neighbor dropped out of the general conversation and devoted himself
to me. Nothing could have been more agreeable. He was as natural as a
child, and genial to the point of readiest laughter. Like most of the
other men, he sat coatless in his working-clothes, his face and hands
black with the grime of the machine-shop where he worked, and his eyes
shining with a light all the merrier for their dark setting.

A young American, a farmer’s son, he was recently come to Chicago from
his home in central Iowa, and was making his way as a factory-hand
and liked it greatly. His name was Albert. All of this information I
gathered in barter for an equal share of my personal history, exchanged
while we both ate heartily of a dinner of boiled meat and mashed
potatoes, and stewed tomatoes and bread and coffee, and finally a
slice of pumpkin pie, all of them excellent of their kind and most
excellently cooked; and, although not neatly served, yet with as great
a regard to neatness as the circumstances allowed.

My interest through the meal, aside from the food, was chiefly in
Albert, but I caught, too, the drift of the general talk. It was
directed at one Clarence, a fair-haired, fair-skinned, well-mannered
youth who sat opposite us and at an end of the line. One noticed him
immediately in the contrast which he made with the other men, for he
was dressed in a “boiled” shirt and a collar, and he wore a neat black
coat and a black cravat. It appeared that he had been promoted, on the
day before, from a subordinate position in one of the machine-shops
to the supervision of the tool-room of the factory. On this morning
for the first time he had gone to work dressed, not in the usual
blue jeans, but as one of the clerical force. The men were chaffing
him on the change. Curiously enough, from their point of view, his
working-days were over. There was no least disturbance in their
personal attitude to the man nor in their feeling for him as a fellow.
They recognized the change of status as a promotion, and you readily
caught the note of sincere congratulation in their banter, and the
boy bore his honors modestly and like a man. Yet it was a change of
status most complete, for he had ceased to be a worker. To their way of
thinking there may be forms of toil which are hard and even exhausting,
but only that is “work” which brings your hands into immediate contact
with the materials of production in their making from the raw or in
their transportation. The principle is a broad one, incapable of
application in full detail, but, as a principle, it figures in the
minds of the workers as an unquestioned generalization that men work
only with their hands and in forms of begriming labor.

Like Albert, Clarence, too, was an American, a youth from a village
home in Ohio, and with the promise of a successful hazard of his
fortunes in the city. I employ my versions of their Christian names
because these were the only appellations in use about the table.

The meal was far too short for any general acquaintance among the men,
and at its end we all hurried back to the factory. Barry was awaiting
me beside the truck; as we began the rounds of the afternoon’s work he
questioned me with interest about my success in getting a dinner. For
another five continuous hours we carted tongues and stacked them.

The hands had been working by gas-light for nearly an hour when the
time came for quitting the day’s labor. There was no rush now in
leaving the factory. We crowded out through the gate, but under no
high pressure, and the moving mass disintegrated and disappeared as
magically as it had formed in the early morning. Beside the entrance
idle men were again waiting, but their number was very few in contrast
with the morning crowds, and their apparent purpose was a personal
interview with the superintendent.

Mrs. Schulz’s boarders had soon reassembled, this time in her kitchen.
Everything was in readiness for us. A row of tin basins stood in a
long sink which extended under the rear windows nearly the length of
the room; buckets of hot water were convenient, and at the pump at one
end of the sink we could temper the water in the basins to our liking.
Finally, there were cakes of soap cut from large bars, and the usual
coarse towels hanging from rollers on the walls. With sleeves rolled up
and our shirts wide open at the neck, we took our turns at the basins.
It was interesting to watch the faces of the mechanics emerge from the
washing in frequent changes of water to their natural flesh-color, in
which the features could be clearly distinguished.

The few minutes during which we had to wait before the call to
supper were spent in the front room, which was the sitting-room for
the boarders and answered to the lobby in the logging-camp. Two
windows looked out upon the street and commanded a farther view of the
factory yard and buildings. The room was heated by a cylindrical iron
stove, standing near the inner wall upon a disc of zinc, that served
to protect a well-worn carpet with which the floor was covered. From
a square wooden table in the centre a large oil-lamp flooded the room
with light and brought out in startling vividness the pink rose-buds
which in monotonous identity of design streaked the walls in long
diagonal lines, broken only by an occasional chromo or a picture cut
from an illustrated print. There was an abundant supply of wooden
chairs, on which the men were seated, for the most part about the
stove, and there was one large arm-chair on rockers, where sat Mr.
Schulz with the next to the youngest child in his arms, an infant of
between two and three. A girl of perhaps seven years, and a boy of
nearly five, were playing together on the floor, and there was yet
another child, for while we were washing in the kitchen I had heard the
fretful cry of a baby from a dark chamber opening from that room.

Two of the men were intent upon the girl who lay in her father’s
lap. They were rivals for her favor, and both were trying to coax her
away. When she at last put out her arms to one of them, he tossed her
toward the ceiling with a shout of glee at his triumph over the other
man.

After supper we all regathered in the sitting-room. None of the men,
so far as I could see, went out for the evening. Some of them read the
newspapers of the day, and four had presently started a game of “High,
Low, Jack,” at the table, with the result that most of the others
were soon gathered about the players in excited interest, watching
the varying fortunes of the game and giving vent to their feelings in
boisterous outbursts.

I sat beside the fire talking to Mr. Schulz. There was inexpressible
satisfaction in the feeling of _raison d’être_ which one had in being
a worker with a steady job once more and a decent place in which to
live. A boarding-house is not a synonym for home, and yet it may stir
the domestic instincts deeply in the contrasts which it offers with
the homeless life of the streets. The unquestioning hospitality with
which I had been accepted as a guest was in keeping with the best of
my experience so far. There was no suggestion of my paying anything in
advance, though I had no security to offer beyond the fact that I was
regularly employed in the factory and my promise to pay promptly out of
the first instalment of my wages.

Mrs. Schulz had offered me board and lodging at four dollars a week, or
at four dollars and a quarter if I wished a room to myself. It was the
last bargain with which I closed when I was shown the only vacant room.
It opened from the passage near the head of the landing and was perhaps
seven feet by six. A single bed filled most of its area, and the rest
was crowded with a chair and a small stand which supported an oil-lamp
under a mirror on the wall. Some nails driven into the door and along
the wall beside it, served the purpose of a closet. Light and air
entered by a window which opened only a foot or two from a side-wall of
the next building.

Cheerless as the room was and far from clean, it yet had about it all
the essentials of privacy, and at a little past eight o’clock I went to
bed with almost the sense of luxury after a fortnight’s experience of
station-houses and cheap lodgings.

At six in the morning we were called by Mrs. Schulz, who had already
been up for an hour or more preparing our breakfast, with the help of a
hired girl. The men turned out sleepy and half-dressed into the kitchen
to wash themselves, and then we sat down to a breakfast of “mush,”
meat and potatoes, coffee and bread. The factory-bell was ringing by
the time that we had finished, and there was a rush to get within the
gate before the last taps marked the advent of seven o’clock.

The routine of factory work does not lend itself to varied narrative,
and yet Barry’s work and mine was far from the monotony of much of the
labor which we saw about us. There was a growing supply of tongues in
the paint-shop, sufficient to keep us busy for several days, and while
the work of loading and carting and stacking them was not hard in
itself, ten hours of it daily was enough to send a man very hungry to
his meals and thoroughly tired to his bed.

I was soon transferred from Crist’s department to one of the
packing-rooms, where, through the remaining weeks of my service, I
worked as a general utility man under the orders of a short, muscular
foreman of singularly mild manner, who appeared to have scruples
against swearing, but who was none the less vigilant and effective
in his management. Most of the work of his department, as in all the
departments of the factory, came under the piece-work system, and I was
simply one of the two or three common laborers who, under his commands,
attended to the odds and ends of jobs.

In one corner a man was packing boxes with the subordinate parts
of mowers--a very interesting process, for the boxes were of such a
size as to exactly hold all the loose parts when packed in a certain
relation to one another, and the untiring swiftness with which the
packer drew his supplies from their various bins and adjusted them in
the box and nailed the lid upon them was fascinating in itself. I was
sometimes employed in carting these boxes on a hand-truck, through a
long run-way, to a warehouse and storing them there.

There were mowers to be shipped to foreign markets, and these had all
to be done up in boxes. Three or four of us would be employed for days
together in bringing the mowers up the run-way from the warehouse and
further separating them into their parts and packing them in large
boxes and nailing down the covers, upon which afterward appeared
directions to distant ports, some to Russia, and others as far off even
as Australian and New Zealand towns. A paint-shop was also connected
with this department of the factory, where painting was done in the
wholesale fashion employed for the binders, and from it I often carted
the portions of the machines which were ready for the warehouse.

Some of the jobs held steadily for days together, and the foreman was
never without work to give me. I could but feel a growing liking
for him, for, although I was far from being an efficient workman, he
was patient with my awkward efforts, and he accepted my mere dogged
perseverance as evidence of a willingness on my part which reconciled
him to me as a hand.

A like consideration had been shown me by the men at the
boarding-house. They accepted me unhesitatingly as a workingman, but
still I felt that I had my way to make among them, and very justly,
for they were piece-workers all of them, earning fifteen dollars a
week at the very least, some of them much more, while I was merely a
common laborer at a dollar and a half a day. Their superiority to me
was only the more apparent when there came among us, a few days after
my arrival, a young Englishman from Jamaica, who had secured a job at
common labor in the factory; for he, too, was far ahead of me, and
it was not long before he was promoted to piece-work in one of the
better-paid departments.

There was no discrimination against me. The men were perfectly
friendly, but for the most part they had been associated for some
time in their work and in their life in the boarding-house, and I was
simply not of their set. The barriers which prevented entire freedom of
intercourse were my own limitations and were never of their making,
for they made the most generous advances when we had lived together for
a time, and no doubt I could eventually have risen to be one of them on
equal terms.

They were nearly all young Americans. Clarence and Albert were
representative of the lot. Ned, the hunchback operative, was older
than most of us, but he, too, was a native, of public-school education
and decent antecedents, and he made a very good wage as a piece-worker
in some department of the factory. Nothing that I saw among the men
charmed me more than their treatment of Ned. He had an ungovernable
temper and a crabbed, sullen disposition, which had been fostered by
much suffering and an intense mortification due to his deformity,
which he rarely forgot, apparently. At times he was as exasperating
as a spoiled, petulant child, but the men endured him always with an
evenness of buoyant good-humor so genuine that it never chafed him,
and it sometimes transported him, in spite of himself, to a mood in
sympathy with their own, in which he could be one of the best fellows
of the lot.

It was not long before I knew that the man who was held in highest
regard by the others was Dennis. The reasons for this did not appear at
first. Dennis was of about the average age among us, a man of between
twenty-five and thirty, an Irish-American of good appearance and a
gentlemanlike reserve. The men looked up to him and paid a certain
deference to his views in a way which puzzled me, for he never played
the rôle of leader, being far less outspoken than some of the others,
and moving among them always in a quiet, unassuming manner which laid
no claim to distinction.

By chance I learned that he was the best-paid operative in the house,
having a position of some importance in a machine-shop of the factory,
and I noticed that he spent much of his leisure in the study of
mechanical problems. He did not hold himself aloof from the evening
game of cards, but he would quit it early and would soon be absorbed
in his book in one corner of the room, where the noise seemed never
to disturb him. Moreover, I came to realize that in certain important
social matters Dennis was an authority. He would leave his work as
black as the blackest man from the shops, but on Saturday afternoon,
when we got off at five o’clock, half an hour earlier than usual, he
would come out after supper ready for the evening’s gayety, dressed
in what was unhesitatingly accepted as the height of the fashion.
Saturday evenings were always devoted to pleasure, and none of the men
was better informed than was Dennis as to the public balls which were
available and which performance at the theatres (always spoken of as
a “show”) was best worth a visit. As a workman of high grade and as a
man of fashion and a social mentor with much occult knowledge of social
form, he was yielded the first place. There was, moreover, a certain
punctiliousness about him which only served to heighten his standing.
It mattered not how late he had been out on Saturday night, I always
found Dennis at his place for a seven o’clock breakfast on Sunday
morning, and saw him start promptly for mass.

He was very evidently a favorite with Mrs. Schulz, and with small
wonder, for he was always most considerately kind to her and to her
children; but I thought that her liking for him grew quite as much out
of her admiration for his strict regard to his church duties. She went
to early mass herself, but she never failed to have breakfast ready for
Dennis at exactly seven o’clock.

Mr. Schulz and she were devout Catholics, only I could but admire her
devotion the more. It seemed to me to be put to so crucial a test.
With but a raw Swedish girl to help her, she had the care of her five
children besides all the cooking and other housework for a dozen
boarders whose meals must be served on the minute. I am sure that
I never saw her lose her temper, and I think that I never heard her
complain, which is the greater wonder when one takes into account the
fact that she was the sole bread-winner of the family. Mr. Schulz had
had a job as a night watchman, but had lost it, and was now looking
for work--not too conscientiously, I fear, for he impressed me as a
weak man who found his wife’s support a welcome escape from a personal
struggle for existence. He had, at least, the negative virtue of
sobriety, and the positive one of loyalty to church duty, and in the
house he perhaps could not have served his wife to better purpose
than by taking care of the children as he did. He was certainly very
proud of Mrs. Schulz. One day he confided to me the fact that she was
a cook when he married her, and that in her day she had served in
some of the palaces on Michigan Avenue. Such an experience explained
the admirable cooking of the simple fare which she gave us, and the
homelike management of her house; and her knowledge and skill in these
domestic matters bore no small relation, I thought, to the spirit of
contentment among the men, which held them to their quiet evenings in
her sitting-room against the allurements of the town.

Her sheer physical endurance was a marvel. It was the unflinching
courage of a brave soul, for she had little strength besides. Very
tall and slight, emaciated almost to gauntness, she had a long, thin
face with sunken cheeks and a dark complexion and jet-black hair, and
round, soft, innocent eyes, which, matched with her indomitable spirit,
were eloquent of the love which is “comrade to the lesser faith that
sees the course of human things,” and seeing finds life worth living
and is willing to endure.

The absence of self-consciousness from the members of this household
lent a peculiar attractiveness to the life there. There was nothing
morbid in their attitude to themselves nor in their relation to one
another. Life was so obviously their master, and they so implicitly
obedient to its control. You could lose in a measure the thought of
self-directed effort to be something or do something, in the sense
that you got of nearness to the spontaneity of primal force. Mrs.
Schulz, for example, never impressed one as trying to exercise a
certain influence in obedience to a volition formed upon a preconceived
plan, but rather as being what she was as the expression of a life
within and exercising an influence which was dominant by reason of its
native virtue. And the men were never awkward and constrained in their
courteous manner toward her, as they would have been had this been
prompted by a sense of formal politeness, instead of being, as it was,
their spontaneous tribute to her gentle ladyhood.

One wondered at first how such serenity would weather the storms. And
when they came, the wonder grew at the further naturalness which they
revealed.

Monday mornings were apt to be prolific of bad weather. The long,
monotonous week loomed before us, and our nerves were unstrung with
the violent reaction bred of over-indulgence in the freedom of a
holiday. Our tempers, as a result, were all out of tune, and there
was no merging of individuality in the harmony of a home. One was
reminded of the discordant harping, each on its own string, of all
the instruments of an orchestra before they blend melodiously in the
accord of the overture. The hired girl, awkward and ungainly and dense,
had neglected the mush and let it burn, and now with stupid vacancy
in her dull eyes she moved about more in the way than of any service.
The children, half-dressed in their pitiful, soiled garments, were
sprawling underfoot, quarrelling among themselves and whimpering in
their appeals for their mother’s intervention. Mrs. Schulz, at her
wits’ end to get breakfast ready promptly, was bending over a stove
whose fire smouldered and smoked and would not burn briskly in the raw
east wind which was blowing down the chimney, and at the same time
there grated on her ears the wails of the children and the ill-tempered
complaints of the men and the stupid questions of the hired girl,
and all the while her nerves were throbbing to the dull agony of a
toothache. The men, roused from insufficient sleep, were crowding into
the over-crowded kitchen, hectoring one another for their slowness at
the basins; one loud in his complaint over the loss of some article
of dress, another insistent in his demand for a turn at the mirror,
and all of them perilously near the verge of a violent outbreak. There
was much swearing of a very sincere kind and much plain speaking of
personal views without circumlocution or reservation, but in the end
the storm would spend its fury and pass. And the marvel of it was in
the completeness of the clearing. The unrestrained vent of ill-temper
would be followed by no harboring of malice. It was as though the men,
who had freed themselves of a load of ill-feeling, were prepared to
continue unhampered in the ease of agreeable association. The secret
of it lay, I presume, in the absence of malignant antagonisms. The
distempers were merely the results of the common attrition of life. At
bottom these hard-working, self-respecting persons respected and liked
one another, and in the intimacy of the crowded tenement they lived in
relative comfort on no other possible terms than those of common liking
and respect.

The factory itself further illustrated the periodic unevennesses of
temper. Not that they were strictly periodic in the home. Mondays
were apt to witness them, but there was no normal regularity in their
occurrence, for they might crop out at any time. But Monday mornings
in the factory were almost fatally sure of their emergence. You could
not escape the feeling of unwonted disturbance both in the humor of
the men and in the progress of their work. But nothing could have been
more potent in coaxing them again into an accordant frame of mind than
the routine of factory labor. The very doing of what had become to
them a second nature by a quickness of hand which itself was a mark of
mastery, seemed to win them back to cheerful acceptance of life. I have
often seen the men at the boarding-house leave the breakfast-table in
moods that “varied mostly for the worse,” and return to it at noon in
high spirits that were finely attune.

There is a monotony about piece-work which must take on at times the
quality of a maddening horror. I can bear no personal testimony to
it, because I did not rise to the position of a piece-worker. The
phases of the system which I saw, however, in the limited insight
into its practical working to be gained in my range in the factory
as a common laborer, impressed me rather with its advantages. Among
the day-laborers here there was apparent at once the same deadly
uninterest in their work which is characteristic of their class in the
present ordering of such labor. The attitude is that of irresponsible
school-boys in their feeling of natural hostility to their masters in
the mutual struggle over the prescribed tasks. But among the laborers
it takes on the tragedy of the relation of grown men to the serious
business of their lives. Interest in their work? Not the faintest.
Sense of responsibility for it? Not the dimmest. Any day you could see
the bearded father of a family shirk his task in a momentary absence of
the boss, or steal truant minutes from his time in idling on an errand,
with as puerile a spirit as that which prompts a stroke of mischief in
school-hours.

The piece-system lifts the labor instantly from this plane to one
where the motive of self-interest conspicuously enters. A man is
insured from the first of at least the wage of day’s labor; his own
industry and deftness are then the factors in determining his earnings
up to a certain limit. For I soon found that a hand was not free to
employ his utmost skill when he became an expert. There seemed to
be a tacit agreement in each department of the factory as to what
should constitute the maximum of day’s labor. Below that a man might
fall if he chose, but beyond it he was not at liberty to go. And the
reason was very obvious. Even a few men in continually passing, by
any considerable margin, the accepted daily average would inevitably
produce the result of a cut in the _pro rata_ price until wages were
down again to the accustomed level. The system gives a man an incentive
to work and to develop his skill, but, in its practical operation, it
holds him rigorously to the level of mediocre attainment.

Barry incidentally pointed this out to me with striking clearness one
day while we were carting tongues. Two of the varnishers were missing
from the paint-shop when we went up for our first loads. Barry remarked
on their absence, with the comment that they were certain to be on hand
at half-past nine o’clock.

It appears that if an employee misses the open factory-gate in the
early morning by ever so little, he may not enter then until the end of
two hours and a half, which marks the close of the first quarter of the
day’s work.

True to Barry’s prediction, we presently found both varnishers at
their places, and when, in the late afternoon, he asked them, with
the frankness of working-people in such matters, as to how much they
had done, he again found himself verified, since each had achieved the
prescribed amount, and so had earned full pay. They had simply worked
at a greater speed than usual; and they might, so far as the time was
concerned, have accomplished this every day, except that a man would
soon gain a bad name by being habitually late, and his promptness at
seven o’clock would be quickly insured by a cut in the rate paid for
his form of labor.

It was a very limited view of the factory as a whole that I could get
from the post of an unskilled worker in one of its departments, but
what growing familiarity was possible served to increase the sense
of wonder at the possibilities of such highly organized methods of
production.

There were the great, substantial buildings themselves with their
ingenious adjustments of parts, so related as to facilitate to the
utmost the processes of manufacture and shipment at the lowest cost
and with the least friction. There were the lines of railway which
entered the grounds, by means of which the machines, loaded into cars
from the platforms of the factory, could be forwarded without change to
every quarter of the continent. All needed materials, to the smallest
detail, entered the factory in their raw forms, and passed out as
finished product, delicately adjusted machines ready for immediate use.
The imagination bounds to the conception of the miraculous ingenuity
of instruments, and the trained skill of operatives, and the shrewd
co-ordination of labor, and, above all, the marvellous captaincy by
which all this differentiation is systematized and is ordered and
directed to the effective achievement of its ends.

The large, well-ventilated rooms, comfortably warmed in winter and
admirably supplied with the means of light and air, are a part of the
general efficacy of the system, and the untiring dexterity of the men
gives to it its strongly human interest. There is a fascination in
their movements which determines the quality of the attractiveness of
the whole. You see no feverish haste in the speed with which they work,
but rather the even, smooth, unfaltering sureness which is the charm of
mastery, and which must be attended by its satisfaction as well.

I witnessed this with delight among the men with whom I lived.
Conversation at our meals was nearly always of shop; at dinner and
supper especially we discussed the details of the day’s work. Several
of us were employed at constructing binders. Albert was of that number.
He was making but little more than the wage of common labor when I
first knew him, but his income began to increase with his increasing
efficiency, and it was a matter of great, vital interest to us all to
hear his reports each day, as he told of a fraction of a binder and
then of a whole one in advance upon his previous work, until his daily
earnings rose to two dollars and a half, which was accepted in his
department as the normal sum.

Besides these elements of personal interest in piece-work as a scheme
of labor and the gratification of the sense of effective workmanship,
there entered here the stimulus of ambition based upon excellent
chances of promotion. The factory system of production creates strong
demand for manual skill, and stronger still for the capacity of
administration and control. Why the realization of these facts did
not possess more thoroughly the minds of the common laborers, I could
not understand. They were strangely impervious to their force, for
nothing could have been more noticeable than the alertness of the
managing staff in watching for evidences of unusual ability among
the men. It was not at all uncommon for a hand who had been taken on
as a day-laborer to be promoted, as a result of his intelligence and
industry, to some department of piece-work. Nearly every foreman in the
factory is said to have begun far down the scale, and Barry’s account
of the career of the assistant manager I have heard confirmed.

During my short stay I was actually witness to the progress of two
men who came in as day-laborers, the young Englishman from Jamaica
and a stalwart, handsome Swede who secured a job and joined us at the
boarding-house about a fortnight ago. Clarence earned a promotion
and got it at the time of my coming to the factory, and I have seen
Albert’s rise from a position removed by very little from that of
unskilled labor to that of a workman whose skill commands the sum of
fifteen dollars a week. Dennis is a type of craftsman whose future
it is not difficult to predict. Conscientious and industrious and
persevering, endowed with rare ability and real capacity for work, his
progress seems assured, and a well-paid, authoritative position an
ultimate logical certainty.

All these are of the best class of factory-workers that I came to
know. There are other classes quite as clearly defined, and most of
them have their representatives about our table. Men, for example,
who have an honest interest in their work as such, and who have risen
by force of ambition and sheer development of manual skill to good
positions in the factory, and have there stood still, their congenital
qualities incapable, presumably, of higher efficiency. But sadder far
than theirs is the case of men who are often best endowed with native
cleverness and aptitude, who rise quickly in the scale of promotion,
and who might rise far higher than they do but for the curse of their
careless living. They know no interest in their work nor pleasure
in its doing. To them it is the sordid drudgery by which they gain
the means of gratifying their real purposes and desires. With sullen
perseverance they endure the torment of labor, with pay-day in view and
then Saturday night and Sunday with their mad revels in what they call
life. The future is a meaningless word, with no claim upon them beyond
the prospect that it holds of more indulgence; the present is their
sole concern, and only with reference to what it can be made to yield
to ruling passions.

From some phase of this last attitude to life none of the men whom I
knew personally seemed to be entirely free. There is no improvidence
like the improvidence of the poor. Doubtless there is no thrift like
theirs, but among these young men, with all of life before them, their
reckless prodigality in money-matters assumed at times an appalling
nature. Some of them made no pretence of saving anything, and the few
who did save would show at times an audacity of extravagance to match
with the wastefulness of the worst. They were not a drinking set in any
sense of excessive indulgence, for not one of them had the reputation
of a drunkard, and their spending was much of it in comparatively
innocent channels, but it was monstrous in relation to their means and
to their prospects in the world.

A perfectly well-recognized philosophy justified it to their minds.

“We’ll never be young but once,” they would say, “and if we don’t have
a good time now, we never will.”

A good time was often secured at enormous cost. I do not know whether
it is the habitual dissipation, or whether it happens to be the vogue
for this winter, but it is very certain that to the men here the
fancy-dress ball is now the incomparable attraction. One or more such
functions within their range falls on nearly every Saturday night.
They are given for the most part by certain “Brotherhoods” and labor
organizations, and they are free, apparently, to all who come dressed
in a manner sufficiently “fancy” to meet the views of “the committee,”
and pay the price of a ticket, which admits “self and lady.”

As the men saw the night approaching, their talk would turn more and
more to the absorbing subjects of costume and the girls whom they
meant to take with them. There are shops which do business at letting
out ready-made disguises for such occasions, and I have repeatedly seen
these hard-working industrious fellows go deep into their pockets, to
the extent even of half a week’s pay, for the use for a few hours of
some tawdry make-up of velvet and spangles and lace, which reeked with
promiscuous wear. And the outlay did not end with dress, for there
remained tickets of admission, and the cost of at least two suppers
for each and of not a little drinking. It was exceptional for any one
of them to come home drunk, and the man who did was sure of a course
of steady bantering for days, but some drinking was the rule for the
Saturday nights that were given to masquerade. When a play would fall
in place in the order of amusement, the men were sure to return by
midnight, and there was always then less evidence of drink.

All forms of public gayety seemed scrupulously confined to Saturday
nights and Sundays. The men could not have been more punctual at their
work, and the habitual week-day evening was the far from exciting one
in Mrs. Schulz’s sitting-room, which I have described. There they
regularly gathered after supper, and smoked, and romped with the
children, and played cards, and read. I was usually off for bed by
eight o’clock, for nothing less than ten hours of sleep would fit me
for the ten hours of labor in the factory, and the others would follow
an hour or two later.

[Illustration: MRS. SCHULZ’S BOARDING-HOUSE.

There we regularly gathered after supper, and smoked, and romped with
the children, and played cards, and read.]

The morning brought the unwelcome summons to get up in what seemed the
dead of night and but an hour or two after the time of going to bed.
Cold water would have its rousing effect, as, also, a breakfast by
lamplight with an anxious eye on the clock, and then a rush through the
sharp air of the morning twilight until you were caught in the living
stream which poured through the factory-gate. Work was begun on the
minute, and your ear caught the sharp metallic clink of the mowers as
the workmen pushed the frames down the loading-platforms to the cars.
Even within the brick enclosures and in the stinging cold of the winter
air, there arose inevitably with the sound the association of meadows
fragrant with the perfume of new-mown timothy and clover drying in the
hazy warmth of a long summer afternoon.

Within the buildings, almost in a moment, would rise the turmoil of
production. You heard the deafening uproar of far-reaching machinery,
as, with wheels whirling in dizzy motion and the straps humming in
their flight, it beat time in deep, low throbs to the remorseless
measures of a tireless energy. Cleaving the tumult of the sounding air
you heard at frequent intervals the buzz-saws as they bit hard with
flying teeth into multiple layers of wood, rising to piercing crescendo
and then dying away in a sob. There was the din of many hammers, and
over the wooden floors and along the run-ways, and through the dark,
damp passages of the warehouses, and down the deep vistas of the
covered platforms, was the almost constant rumble of hand-trucks pushed
by men and boys.

All this unceasingly for five continuous hours, which always seem
unending, and then the abrupt signal for twelve o’clock, and the sound
of the machinery running down while the men are hastening to their
mid-day meal. About the factory-gate are always at this hour groups
of women and young children who have brought in pails and baskets hot
dinners for their men. On brighter days you can see long lines of
operatives sitting along the curbs or with their backs against the high
board fence, basking in the sunlight, as they eat their dinners in the
open air and converse among themselves and with their wives or children.

[Illustration: THE NOON HOUR.]

Then back to your place in the afternoon while the machinery is slowly
working up to its accustomed pace and the men about you reassembling to
take up again, on the stroke of the hour, the work of the afternoon.
Five more hours of the thundering rush of factory labor follow, and
you leave the gate at night almost too tired to walk. A wash is first
in your recovery, and it rests you more than would sleep. Then supper
brings its deep satisfaction and a smoke its peaceful content, and you
go to bed better off by a day’s wages.




CHAPTER V

AMONG THE REVOLUTIONARIES


                             No. -- SANGAMON STREET, CHICAGO, ILL.,
                                  February 27, 1892.

Again I am in the army of the unemployed, and have been there for
the past three weeks and more, but on other than the terms of my
first experience in Chicago. I have been looking for work and testing
many phases of this lurid life of enforced idleness, but with a wide
difference from the original venture here. My savings from wages
earned in the factory have put me on quite another footing. The room
in which I am writing has been an adequate shelter, and I have paid
for it only one dollar and a half a week. Odd jobs have helped me
often in the matter of securing food, and, when these failed, I have
had my dwindling store of savings to fall back upon; and I have a not
inconsiderable knowledge of the cheap eating-houses of the town.

All through my time of service in the factory, I saved scrupulously. A
wage of nine dollars a week held out a hopeful prospect as the result
of seven weeks of labor. I did not miss even a fraction of a working
day, and so the total of my earnings would have reached sixty-three
dollars but for the unfortunate fact that, besides Sundays, there fell
two holidays within the limits of that period. On Christmas and New
Year’s Day the factory was closed, and I found, to my surprise, that
holidays, which I should have supposed were joyously welcome to all
the world, are really of very doubtful blessedness to the vast number
of workers who are paid for the actual amount accomplished, and by
the detailed reckoning of time. I lost three dollars in hard cash by
Christmas Day and that of the New Year, while my living expenses were
uninterrupted; and three dollars would pay for two weeks of comfortable
housing from the cruelties of this inclement life.

It was three weeks before I could get appreciably ahead in the matter
of saving. Nearly all the first instalment of my wages was already due
for board, and a bill for washing cut deep into the small remainder. A
pair of shoes was an absolute necessity at the end of the next week,
for I was going about almost barefooted, and some other articles of
clothing were equally requisite. And so my wages for week by week
together were already mortgaged to nearly the last penny before I
had actually earned them. But at last the materials of a fairly
respectable appearance had been secured, and then, out of the wages of
the last four weeks of factory work, I managed, by closest economy, to
save seventeen dollars and a half.

Gradation in respectability in the matter of dress, from the point at
which a man is unmistakably in his working-clothes to that in which he
readily passes as a workman in his Sunday best, has furnished the means
of some range in the experiment of church-going. From the first I have
gone regularly to church. But appearing in the garb of a day-laborer
in the fashionable churches of a great city is far removed as a matter
of experience from attending the service of a village meeting-house.
I am inclined to think that the latter would be the greater ordeal
to a real workman. Country parishioners turn out on Sundays with an
amazing show of dress, and one of their own number in flannel shirt and
labor-stained clothing would be oddly conspicuous; and he would feel
his peculiarity much more, I imagine, than if he found himself among
persons whom he did not know on equal social footing. For me the case
was different and was wholly artificial, but in going to church in the
country, dressed in working clothes which had been carefully protected
by overalls, and mended, and brushed, and cleaned to the utmost, I yet
could but feel how intolerable to a workingman the actual situation
would have been. To slip early into a quiet corner of the village
church which was usually free, and then out again before most of the
congregation had well started for the door, was a widely dissimilar
thing from regularly attending service with your neighbors.

In overalls and a “jumper,” a man is easily classified; without them,
however plain may be the stamp upon him of attempted cleanliness, it is
difficult to place him among a Sunday-dressed community, whether in the
country or in town, unless he, too, is evidently in Sunday clothes. It
is not, in its general application, a question of fashion; the cut of
a man’s garments may be that of ten years back, or may be foreign to
any fashion known, but his clothing must not bear the marks of toil,
and must have the linen accompaniments which render, while they are
worn, all manual labor difficult. If he would conform, a man must never
worship in garments in which he could work.

A want of conformity might quite possibly expose him to aggressive
criticism and ridicule among his accustomed fellows. I never found it
so myself in the country, where I always went to church in working
clothes because I had no others, for never once was I made to feel
the least embarrassment, while many times I wondered at the gracious
courtesy which met me. But I was always a stranger, and had never to
face companions of long standing. And so, as in many phases of my
experiment, the unreality of my position marred, in large measure, the
value of the result.

In Chicago, however, the circumstances were not so clearly against
me, and they served to give to my own experience something of a
normal character. In entering a church door on Sunday mornings, I
was objectively in no other station than that of any workingman who
may have wished to worship there. The treatment which I received is,
therefore, a fair gauge of the reception which another worker might
expect.

If it were a single instance I should not mention it, and I venture to
offer no generalization, although I am speaking of tests which covered
many Sundays and included all the principal churches of the town. All
that can be said, I think, is that the uniformity of result is some
evidence of what a like-conditioned workingman might count upon in the
way of treatment at the hands of fashionable churches.

I was sure, in the first venture or two, that the circumstances were
exceptional, and that I had chanced upon churches which, although
most evidently of the rich, were yet watchful for every opportunity
of welcoming the poor. It was not until I had made the rounds of many
churches of many denominations that I realized how general and how
sincere among them is the spirit of hospitality to the working poor.

In the vestibules, I always found young men who acted as ushers, and
who were charged with the duty of receiving strangers. Never once did
I fail of a friendly greeting. With every test I felt increasingly the
difficulties of the situation for these young men, and my wonder grew
at their graceful tactfulness. A touch of the patronizing in their tone
or manner would have changed the welcome to an insult, and any marked
effusiveness of cordiality would have robbed it as effectually of all
virtue. It was the golden mean of a man’s friendly recognition of his
fellow-man, with no regard for difference in social standing, which was
the course so successfully followed by these young ushers.

[Illustration: NEVER ONCE DID I FAIL OF A FRIENDLY GREETING.]

I had always to avoid a more desirable seat by particularly asking
for one far to the rear. And in the pews there was no withdrawing
of skirts, nor were there other signs of objection to me as a
fellow-worshipper. On the contrary, a hymnal, or a prayer-book would
be promptly offered, and sometimes shared; and, at the service-end,
a cordial invitation to come again would often follow me from the
pew-door, although frequently I noticed that I was conspicuously
lonely, as a representative of the poor.

How natural it was and how inevitable that the poor should not be there
shone clear as day the moment that I regarded the matter from the
subjective attitude of a genuine worker.

From their status as citizens in a free land, American workingmen have
acquired, together with the sense of individual freedom, the quality,
in very marked degree, of self-respect. It exhibits itself sometimes in
highly contradictory fashion, for it is sensitive and jealous in the
making; but self-respect is none the less a fundamental characteristic.

Besides Dennis and three others, who were Roman Catholics, the men
at Mrs. Schulz’s boarding-house did not go to church. In talking
with them I discovered that all had been more or less in the habit
of church-going in their country homes, but that the habit had
dropped completely from them upon coming to live in town. The case
was perfectly apparent. The mere suggestion of a mission church was
insulting to them and, from the new idea of churches for the rich, they
had learned their first lesson in class distinctions. Every feature
of such a church, its richly dressed occupants in their high-priced
pews, and the general atmosphere of merely social superiority, would
have inflicted upon these men, in spite of a cordial welcome, as deep
a wound to their self-respect as they would have felt in being decoyed
to a formal reception in a lady’s drawing-room. To them, the latter
function could not be more obviously intended for another class than
theirs.

One night, before I left the factory, Albert spoke his mind to me on
the subject with much freedom. Several times I had asked him to come
with me to church, and on this particular Saturday evening I spoke of a
preacher whom I hoped to hear in the morning, and who, I urged, would
surely interest him.

“Look here, John,” he said, finally, “it’s all right you asking me to
go to church, but I ain’t going. I used to go regular when I lived to
home, although I ain’t no church-member. It was different out there,
for most everybody went and chipped in what they could, and everybody
sat where they liked, and it wasn’t one man’s church more than
another’s. You go to church if you like. That’s your own business. But
I ain’t going to no one-horse mission chapel that the rich has put up
so they won’t be bothered with the poor in their own churches. You say
they treat you well when you go to church on Michigan Avenue. I don’t
doubt it. What reason would they have for not treating you well? But,
all the same, they take you in for charity, for you couldn’t pay for
a seat in one of them churches. No, sir, the rich folks build their
churches for themselves, and they keep them up for themselves, and I
ain’t never going to interfere with that arrangement. I don’t mind
going to the meetings of the Association once in awhile, for there’s
fellows of your own kind there, and you hear some good speaking and
singing. I ain’t got much use even for that, for it’s only a sideshow
that’s run mostly by the rich, but I ain’t got no use at all for your
churches.”

Nevertheless, on the whole, I was sorry the next morning that Albert
was not with me. There were moments when I did not regret it, but the
sermon, for all its strange setting, was one which could scarcely have
failed to impress him.

After a seven o’clock breakfast, which seemed luxuriously late, and
which Dennis and I shared alone on Sunday mornings, I set out as usual
for the South Side. It was five miles to my destination in that section
of the city, and I always walked both ways, for sometimes I had not the
fare, and, in any case, ten cents saved was no mean item in a careful
account of possible economy.

The Sundays of my term of service in the factory were, for the most
part, splendid winter days, and this was of the best. No snow lay on
the ground, no winter wind stirred the dust in the long, quiet streets,
and clear from out the cloudless sky came the glowing rays of the sun,
tempering the cold air to the exquisite delicacy of reviving warmth
wherein you catch your breath with wonder, so charged is it with the
mystery of the coming spring. Walking, on such a day, is of the essence
of delight. Some measure of bodily exercise is needed to keep one warm,
and this forth-faring on a holiday, free from the necessity of labor,
which begins almost with the dawn of consciousness after sleep and ends
only as the night of sleep closes down upon one, is a form of pleasure
which life does not often match.

The spell of it bore me company through the factory region, and where
there opened to my view mile after mile of lumber-yards, with unsightly
piles of seasoning timber stretching away to where the vessels lie in
the canals which are fed from the river, and there rise the gaunt bulks
of towering elevators, and the tall chimneys that everywhere send forth
their ceaseless volumes of black smoke. All this was eloquent of work,
and wages, and the means of decent living, and it therefore had a
beauty which will not be denied to it by one who knows something of the
misery of the unemployed. Even the grotesque ugliness of the long lines
of buildings, as I entered the closely built-up sections of the town,
could not rob me of the comforting sense of shelter and much legitimate
business among the well-paid working poor.

But, before crossing thence to the South Side, there remains a belt
through which even the stanchest optimism on its way to church on a
bright Sunday morning could scarcely pass without misgivings. A varying
foreign population, chiefly from southern and eastern Europe, thickens
here to a point of incredible crowding, and sweat-shops abound, and
cheap bakeries, and there is a marked increase in the number of
pawn-shops and saloons.

The crowds in the streets had been in Sunday dress thus far for the
most part, and were evidently on the way to mass or just returning.
Many children were among them, uniformly well-booted and dressed, and
here and there appeared the white veil and crowning flowers of a first
communion.

There was no sharp transition to a region which knows no Sunday, for
everywhere were the outward symbols of the day in closed shops, and
streets free from the noise of traffic, and the presence of holiday
garments; and yet more obvious on every hand became now the evidences
of a poverty which finds no day of rest. The unemployed, in the uniform
of rags, were loafing on the streets--the long, relentless waiting
which is an honest workman’s torment until he finds employment, or
loses hope and self-respect, when it becomes his sure destruction.
Children who have scant knowledge of clean water or clean clothes
were playing in the unclean streets, or emerging from the “family
entrances” of saloons with pitchers or tin-pails of beer, destined for
rooms swarming with workers whose labor never ceases, except for a few
hours each night, unless there comes the calamity of no work at even a
bare-living rate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: THE SOCIALIST MEETING.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I have no definite plan,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: RETURNING WORK FROM SWEAT SHOPS.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Unionist had caught me by the arm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VI

A ROAD BUILDER ON THE WORLD’S FAIR GROUNDS


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey, John!”

“Hello,” I said.

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

I told him that I had not thought of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The proprietor,” I answered.

“Did he say you could have that bunk?”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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




CHAPTER VII

FROM CHICAGO TO DENVER


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” said his daughter.

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

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

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

I do all that I can to keep a respectable appearance, and never a day
passes without the opportunity of a bath in a lake or a wayside stream,
and sometimes I am so fortunate as to come upon two or three such
chances for refreshment in a day’s march. But a long course of wearing
the same outer garments and sleeping in brick-kilns and hay-ricks must
inevitably produce an effect in clothing which, accompanied by an
unshaven face, gives rise to a somewhat scandalous figure.

I could only say, in reply to Mrs. Barton, that her husband’s
instructions to me were simply to deliver the message which I had
brought, and then to await his coming at the farm.

She was by no means reassured, but her hospitality overcame her fear,
and, unfastening the screen-door, she opened it with an invitation to
me to come in.

The dust on my boots and the general condition of my dress became the
instant source of poignant feeling as I stepped upon the speckless
carpet and took a seat in a straight-backed wooden chair which shone as
though the varnish were but newly dry.

The situation was unmistakably awkward, and, under the disturbing spell
of it, I sat very straight in the chair with feet close together and my
hands on my knees, anathematizing myself for stopping before there was
any need for it and getting myself into a mess. Then I began to cast
about for some excuse for going out-of-doors once more, so that I could
cut and run for the road.

Out of purest kindness of heart Mrs. Barton was trying to set me at
ease. There was some threat of rain, she remarked; and we had had a
great deal of rain this spring, she added; and where had I met Mr.
Barton? and when did he say that he would be home? she inquired.

My best efforts at responsiveness were dismal failures, and the gloom
was growing denser when Miss Julia came to my rescue with a copy of
_The Youth’s Companion_, which she suggested that I might care to read
while waiting.

Over and over again I read sections of continued “boys’ stories” and
a number of interesting anecdotes and tried to study out certain
puzzles, but Mr. Barton did not come. Mrs. Barton and her daughters had
immediately resumed their work and their conversation, and, with kind
considerateness, had left me to the paper. The hot summer afternoon
slowly dragged its length toward evening. Through breaks in rolling
clouds, heavy with rain, the sun shone at intervals with piercing heat.
A warm, damp, sun-lit air, laden with honeysuckle and the fragrance
of strawberry-beds, came floating idly through the open doors and
windows, bearing the droning hum of many bees, which was like a low
accompaniment to the soft voices of the women. Moving up the lane with
the stately, steady motion of an elephant, came presently a huge rick
of hay, the horses almost concealed under the overdrooping load and two
hired men seated comfortably on top.

Soon after this Mr. Barton arrived, and I went out to meet him in the
yard and helped him unhitch the horses. Then he set me to ploughing
potatoes in the garden with his youngest son, an intelligent,
gentlemanlike lad of seventeen, who, as I discovered later, was
preparing for college, for scarcely a day passed that his sister
Julia, who teaches school in a neighboring town through the winters,
did not find time to help him with his Algebra and Latin. When we were
called to supper I found that my case was satisfactorily explained to
the family, and that I could now read my title clear to a perfectly
comfortable position among them.

Would that I could do justice to the exquisite charm which I began to
feel at once in that simple, natural home-life! The men assembled at
the call to supper from different quarters of the farm. There were
five of us, Mr. Barton and his son Richard, and, besides me, two other
hired men, Al, an inflexible Yankee transplanted from far down East,
and Harry, a stalwart young Englishman of the grown-up “butcher’s boy”
variety, whose “h’s” had grown to be a source of discomfort to him. We
washed on the kitchen porch, and, contrary to the usual custom on the
farms, we put on our coats before entering the dining-room, which is
also the family sitting-room, where I had found Mrs. Barton and her
daughters at work.

The table was spread with clean linen, and a napkin was at each place.
Mr. Barton said grace in the midst of a reverent silence, which
continued while we began upon a meal abundant enough for a hungry man
and dainty enough for a lady.

After supper Harry and I went to fetch the cows, which had to be driven
in from a pasture beyond a little river that flows through the farm.
There were thirty-seven of them in all to be milked, but Miss Emily
and Miss Julia lent a hand, so that it did not take long, and when
the horses had been fed and their stalls made ready for the night, we
men were free. In the dark, star-lit evening, which followed almost
instantly upon the setting of the sun, we walked down to the river for
the regular evening bath.

It is early yet for sight of the past week in true perspective,
but even now its events take form in memory with a certain natural
sequence. With only one exception, clear, radiant summer days have
followed one another, days begun for us at five o’clock and spent in
the hay-fields when the chores were done and breakfast over. Long days
they were, full of hard work in the heat of the meadows, but there was
the refreshing cool of the house at mid-day, and a dinner excellent in
itself but to our whetted appetites a keen physical delight. And better
even than dinner was supper at the end of the day’s work in the fields,
a delicious supper of cold meats and potatoes and home-made bread and
milk and tea, and finally cake with strawberries from the garden. If
anything could have been better than that it was when Richard and we
three hired men took towels down to the river in the gloom of the early
evening, and under the clear summer stars from the high embankment
covered with soft turf, with the glitter of fire-flies all about us and
the air full of the deep croaking of frogs and the sharp reiterations
of the katydids, dove headlong into the dark, cool, flowing water. We
swam about for a quarter of an hour and came out with scarcely a trace
left in our muscles of the ache of the day’s labor and then went to bed
to eight hours of deepest sleep.

One was a rainy day when work in the fields was impossible, and we
spent it in the barn running some of last year’s wheat through the
fanning mill and measuring and sacking it ready for shipment. Then
Sunday came with its long, peaceful rest. Al and Harry secured each a
buggy and were given the use of two of the farm horses, and, in their
best Sunday black, they started after the chores were done to take
their best girls to church, and for a long drive in the afternoon.

The family attend church in Blue Earth City, but their rector has
another parish and can preach here only on alternate Sundays. This was
his Sunday in the other parish and there was a Sunday-school service
here. The restful observance of the day seemed to me in most natural
keeping with the deeply religious tone of the family life. Morning
worship followed breakfast as usual; then came the preparation for
church, and after the morning service and the mid-day meal, which was
almost wholly prepared on Saturday, the afternoon was spent in reading.
After a light supper in the evening Miss Julia played the harmonium in
the parlor, and we all joined in singing hymns until bedtime.

If there is one scene more than another which I shall always remember
as eminently characteristic of the household, it surely is that of
morning prayers. No pressure of work, even at the very height of the
haying season, is allowed to interfere with this act of worship.
Immediately after breakfast the family group themselves about the
dining-room, drawing off a little from the table, and Mr. Barton,
taking down an old Bible from the mantel-shelf, seats himself in the
rocker and begins to read the morning lesson. The passages have been
from the prophecy of Ezekiel, and, stronger than any other association
with that book, will hereafter be for me the sturdy figure of Mr.
Barton in his working clothes, seated in a rocking-chair with his head
bowed over a Bible as he reads, reverently, the oft-recurrent phrase:

  The Word of the Lord came again unto me saying, Son of Man,----

The prayer that followed has been always a simple, earnest appeal
for help and guidance. It was as though our dependence upon God and
His right to supreme devotion in every act of life was instinctively
recognized, and that the worship was a natural expression of love to
the Father of us all, thus renewing our wills and bringing us into
captivity unto the obedience of Christ, and sending us forth to the
duties of the day strong in the sense of the sacredness of work as
service to the Lord, and of His presence with us as the source of all
life and hope and strength.

Monday was the Fourth of July. Harry and Al were early off again with
buggies and best girls, and Mr. Barton invited me to join the family in
celebrating the day in town. We hitched a team to a four-seated market
wagon, and Mr. Barton’s son and his wife, who live on an adjoining
farm, drove with us to Blue Earth City, where we were to attend the
festivities and go for dinner to the home of a married daughter of Mr.
Barton, whose husband is a merchant there.

All along the country roads converging toward the county seat we saw
lines of farmers’ wagons driving to the common centre. There was great
variety of equipage; some were very rude and plain, but others were
exceedingly well appointed, and not a few of the low phaeton-buggy type
rose to a degree of elegance.

Many of the nearer dwellers were walking in, and as we approached our
destination the foot-paths were crowded, chiefly with young men and
boys, and the town itself, when we entered it, we found thronged with
holiday-seekers, the women in light dresses and bright ribbons, the men
in sober black, and all of them in their movements giving the sense of
heavily conscientious merry-making in spite of the glorious sunshine
and the air that throbbed with the joy of a ripe summer’s day.

When the horses were put up we fell in with the stream of people moving
toward the main street, and there in the thick of the serious throng
we stood on the curb watching a procession of local organizations
file past, headed by a brass band from Winnebago, all gorgeous in
new uniform and led by citizens on horseback as important and
uncomfortable as the marshals in a St. Patrick’s Day parade.

There was a common movement then of the crowd, through streets which
cracked to the continuous discharge of explosives, toward a wood on
the outskirts, where a rough booth had been erected and row on row
of benches placed before it in the shade. We found seats near to
the front, and presently there fell a hush upon the assembly which
quieted the flutter of fans and the mingled interchange of neighborly
conversation. A procession of little girls in white, with bright blue
sashes, each wearing the name of a State or Territory in silver letters
across the band of her sailor hat, which had long blue streamers
behind, came filing in among the crowd, all intensely trim and
self-conscious with their fingers protruding stiffly from white cotton
mits. Following them were a minister and a schoolmaster and a small
group of other prominent citizens, from among whom towered the tall,
massive figure and the clean-cut, rugged, beardless face of an old
ex-senator who was the orator of the day.

The little girls grouped themselves on benches which rose like steps
from the ground to the level of the floor of the booth, and the
citizens took seats assigned them on the platform. One of their
number, the chairman of the occasion, introduced the minister, who
led the company in prayer. Then the schoolmaster was presented as the
reader of the Declaration of Independence. A few explanatory sentences
in unconventional English served to bring vividly to the minds of the
people the familiar circumstances of the signing of the Declaration,
and then in sonorous, ringing voice he read, amid breathless stillness,
the deep natural stillness of the woodland, the well-remembered phrases
of that great document. There was no applause when he ceased, no
outward demonstration of any kind, but through the great still company
one could feel the strong movement of the sense of national life.

The ex-senator then rose to speak. He was himself a frontiersman,
having known the Northwest from its early settlement and having
represented it in Congress a generation ago, and he spoke to people
whose history he knew and whose temper he thoroughly understood. It was
inspiriting to catch the dominant note of what he said and to watch
its effect upon his hearers. There was talk of national growth, but
without boasting, and there was very serious reckoning of national
problems, but without carping, and there was high appeal to national
responsibility, but without canting, and when at the end, out of
the wealth of his own personal association with the man, he spoke of
Lincoln and enforced all that he had said with homely, cogent teachings
drawn from the life and the words of the great apostle of the common
people, the assembly was moved and stirred as no other appeal could
have affected it.

After this the crowd scattered for dinner, most of the people
re-entering the town, and the spirit of fun, no longer to be restrained
by a conscientious sense of the seriousness of enjoyment, broke loose
in a bit of genuine American horseplay, when a company of boys and
young men, in most fantastic disguise, passed in grotesque procession
through the streets, and for a few minutes the solemn crowds really
lost self-consciousness in true _abandon_ to the spontaneous sport.

The Barton family had soon gathered at the married daughter’s home, and
there with the greatest good cheer we had a picnic dinner of delightful
cold meats, and the thinnest of bread and butter, and olives, and
dainty home-made cakes, and the reddest of ripe cherries--all served to
us as we sat just within the dining-room door or ranged in a semicircle
about it in the shade on the lawn.

When it was over everyone was eager to start for the public green
outside the town, where the afternoon’s sports were to be held. It was
not far, and we walked out, but almost a continuous stream of carriages
was passing us in a common movement, and when we reached the bridge
just outside the town the stream had narrowed to an unbroken line of
vehicles moving slowly in single file. At the centre of the bridge
which spans a narrow stream below the public green stood an interesting
figure as we drew up. He was a tall, lean man of sixty, perhaps, but
without a suggestion of old age in his lithe, sinewy frame; a Yankee
by every gift of nature, with the sharply inquisitive face of a ferret
and shrewd blue eyes with a gleam of humor in them and a little tuft
of whiskers on his chin. Every vehicle, as it passed, underwent an
interested scrutiny from him, and his whiskers worked comically up and
down as he cordially greeted the occupants whom he knew. I was walking
with Mr. Barton, and seeing us in the crowd on foot, he eagerly hailed
Mr. Barton as a sympathetic old acquaintance.

“John,” he said, “I was just thinking as I stood here how I was to the
Fourth of July celebration in these parts thirty years ago to-day,
in ’62. And my gracious, it’s hard to realize the change! Why, there
warn’t a team of horses in the hull county then, and everybody come on
foot or else behind a yoke of oxen. But just look at that percession
now! There ain’t a ox-team in the hull outfit, and ther’s some rigs
here that’s fine enough for the President to ride in.”

The common presented a truly festive scene when we reached it. As
large as a ten-acre lot, it was covered with a soft, rich turf and
enclosed on three sides by beautiful woodland and on the fourth by the
main-travelled road. Horses, tied in the shade along the outer rim of
trees, were munching hay from piles which had been thrown down before
them. Deserted vehicles, ranging from white-canopied prairie-schooners
and rough market-carts to the smartest of new buggies, stood idly
among the trees, and, with changing lights and shadows playing over
them, were groups of picnickers seated on the mossy ground about white
table-cloths which bore their viands, and some on rustic benches at
rough tables hastily put up for the occasion.

But the dinner-hour was nearly over, and those who had picnicked in
the woods were fast joining the crowds who poured in upon the common
from the town. The peanut and popcorn and lemonade venders were out in
force, and you could hear from many quarters the professional tones
of fakirs who invited the crowds to throw rings at walking-sticks,
or rubber balls at stuffed dolls for cigars, or to various tests of
strength on a variety of ingenious machines. These had their votaries
for a time, and there was much laughter and chaffing about the jousts,
but the current of the crowd soon set overwhelmingly toward a quarter
of the field where a baseball game was being started. Two townships
were to play each other. There was no organized nine in either, but
a volunteer one was presently secured from both. Not without some
difficulty, however. I saw one sturdy young farmer offer his services
as pitcher, and his wife, who stood by with her baby in her arms,
pleaded with him to desist.

[Illustration: THE FOURTH OF JULY--“TWO TOWNSHIPS WERE TO PLAY EACH
OTHER.”]

“Charlie,” she repeated with whining petulance, “you hadn’t ought to;
you _know_ you hadn’t ought to. Just think how stiff and sore you’ll
be to-morrow. You won’t be fit for the haying.” But the spirit of the
sport was upon Charlie, and not only did he pitch for his township, but
he took off his boots and played in stocking-feet to facilitate his
base running.

Another young farmer, a gorgeous swell, with his best girl beside him
in a phaeton-buggy, and with no end of a white waistcoat and a white
cravat, and with a high, stiff collar chafing his well-burned neck, sat
spectator to the scene for a time; then, unable to resist longer the
demand for a catcher for his township nine, he asked the young woman
to hold the horses, and, leaving his coat and waistcoat and high collar
in her care, he caught a plucky game without a mask or a breast-pad and
with only an indifferent glove, and he threw so well to second that the
other side had to give up trying to steal that base.

It was a perfectly delightful game; not at all a duel of batteries, but
like a contest between two newly organized rival freshman nines before
any team-work has been developed, for both pitchers were hit freely,
and there were plenty of the most engaging errors and the wildest of
excited throwing, and at times a perfect merry-go-round of frantic
base-running, during which it was difficult to keep track of the score.

We drove back to the farm in the cool of the evening in time for supper
and the chores before nightfall, and at five o’clock on the next
morning began again a day of work in the hay-fields.

       *       *       *       *       *

                              DENVER, COL., September 21, 1892.

It is a long cry from Mr. Barton’s farm to this beautiful Western
city, but the story of the journey can easily be shortened to a few
pages, which will serve to picture its salient incidents. Even at
this distance of time and space I cannot touch in passing upon my
parting with the Barton family without feeling again the sense of
homesickness which accompanied me as, in the glory of an early July
morning, I walked down the garden-path to the road, with her good-by
and a gentle “God bless you!” from Mrs. Barton sounding in my ear, and
a last repeated generous offer from Mr. Barton of a permanent home,
if I would stay with them, almost following me to the gate. It was
the best of the many chances which I have found open to men who are
honestly in search of work and willing to work their way industriously
and patiently to advancement. I have found many jobs thus far, and
in scarcely one of them have I failed to see the means of winning
promotion and improved position, while not a few have seemed to me to
open a way to considerable business success to a man shrewd enough to
seize it and persistent enough to develop it. Often, as I look back
upon two thousand miles of country crossed--apart from the splendor
of it--the almost overwhelming impression that it leaves of boundless
empire wherein a growing, intelligent, industrious, God-fearing people
are slowly working out great ends in industrial achievement and
personal character and in national life, an impression which thrills
one with a new-found knowledge and love of one’s country, with her
“glorious might of heaven-born freedom” and the resistless resurgence
of her boundless energies, and, notwithstanding all waywardness, a
deep-seated, unalterable consciousness of national responsibility to
the most high God; apart from all this, the strongest sense which
possesses one in any retrospect of a long, laborious expedition like
mine, is that of a wide land, which teems with opportunities open
to energy and patient toil. Local labor markets there are which are
terribly crowded, as I found in Chicago to my cost. Awful suffering
there is among workers who are in the clutch of illness, or, bound by
ties which they cannot break, are unable to move to more favorable
regions; pitiful degradation there is among many who lack imagination
to see a way and the energy to pursue it, and who, without the
congenital qualities which make for successful struggle, sink into
the slough of purposeless idleness; deep depravity and unutterable
misery there are in the great congested labor-centres, many of whose
conditions are the price which we pay for our economic freedom. But the
broad fact remains, that the sun never shone upon a race of civilized
men whose responsibilities were greater and whose problems were more
charged with the welfare of mankind, among whom energy and thrift and
perseverance and ability were surer of their just rewards, and where
there were so many and such various chances of successful and honorable
career.

In leaving Mr. Barton’s farm I found much the same external conditions
as those with which I had grown familiar ever since I left Chicago.
It was a rich agricultural region, and was inhabited throughout this
section in curious, clearly defined communities. In one quarter
was a German settlement, and in another a Norwegian, and a Swedish
settlement in a third, while I heard of a French colony as a curiosity
in another direction, and even an organization of Quakers. But there
were native-born Americans in plenty, and chiefly of New England
antecedents, as I found in my chance acquaintance with farmers by
the way, and from observations of such a charming town as Algona, in
northern Iowa, where I spent several days. On every hand it was borne
in upon one, not merely from what appeared but from the invariable
assurances of those who have lived long in the region, that among the
foreign population no fact is more thoroughly established than that of
its swift assimilation. So swift and sure a process is this said to
be that the children born upon the soil, of immigrant parentage, seem
to lose certain physical characteristics which would link them to an
alien ancestry, and to take on others which approximate to recognized
American types. Their children, in turn, are said to be natives of
established character; but of them all none surpasses the first-comers,
when once they are settled and grown familiar with our institutions,
in a stanch, honest conservatism and in a loyal, patriotic devotion to
their adopted country.

It was nearly the end of July when I reached Council Bluffs. I was
well worn with walking, for the last two hundred miles I had covered
in six days’ march, and I was glad enough to stop for a time. But I
did not wish to stop there, for my letters for several weeks past had
been forwarded to Omaha, and were now awaiting me across the river.
Unluckily for me, there was a five-cent toll for foot-passengers on the
bridge, and I had only one cent left.

It was the middle of an intensely hot afternoon. I was too tired to
begin an immediate search for work, and so I took a seat on a bench in
the shade of the public square, near to a fountain which played with a
delicious sound of coolness under the trees. The park walks converged
toward the fountain as a centre, and thither came the people who wished
to rest in the shade or whose errands carried them through the public
square. Presently a sharer of my bench got up and walked on, leaving
behind him a copy of a local paper, which I eagerly seized upon and
read and re-read until I became conscious of the dimming light of
early evening. I was stiff and sore with the long, hot, dusty march,
and uncomfortable at failing to get the letters upon which I had long
counted, and I lacked utterly the energy to surmount even so slight a
difficulty. But with the cool of the early evening came the natural
hunger bred of a day’s march, and the necessity of providing for that
and a shelter for the night.

One of the streets of the city through which I had walked to the
central square was named Fifth Avenue, and from one point on its
pavement I could see through the open windows of a cheap hotel the
tables in the dining-room spread for supper. There were screens at the
windows and light cotton curtains, and the table-linen appeared clean
and the shaded depth of the room looked to me, from the blistering
pavement, like the subdued, fragrant coolness of real luxury.

I retraced my steps to the hotel and asked for work, but there was
none for me. I found the way to the stables and applied there, but an
old man with a long nose and a white, patriarchal beard told me that
they were in no need of more men. This was very different from my
experience in the country, where everyone was in need of men and one
had not to ask for employment but was everywhere urged to accept it,
and I began to wonder whether for the sake of work I should be forced
out again to the farms.

Near this “Fifth Avenue” hotel I had noticed a livery-stable which
fronted on one street and extended through to another bordering
the public square. I went there next, and found its keeper seated
comfortably in the wide, open doorway. Taciturn and non-committal at
first, he confessed eventually to his needing a man in addition to the
two already at work in the stable, and, after some questioning, he told
me to come back at nine o’clock that evening and receive his decision.

I was supperless and without the means of securing anything to eat,
and there remained an hour and a half before nine o’clock. In this
predicament I had the good fortune to chance upon a delightful public
library on the second floor of a building overlooking the square. It
was like the library at Wilkesbarre in its charming accessibility;
and, without a trace of the feeling of weariness or hunger left, I was
reading ravenously, when, by some happy chance, I caught sight of a
clock that was almost on the stroke of nine. With thanks, which were
exceedingly short and abrupt, I returned the books to an attendant
in the library and then bolted for Mr. Holden’s livery-stable. He was
standing in the door when I came up, and, without preliminary remarks,

“I will take you on,” he said, and then he added, almost without a
pause,

“I will give you twenty dollars a month and arrange for your board at
the hotel [indicating the “Fifth Avenue” one], or thirty dollars a
month and you manage for your own keep. You will sleep in the loft over
the harness-room.”

Without a moment’s hesitation I accepted the first offer, and wishing
us good-night Mr. Holden left the stable in charge of Ed, one of the
other hired men, and me.

It was too late to get anything to eat at the hotel, and so I sat up
with Ed and helped unhitch the horses and put up the traps as they came
in. The last horse was housed by eleven o’clock. I then found that with
the aid of a hose a capital bath was possible in the carriage-washing
section of the stable, and then I went to bed on a cot in the
well-ventilated loft, very content in the knowledge that I had found a
good place and should have a breakfast in the morning.

Ed called me at five o’clock as he was going below, and when I followed
him he assigned me the two rows of stalls next to his own, which
contained twelve horses and which were to be my first care. All these
stalls had to be cleaned and the horses fed before I was at liberty
to go to breakfast, and it was with a royal appetite that about seven
o’clock I applied at the hotel. It was a very decent hostelry, largely
made use of by farmers apparently. I was at once accepted as an employé
of Mr. Holden, and served to an excellent meal by a trim little
waitress, at one of the very tables which I had looked in upon on the
previous afternoon with such genuine longing, and with the feeling of
its belonging to a degree of luxury far beyond my reach.

The twelve horses which had fallen to my share had all to be curried
after breakfast and got ready for the day’s orders. Calls for vehicles
began to arrive in the middle of the morning, and they continued to
come at intervals throughout the day, so that there was much hitching
and unhitching to interfere with regular tasks.

Jake, the third hired man, was boss in the absence of the owner. He had
long been in Mr. Holden’s employ, and had a wife and several children
in a home of his own somewhere in the outskirts of the city. All the
feeding, and cleaning, and currying, and carriage-washing, fell to Ed
and me, while Jake, in addition to a general superintendence, had as
his special trust the care of all the harnesses. He took great pride
in them, and certainly kept them in admirable condition. Ed was chief
carriage-washer and next in command under Jake, while to me, when my
regular work was done, fell the odd jobs of keeping the carriages
oiled, and watering the horses at the proper hours, and lending a hand
at the unloading of the hay and feed as they came in--of holding myself
in readiness, in short, to do anything that anyone in the stable asked
of me. A very good position it was, as I very soon found. I had no
great difficulty in learning the various tasks, and in a stable which,
even in the fierce heat of August, was always comfortable, and at forms
of work which were always interesting, and with every cost of living
provided for, I was clearing five dollars a week.

By no means were the demands of our work continuous. Nearly every
afternoon we had an hour or two or even three together, when there was
little to be done. I found a book-shop across the way from the stable,
where second-hand books could be rented at the rate of six cents a week
and the books exchanged as often as you pleased.

Then in the evenings, when we all had supped in turn, and the stalls
had been made ready for the night, and the traps sent out in answer to
the evening trade, Jake and Ed and I used to sit out in front, within
easy hearing of the telephone-bell, with our chairs tilted against the
stable-wall and our feet caught by the heels on the chair-rounds, and
there we talked by the hour together, until Jake went home and left Ed
and me to care for the outstanding horses and traps, and lock up the
stable for the night.

I was at a disadvantage in these conversations. Jake and Ed were
Yankees, both of them shrewd, hard-headed, steady fellows. Jake was the
father of a family, and Ed an unmarried man of three-and-thirty, who
was working with all his might to pay off the mortgage on his father’s
farm back in Illinois. Both of them had had some district-school
training, but nothing beyond, and while they had a perfectly
intelligent knowledge of affairs which concerned them as men and as
citizens, their farther intellectual horizon was limited.

One evening as we sat under the stars the talk turned upon astronomy,
and Ed began to comment disparagingly upon the claims of astronomers
of an ability to weigh the heavenly bodies, and to measure their
distances from one another and from the earth. Jake heartily agreed
with him, and insisted that not until a line could be carried from
one to another, and each star weighed accurately in a scale, would he
put any confidence in these pretended results. My attempt to point out
that there were methods of determining weight and distance other than
the very direct ones which they insisted upon, was very damaging to my
reputation for intelligence, and was set down as of a piece with the
general ignorance which I had shown in the work of a livery-stable.
And when, later in the discussion, I stood out for the validity of
the doctrine of the conservation of energy, against Ed’s immediate
demonstration of its falsity in the heaps of refuse which he pointed
out were thrown every day from our stable alone, and which must to some
degree effect a variation in the totality of matter--I found that my
position in the crew was threatened with unpleasantness.

But in reality both Jake and Ed were exceedingly friendly to me. They
were at pains from the first to teach me my work, and to give me a hint
now and again, which counted for much, in the matter of getting the job
well in hand. Soon the days began to go by with astonishing rapidity. I
had told Mr. Holden that I should not be with him very long, and at the
end of two weeks I left the livery-stable with ten dollars and one cent
in my pocket, minus the twelve cents which were due for book-hire, and
which I felt had been well invested.

At Omaha I stopped for several days. Like Minneapolis and Denver,
of the Western towns which I have seen, it is a splendid type of
the American city of a generation’s growth, where almost miraculous
progress has been made in actual material development, and where the
higher demands of civilization are responded to with an energy and
enthusiasm which are inspiring, and which are prophetic of splendid
results.

Then out I walked one perfect afternoon upon the level plains of
Nebraska, with wild sunflowers in prolific bloom and square miles of
Indian-corn fields standing lusty and stark to the very horizon with
puffs of belated pollen powdering the warm red light, and the corn-silk
turning black at the ends, and the long, drooping, cane-like blades
beginning to show the ripe yellow of the autumn.

The mere writing down the bare fact of the journey stirs in one’s blood
again the joy of that free life. The boundlessness of the world and
your boundless enjoyment of it, the multiplicity of abundant life and
your blood-kinship with it all, some goal on the distant horizon and
your “spirit leaping within you to be gone before you then!” There is
scarcely a recollection of all the tramp through Illinois and Minnesota
and Iowa and eastern Nebraska which is without the charm of a free,
wandering life through a rich, beautiful country. What I saw of the
wealth of a fertile region in central Illinois I found again enhanced
in beauty and productiveness in southern Minnesota, and, varying in
outward configuration but scarcely less attractive or fruitful, across
the face of Iowa, losing only its variety as it modulates in Nebraska
to the plains which slope upward gently for five hundred miles to the
Rockies.

My mind throngs with the pictures of splendid cultivation, of leagues
on leagues of farms which were had for the taking or were purchased
from the Government at a dollar and a quarter an acre, and where I saw
countless comfortable homes and fields white to the harvest, with no
demand so strong as the one for laborers.

It was not wealth in the sense of opulence, but it was the plenty
which is beyond the fear of want that marked the character of that
broad domain. The poor were there, and the suffering and the deeply
discontented, and there were hard conditions of life and very sordid
ones, but never the hopelessness which gives to town-bred destitution
its quality of despair. In the gradual development of actual resources
about you appeared to be the remedies of most of the obvious ills.

“This is a rich region,” said a handsome young farmer who had offered
me a lift one blistering hot day in Iowa--“this is a rich region, and
it is more than rich, it is reliable. We never know a total failure of
crops here; we can always make a living. This country, for hundreds of
miles around, is a garden, and we live in the heart of it.” And he was
one of the discontented. I only regret that I have not space here for
his interesting account of the tyranny of capital under which, from his
point of view, the farmers live and work, and the imperative need of
monetary reform as a means of bringing about their emancipation.

It was the thing which I had heard many times from many farmers at
the West, only never presented with quite equal cogency before. The
opposite views had been represented to me, and there was often a
singular alternation of presentation within the course of a day or two,
and I had come to recognize a comical uniformity between condition and
views.

If I chanced upon a farmer who had no particular quarrel with the
existing order of things, who was conservative and cautious and
sceptical of the efficacy of change, I was quite sure to find that
he was an admirable farmer, thrifty and energetic and industrious,
with a thorough knowledge of his business down to a frugal care of
minor details. But if, on the other hand, I fell in with a farmer who
was clamorous for radical economic change, on the ground that he and
his class were being ruined by the injustices of existing economic
conditions, I soon began to feel a suspicion, which all my observation
deepened into a conviction, that the man of this type was fundamentally
a poor farmer; his buildings and fences were sure to be out of repair,
and his stock showed signs of suffering for want of proper care, and
the weeds grew thick in his corn, and his machines were left unhoused
and suffered more from rust than ever they did from wear.

This would be absurd as a generalization with any claim to wide
applicability, as would be any generalization based upon my casual
experimenting; it was the comical uniformity of my experience in this
case as in some others that impressed me.

The real difficulties of the situation for many of the Western farmers
one could not fail to see. Apart from material misfortune and apart
from sickness and ill-luck, there is the inexorableness of conditions
which seem at times to hold them to a life of servitude with no escape
from unprofitable drudgery, and from the carking care which burdens
men who are hopelessly in the clutch of debt.

I grew impatient at times with the tone of Philistine patronage and
superiority adopted by the sturdier farmers. Theirs was the harder work
no doubt and theirs the shrewder carefulness and the more provident
handling of their instruments, but even hard-won success is sometimes
so strangely blind to the obligations which arise from the fact that
subjective difficulties are as real and are often far more difficult of
mastering than those which are objective. Often it appears at its worst
as, with utter disregard of the duty of helpfulness, it chants its
heartless creed in the terms of the fore-ordination which lightly dooms
all the non-elect of high efficiency to the deep damnation of beggarly
dependence or of endless failure in the struggle of life.

Two hundred miles west of Omaha the wages earned at the livery-stable
in Council Bluffs were exhausted, and I was obliged to look for another
job with which to replenish my store. I was following the line of the
Union Pacific Railway, and, having spent my last cent one mid-day
for a dinner, I went up to the first section-boss whom I met in the
afternoon’s walk and asked him for a job. He was a burly Irishman of
massive figure. Without a moment’s hesitation he told me that he was
in no need of a man, but that Osborn, the boss of the next westward
section, the thirty-second, with head-quarters at Buda, he knew was
looking for one.

About eight miles farther on I came upon Osborn and two men at
work near the little station at Buda, a scant four miles east of
Kearney, and it was as the Irishman had said, for instantly, upon my
application, Osborn accepted me as a section-hand at wages of a dollar
and a quarter a day for ten hours’ work, and offered me board and
lodgings at his home for three dollars a week, an arrangement with
which I instantly closed.

For the remaining afternoon and until six o’clock I lay resting in the
tall prairie grass in the shade of the railway station, and at seven
o’clock on the next morning I began a term of three weeks’ service as a
section-hand under the orders of Osborn the boss, and with a strapping
young Irishman, “Cuckoo” Sullivan by name, as my partner.

That was the last long stop before I reached Denver. And now, as I
am about to leave this city for the remaining thousand miles of my
journey, I look back over a summer and autumn spent in the country
and in towns and villages of the thousand miles from the seaboard to
Chicago, and then a winter and a spring within the limits of the
foremost city of the Middle West, and then a summer in the vast farming
region between Chicago and Minneapolis and Denver. A thousand miles
remain, but with what eager anticipation do I look forward to them!
I shall strike in among the mountains, and then leave to the natural
development of events the determining of my westward journey. Whichever
course it takes, my way must lie through the frontier, and by force of
necessity I must come into contact with a life which is something other
than the monotonous daily round of work. There will be mining regions
with the chances of prospecting, and the ranches with the wide range
of their free living, and Indian reservations to be crossed, and many
lonely mountain-trails to be followed.

It was never without interest and charm, this summer’s walk with its
intervals of work, over a thousand miles of the mid-continent. It
varied in beauty with every day’s march, and even the dead level of
the Nebraska prairies as the Indian-corn fields grew thinner and faded
completely into boundless plains of sage-brush, where the alkali lay
white on the glittering soil, and the bleaching skeletons of cattle
joined their mute appeal to the cloudless sky for water to quench a
burning thirst--even here was an attraction and an interest of its own.

Days ago I caught sight of the mountains rising from out the level
plain, and, through the haze of distance and above the mists which
shrouded their gaunt sides, I saw their “silent pinnacles of aged snow”
appearing clear against the blue of high heaven. Now, as I have drawn
nearer in this marvellous air, a hundred miles of the range stand out
in glorious vividness of color and of every detail of configuration,
and my heart leaps again to the joy of their companionship, and I
realize with a tingling of blood that the best of the journey, in any
sense of adventure, lies before me in the life which they hold upon
their slopes and fertile valleys, and in the gloomy depths of their
vast cañons.




CHAPTER VIII

FROM DENVER TO THE PACIFIC


                                      PHŒNIX, ARIZONA,
                                      January 3, 1893.

Journeying by no pre-arranged plan, but directing my course according
to the promptings of chance circumstances, I have wandered far from a
direct westward line from Denver to the sea, but I have come by a way
that has furnished in experience all that I could have hoped.

The very first step from Denver carried me out of a due westward
course. In the vague, ill-defined manner of a tenderfoot, I knew
that Cripple Creek was a relatively new mining camp, and that it lay
somewhere beyond Pike’s Peak, and I light-heartedly dreamed that,
being a new camp, it was just the place for a new-comer; so, late in
September, I set out from Denver with Cripple Creek in view.

For seventy miles or more I went south, the earlier part of the walk
leading me through the sandy tract which begins abruptly at the very
edge of the fresh green lawns that mark the end of irrigation in the
city. The road which first I followed gradually faded out on the open
plain. Then I cut diagonally across country in the direction of the
foot-hills.

Near to the city as it was this bit of country, after weeks of drought,
was like a veritable desert. Underfoot was the hot alkali dust, where
grew the short plain-grass that lay whitened in tufts of crisping
curls, as though dead beyond all reviving. Thick on every side was a
growth of stunted cactus, well in keeping with the character of the
plain, while the deeper green of the long, sharp Spanish needles was
a sad mockery of fertility. Along occasional ravines, washed deep by
sudden, rain-fed streams whose beds now lay stony and parched and baked
under the hot sun, were here and there clusters of scrub-oaks, small
in growth but with their wiry branches spreading a luxuriance of small
oval leaves which supplied the welcome of a shadow in a desert land.
At intervals among the dry, tufted grass small sand-heaps appeared,
and above them the heads of prairie dogs, piping shrill warning of
suspicious approach, or darting in swift flight from one burrow to
another.

For some miles I walked through such a region, growing momentarily
thirstier as the sun beat down upon me and I inhaled the alkali with
the sensation of having eaten soap. The only sign of habitation that
I saw was a shanty, a mere shell of boards tacked upon a frame and
standing ten feet square, perhaps, and seven feet high. The hill on
which it stood sloped to a deep ravine, and past the shanty door wound
a smaller water-course, where a line of scrub-oaks grew, suggesting the
presence of a spring. But the bed was dry and yawned in thirsty cracks,
and no source of water could I find, although the shanty was plainly
inhabited; for the door was heavily padlocked, and a half-starved dog,
with a broken leg, limped from his kennel among some old soap-boxes
and barked a feeble protest against my approach, and a few fowls were
squatting in the dust in the shade of the scrub-oaks, or scratching for
food in the dry grass near the shanty.

Two or three miles farther on I came out upon a highway, which follows
the general direction of the Santa Fé and the Rio Grande railways, as
they parallel each other to the south. Here was a very different tale
to tell. There were many ranches along the route with abundant supplies
of water from artesian wells, apparently, whose streams were playing
ceaselessly over gardens and at the roots of thrifty fruit-trees. I
passed through a number of typical Western villages on the march, and
once through an encampment of a regiment of regulars, whose officers
were at mess and many of the men lying at full length on the ground
with their legs protruding from under the slight shelter tents, while
foraging expeditions could be seen bargaining among their out-houses
with the neighboring ranchmen, with all the womenkind and children in
interested attendance.

The road was gradually drawing nearer to the foot-hills. Instead of
a hundred miles of unbroken mountain-range, from Long’s to Pike’s
Peak, that seemed to rise abruptly from the plain only an hour’s walk
away, I began to be aware of the magnificent distances so strangely
disguised in that clear, rarefied air, and to appreciate altitudes by
comparison with lesser heights. The view lost in extent, only to gain
in the grander outlines of splendid detail. And with the nearer view
there grew clear the marvellous coloring in the exposed strata and
the fantastic shapes which mark the play of erosion among the rocks.
There were deep saffrons and reds of every hue, from a delicate flush
to crimson; there were browns and grays without number, and a soft
cream color deepening to yellow, and now and then a jut of rock that
in certain lights appeared milk-white. To boundless variety in color
was added a weird charm of form with which the imagination could play
endlessly. Sitting a rugged bowlder with the dainty poise of an egg
upon a conjurer’s finger would appear a round-bellied Hindu god in
solid stone, and near him, in exquisitely delicate tracery, a flying
buttress or the tapering spire of a cathedral, while crowning some
sheer height in all the glory of gorgeous color would rise the grim
towers and battlements of a mediæval fortress.

It was after nightfall on Saturday evening when I entered Colorado
Springs. With the aid of the electric lights I soon gathered an
impression of a considerable town of large hotels and wide, regular
thoroughfares, with the squares built up, many of them, in detached
villas, after the manner of Eastern summer-resorts by the sea. In the
course of a walk about the town I came upon an empty prairie schooner,
which stood in a cluster of trees on the outskirts of an open square,
and creeping under the sheltering canopy I slept there for the night.

The Sunday which followed I remember chiefly for its glorious sunshine
and the view which I had in the morning of Pike’s Peak. Its summit
seemed to leap into the sky as it rose stark and bald above the
timber-line, and yet there was infinite repose in its splendid height,
standing out clear and majestic in the full rays of the morning
sun. I remember, too, a service in a well-filled church, and an odd
reminder in its worshippers of the Eastern seaboard, and the exciting
expectancy of chance sight of some familiar face, and, finally, the
figure of a girl, who, entering after the service had begun, slipped
noiselessly into a seat at my side in a pew near the door. A wonderful
vision she was of what men mean when they speak feelingly out here of
“God’s country,” for you no sooner saw her than there flashed into
sight the long vista of the avenue as it heaves to the lift of Murray
Hill. You could see her there--and can see her superior nowhere under
heaven--with the light streaming in red, level rays through the side
streets on a late afternoon in the cold, crisp air of autumn, with the
tan of a summer on the New England coast upon her, and her exquisite
figure instinct with the vitality which comes of yachting and hard
riding, her frock and jacket fitting her like a glove, and her clear,
frank eyes looking you straight between your own and making you feel
in her presence what a clean, wholesome, manly thing is life! She
little dreamed, as she cordially shared her prayer-book with me, how
deeply indebted to her I was for being so fine a type of the finest and
handsomest women in the world, and how much I owed her for so fair a
vision before I launched into the mining regions of the frontier.

Monday dawned as bright as Sunday had been, and by eight o’clock I
reached Manitou and was ready to begin the ascent of Pike’s Peak. There
was a wide choice of route, for there was a road, and a well-beaten
trail, and the bed of the cog railway. I took to the railway as the
most unmistakable and very likely the directest course.

With infinite engineering skill the first ascent of the cog-road is cut
as a ledge along the side of a deep gorge or cañon, down which rushes
a mountain stream of considerable volume. Following the great turns
of the cañon the road ascends in the shadow of huge rocks, that tower
straight above it or slope in a more gradual rise, furnishing place for
the cabin of a miner or of some lover of camp life. The mountain-sides
are dark with evergreen, which seems to grow deep-rooted in the rock,
clinging at times to a bare, protruding ledge with naked roots thrust
deep into crevices where soil and moisture are found. The quaking aspen
shares this bare subsistence with the pine, and, green with the rich
green of late summer at the mountain-base, it marked all the stages of
the autumn in the ascent, until at the timber-line I found its leaves
turned yellow and fast falling to the ground.

About two miles below Windy Point I had the good luck to overtake a
miner, who had been spending Sunday with his family near Colorado
Springs and was now on his way back to work in Cripple Creek. He was
not at all encouraging as to the prospect of my finding work in the
camp, but before we parted at Windy Point he gave me careful directions
about the way, and I began to feel, in his calling me “partner” and
in his talk of “claims” and “gulches” and “blazed trails,” my first
intimation of nearing the mining regions of the Rockies.

We separated where the cog-road sweeps around the southern side of
the mountain, only because I was bent on reaching the summit before
going on to Cripple Creek. All the difficulty of the ascent I found
concentrated in the last hour of climbing. It no longer was a matter
of steady uphill work, but a succession of short spurts wherein one
breathed more by accident than design. You were not tired in the least,
but, at an altitude of some 14,000 feet, your breath failed completely
in an upward walk of fifty yards, and you were obliged to stand still,
panting until respiration became normal again.

Exactly at twelve o’clock I reached the summit, where I found a
piercing cold wind blowing and small drifts of snow lying in crevices
among the rocks on the northern slope; in an air as clear as crystal
my eye swept boundless mountain-ranges to the north and west and south
and a boundless plain below, where, at the foot of the mountain, lay
Colorado Springs, a few, dim squares formed by the intersection of
faint parallel lines at right angles to one another. Above the rushing
of the wind among the grim, naked crags which form the summit, a wind,
which at that solemn height suggests the sweep of awful interstellar
spaces, the only sound I heard was the voice of an attendant in a stone
building near by as he sang, again and again, the chorus of “Ta, ra,
ra, ra, boom, de ay!”

I remained at the summit as long as I dared, held by the fascination of
the view; then I returned to Windy Point and went down the south face
of the mountain and across a beautiful grass-grown level to the brink
of another descent, where, according to my miner friend of the morning,
I should find a blazed trail. I found instead the sheer side of a
cañon. I followed the brink of the precipice for some distance, and
coming at last upon a less abrupt point, I plunged down and made my way
over shelving rock and fallen trees until I eventually chanced upon the
trail. This I followed to the deep bed of the cañon, where I saw some
claims staked out and lost my way in a tangle of cattle trails. It was
growing dark, and there was no sign of the journey’s end, but I knew
the general direction of Cripple Creek, and the moon was at its first
quarter.

Even the cattle trails failed at last, and in the dark forest I was
soon lunging on over bowlders and rotting trees and the _débris_ of a
mountain wood in the direction of the camp, hoping, meanwhile, that
I should not be obliged to spend the night in the open, for at that
altitude in late September it was turning “wondrous cold.”

Down one ridge and up another I forged ahead through the tangled
undergrowth of the forest, and at last, from the top of a rock which
cleared the trees about it, I caught the glimmer of a light through the
window of a cabin a mile or two away.

It was an ore-crushing camp I found; I was made most cordially welcome,
and given a bed on a pile of blankets in a tent where slept the half
dozen men of the crew. They were a hearty, healthy lot of young farmers
to all appearances, and I gathered that they had come up from Kansas at
the time of the “boom” at Cripple Creek.

A walk of only four or five miles carried me into the camp after
breakfast next morning. The first view that I had of it was very
striking, I thought, as I looked down upon it from a sudden turn in
the road. The settlement lay in the southeastern bend of a basin whose
bottom was as flat as the prairie and well turfed. The hills rose
quite bare for some distance about it, and their sides looked oddly,
as though heavy artillery had been playing upon them, for they were
peppered with holes made by prospectors, with loose earth and stones
lying about them.

Straggling lines of wooden buildings followed roughly the rude course
of a long, dusty street, which ran southward to the mouth of a gulch
and then turned abruptly west until it lost itself on the level. Some
of these buildings were log-cabins, of much solidity, and others were
trim, substantial frame houses, neatly painted; but for the most part
they were crude, unpainted shanties, and there were many tents dotting
the hillsides, and a few lines of light structures which marked the
outlines of prospective streets branching from the main thoroughfare.

The camp itself wore an air of desertion, which was only confirmed
when I entered it. There were few persons in the streets, and some of
the houses were abandoned. The picture formed a very welcome contrast
when I saw a school-mistress step to the door of a long log-cabin, with
grass growing thick on its roof, and ring a bell to summon a troop
of little children, who came running and shouting from unexpected
quarters, dispelling at once the loneliness and quiet of the place.

It was but nine in the morning, and I had the full day in which to
look for work. There were very few mines in actual operation in the
neighborhood, I found, but I visited all of them, asking for any form
of unskilled labor.

I was struck at once with the wide difference in bearing out here,
as compared with the East and Middle West, on the part of employers
toward workingmen. It did not take long to discover that there were
scores, possibly hundreds, about the camp who were out of work, and yet
the manner of men to whom I applied for employment was most uniformly
courteous, and courteous in the best possible way. Invariably I found
myself treated as a fellow-man, and that was a wonderful salve to
one’s self-respect. There was no effort at politeness, but simply an
instinctive recognition of fellowship.

“Why, no, I ain’t got nothing that I can give you to do now, partner,”
a boss would say. “You see it’s like this----,” and then would follow
a friendly talk on the general situation, as one man might naturally
explain a case to another.

It was all easily intelligible. The camp had enjoyed its “boom” during
the last autumn and winter, but especially through the spring.
There had been the usual rush of fortune-seekers, with an uncommon
preponderance, however, of farmers from Kansas and Nebraska. Some
silver had been found, but much more gold-bearing quartz and a little
placer deposit. Evidently Cripple Creek is to become a gold-producing
centre, but the ore discovered so far is of rather a low grade. Very
little of it can be worked at a profit so long as it must meet the
great cost of transportation by mule train to the railway at Cañon
City, more than thirty miles away. There are two railways now making
for the camp; so soon as they have entered the region and reduced
greatly the present cost of transportation and other costs attached
to mining there, many claims will rise instantly to the position of
paying properties which cannot now be worked to any profit whatever.
The miners were all sanguine of rich results when once this period of
waiting has been tided over.

But in the meantime it was “hard scrapping” for a living. There were
golden prospects, but very little immediate work, and the best of
prospects makes but an indifferent diet. After a long and tiring
round of mines, I went at last, very hungry, in the direction of an
ore-crushing outfit, which stood in the bottom of the basin near the
camp. Nothing in the way of work was to be had there, but I was
fortunate enough to see an old prospector test some placer diggings,
deftly washing out a panful of soil, and exhibit the few tiny specks of
gold deposit at the last.

Turning back to the camp I began a round of the lodging- and
eating-houses and shops, in the hope that some opening might be found.
But there was as little demand for help there as I had found about the
mines, with the exception of one cheap chop-house, where a notice was
exposed advertising for a dishwasher. I applied for the place with
high hope of getting it, but the buxom, stolid woman who was in charge,
met every advance on my part with an unvarying “No” and with nothing
more, and, worsted at last, I was obliged to withdraw.

It was by mere accident that I drifted in the evening to Squaw’s Gulch,
and fell in there with an old prospector who was working out the
assessment on his claim, and who offered me food and shelter in his
cabin and a certain share in the mine if I would help at the work.

When, finally, I left Cripple Creek, Créede was my next objective
point. Down the mountain road in the direction of Cañon City I went,
but I did not get so far as that on the first day’s march, for I was
late in leaving Cripple Creek and darkness overtook me when some
fifteen miles of the way yet remained. For some time I had been
following an excellent road which wound through a charming valley in
its easy descent to the plain. The valley narrowed presently, leaving
but a few hundred yards between the steep sides of mountains, which
hemmed it in. A stream was flowing swiftly along its rocky bed, and the
evening winds were blowing with the sound of a low murmur among the
pines as I pressed on in the darkness through the ankle-deep dust of
the road.

It was not a light that first attracted me, but the black bulk of a
cabin that seemed to rise suddenly from the ground on my right. Soon
I saw that it was occupied, and, going near, I found a side door
wide open, with lamplight streaming from it into the night. For a
moment I stood unnoticed in the doorway, and could see at a glance
the heavy wooden table and the chairs and the large, old-fashioned
cooking-stove, and the prints tacked to the walls, and the cooking
utensils hanging behind the stove, which made up the furniture. The
floor was of well-planed boards, which had been scrubbed white, and the
whole room partook of the atmosphere of cool, wholesome cleanliness,
characteristic of the best New England kitchens. And the figure that
stood ironing at the table in the centre of the room was in perfect
keeping with her surroundings. A tall woman, evidently past fifty, of
strong, muscular frame, and with a face of high intelligence, wearing
in repose an expression of sweetness and of lady-like serenity, which
gives to the wrinkled faces of some women so high-bred and distinctive
a grace.

I knocked on the open door, and she looked up in no wise disturbed
at sight of a stranger there. I explained my purpose and asked
whether there was anything that I could do in payment of shelter and
a breakfast. She drew out a chair from the wall and invited me to be
seated, saying that we should consider that matter in the morning. For
some time I sat talking with her, and while she ironed she conversed in
an easy, natural manner, bred of the free life out here, which has in
it all the charm of the directness and simplicity of a true woman of
the world.

Presently she invited me to meet her husband, and, leading the way, she
took me to an inner room, where, in a rocking-chair before a wood fire
on a large, open hearth, sat a man of about her own age. He looked his
character perfectly, for he was a hard-handed frontiersman of rugged,
sinewy frame, with hair and beard unkempt, apparently, but you saw at
once that he was faultlessly clean, as was the beautifully whitewashed
room in which he sat, with its muslin ceiling sagging here and there.
He did not rise to meet us, only turned a little in his chair and
allowed his paper to rest on his knees as, for a moment, he fixed upon
me his dark eyes full of the unfathomable mystery and sadness of life.
I marked in him at once the same well-bred repose and self-possession
which I had noticed in his wife.

We talked at first of indifferent matters until I, keen with interest
in the shelves of books which I saw about the walls, and other shelves
on which fragments of many kinds of rock were lying in order and all
labelled, ventured an inquiry as to whether he was interested in
geology.

With shame do I confess that there was in my witless head at the moment
a patronizing, supercilious curiosity at the fact that the rough
old backwoodsman who sat before me in his shirt-sleeves should have
surrounded himself with objects about which he could know so little. I
got it full between the eyes.

“Yes,” he said quietly, in answer to my inquiry, “I have been a good
deal interested in the science for the last twenty-five years, for my
ranch turned out to be remarkably rich in paleontological remains and
in geological material, particularly of the cretaceous period.”

And then with natural straightforward ease he began to go into details,
describing to me his first chance discoveries on the ranch when, soon
after the civil war, he had moved out from New England and pre-empted a
homestead here. It was a fascinating narrative most modestly told, of
one discovery leading to another, of interest awakened in an unknown
field, of a book secured here and there, of a widening intellectual
horizon, and of an awakening to undreamed-of worlds of infinite
interest and wonder, of communication with men of science, of personal
acquaintance with some of them, and finally of a recent visit to a
great Eastern university where the best of his specimens are all
mounted in the Geological Museum. Now and then he would reach down a
fragment of rock bearing the impress of some paleontologic form and
would illustrate in concrete detail. In a single sentence he would be
far beyond my shallow depth of meagre, book-learned science, but he
generously paid me the compliment of taking for granted that I knew,
and he could hardly have had a more interested listener.

In the morning he was driving to Cañon City and he invited me to go
with him. On the way he talked of science, geology this time, and he
amply illustrated what he said by means of the vast exposed strata
which rose tier on tier in the sheer sides of the cañon through which
we drove to the plain.

From Cañon City I crossed the Arkansas and struck up into the mountains
in the direction of Green Mountain Valley. The weather had favored
me marvellously. Not since I had left my job as a navvy at Buda on
the Union Pacific Railway had I been hampered by a drop of rain. Down
through Colorado and among the mountains so far, I had enjoyed an
unbroken succession of most delightful autumn days. But the clouds
began to gather now as I made my way through Green Mountain Valley.
I well remember the cold, threatening morning of October 18th, when
I walked through the all but deserted mining camp of Silver Cliff.
That night I spent with a ranchman in the heart of the rich valley;
when I set out in the morning snow had begun to fall, and I realized,
with some concern, that I still had a considerable range to cross and
several days’ march to the mining camp of Créede.

I did not get very far on that memorable 19th. For an hour or two I
had no difficulty in keeping the road, but the snow had thickened to
a blinding storm by then, and the wind was fast rising to a gale.
Anything like that snow-fall I have never seen. A whole landscape
was blotted out as in a moment, and the road which just now was
a clearly defined way through the valley became almost instantly
indistinguishable in the general sweep of flaky whiteness, over which
fresh snow was falling so fast that you could not see ten yards ahead.

I found out afterward that I had been very near to losing my way on a
plain where I might have wandered in endless circles, for the falling
snow instantly covered one’s tracks and left no trace of the way one
had come. As it was, seeing that it was impossible to make headway in
such a storm, I struck out for shelter, and before I realized my actual
danger I ran up against a ranchman’s cabin.

It was a very small affair, with a lean-to for a kitchen, but a dark
little German woman with a soft musical voice, who opened the door,
bade me a most cordial welcome; and as she placed a chair for me before
the fire, she assured me, again and again, of the anxiety that she
should feel if one of her boys were caught out in such a storm, and of
her gratitude to anyone who might shelter him. I began to understand
that I was coming in for a good deal of vicarious attention, for she
took my wet coat and boots to dry them in the kitchen and insisted upon
my drinking some hot tea.

It was a very cosy nest into which I had fallen. The ranchman himself
was a mild-mannered German, with a blonde beard and dreamy eyes, and
an air of abstraction, who looked up to his wife in all things, for
she was vastly his superior. Two boys were at home, magnificent young
fellows of about fifteen or sixteen, handsome, clear-eyed, ruddy-faced
lads, with the carriage of men who are most at ease in the saddle.
And visiting her prospective in-law relations, was the fiancée of the
oldest son, who is a merchant, I think, in West Cliff. It was worth far
more than all the risks of the storm to see her. She was a Swedish girl
in the very bloom of youth, and her light hair had in it the living
fire of red gold. It was brushed straight back and done up behind her
head in a great mass of interweaving coils in which the light played
superbly. Some shorter hairs had worked loose, and these fell in almost
invisible curling threads of gold about her white forehead. Her cheeks
were of translucent pink, and her rich red lips were as delicately
formed as in the Psyche of Praxiteles.

The child was perfectly unaware of her beauty. In her wide, blue eyes
there was not a suggestion of self-consciousness. And the family about
her seemed not to consider it either; perhaps they all regarded it,
as the poor instinctively accept much in life, as belonging to the
natural order and not to be counted in an individual sense.

We had a jolly time that day playing games and telling stories far into
the evening. It was perfectly clear next morning, with a warm sun fast
melting the deep snow. I could not venture on, however, for the way was
too obstructed, and in another day spent in the cabin I got on quite
intimate terms with the family, especially with the ranchman’s wife,
who told me much of their life and many of her troubles. They were
very serious, though her life was not without its compensations. It
was pitiful to see the care-lines deepen in her sensitive face and an
infinite perplexity cloud her eyes as she talked to me of her sorrows.

“My man is a good husband,” she would say, “but he’s not a good farmer.
I don’t know what’s to become of us. He gets deeper and deeper into
debt. Sometimes he works hard and manages well and I think that we are
going to get on; and then in the middle of it the prospecting fever
takes him, and he leaves everything and goes off into the mountains and
spends every cent that he can raise, looking for silver.

“You see a fortune-teller told him once that he’d ‘find his fortune
in stone,’ and ever since then he’s been crazy to prospect and he’s
squandered everything off there in the mountains. The boys have to
work too hard and they don’t get the proper schooling, and I don’t know
what’s to become of us.

“But there’s my son John that keeps store in West Cliff”--and it was
beautiful to see her face light up--“no woman ever had a better son
than him. He’s been like a father to the family. I don’t know what we’d
ever have done without him, for he’s been the greatest help to us in
all our troubles.”

They urged me to stay longer on Friday morning, but the day was
perfectly clear and patches of dry ground had begun to appear through
the snow, and so I set out early, hoping to cover before night most
of the distance to the entrance of Musa Pass, which leads from Green
Mountain Valley over the Sangre De Cristo Range to the San Luis country.

I accomplished it comfortably, and early on the next morning made
my way into the pass. The snow lay deep about the entrance, and it
deepened as I climbed the range, but a party of prospectors had just
come over the trail as I started in, and it was a simple matter to
walk in the path which their burros had made through the snow. The
prospectors did me another unconscious service, for when I met them two
of the five men were suffering keenly from snow blindness, and, taking
warning, I tore a strip from a coarse cotton handkerchief and bound
it around my eyes, in a way that interfered very little with vision
and yet acted as an adequate protection from the blinding glare of the
sunlight on the snow.

That night I reached a Mormon’s ranch well in the San Luis Valley. It
was a matter of easy marching after that, for the snow was all gone in
a day or two and I had only to walk by way of Alamosa and Monte Vista
and Del Norte to the Wagon Wheel Gap region and so up to Créede.

I was much disappointed there in not finding work in the mines. Numbers
of them were in operation, and there were large gangs of men employed,
but there were plenty of experienced hands about, and nothing whatever
in the mines for a raw tenderfoot to do. Still I had no difficulty,
for at the very first asking I got work with a gang which was cutting
a new road down Bachelor Mountain from the New York Chance Mine to
Créede. And so, while not a member of a mining crew, I was a member of
one which contained many miners, and I lived in the camp on Bachelor
Mountain with scores of the men from the New York Chance and the
Amethyst Mines. I fell in eventually with a group of truest Bohemians,
a mine superintendent of the best type, and a magnificent chap who was
an engineer and surveyor and whom I liked best of all, and a young
Harvard-bred barrister who was on the high road to being the District
Attorney, and a newspaper editor. I cannot now recall how I came to be
one of their number, it was done so quickly and naturally; but I was
suddenly aware that I had been accepted as such, and all that belonged
to my new-found friends was mine, and the engineer and barrister and I
were sleeping three in a bed.

My pen rebels against the necessity which spurs it to so swift a pace
over details where it longs to linger. For those were hard but glorious
days on the mountain; there were always new and strange men to be
known among the crews, men whose emancipation from conventionality was
complete, and whose personalities possessed a marvellous richness. The
railway and statutory laws and honest women and the ten commandments
were there, so that the camp “enjoyed the blessings of civilization,”
and was widely different from the camps of earlier days--much to the
regret of the older men who knew the earlier days and many of the
younger ones who would have liked to know them.

Already there were apparent the phases of human nature which seem by
a curious contradiction to reveal themselves under the very protection
of the vast improvement wrought by the reign of “law and order.” But
the freer, braver elements of human nature were present, too, and
were not always beneath the surface of convention. How it stirred
one’s better blood to see those free, strong, natural men face one
another in the common intercourse of life and meet the exigencies of
their work! And under what spells have I sat looking in the eye some
tawny-bearded giant of a prospector as he told of thirty years or more
among the mountains and in the mining camps, of hardships endured and
difficulties overcome and death and danger faced, and of the rare times
when he “struck it rich,” and then the lordly, vicious days when he
“blew it in!” How much may have been concocted for the ready ear of a
tenderfoot I did not know; I only knew that it reeked with the red, raw
blood of life, and whether true or false it thrust roots deep into grim
and stanch realities.

Hamilton will answer as the name of the engineer. It was in his office
that the little coterie which I have mentioned would gather in the
evenings. There were rough chairs of most comfortable shape, and there
was always a roaring fire in the stove, for the nights were bitter
cold, and a number of Hamilton’s drawings in crayons and blue prints
were tacked upon the walls, for besides being a skilful engineer he was
a splendid draughtsman. His surveying instruments stood together in a
corner, and the ample tables were covered with unfinished drawings and
with the tools of his art.

Never was more diverting talk than that which ranged around the room
where we sat in easy attitudes, with feet cocked up and chairs tilted,
in the soft light of Hamilton’s well-shaded lamps and in a deepening
density of tobacco-smoke. And the talk was catholic in its range, for
the editor was an authority on local and state and national politics,
and, as a recent convert to “free silver,” he could argue its cause
with all the fervor of a novice. The barrister was a man of liberal
education who had taught the classics and loved them, and who could,
with real enthusiasm, lead the talk back from all things modern to

    “--those old days which poets say were golden.”

And the mine superintendent, for all his shrewd and efficient
practicality--for he was counted the best superintendent in the
camp who, in the face of the declining price of silver and of other
difficulties as great, had accomplished marvels with his mine--was
profoundly interested in Biblical criticism; he could speak with the
knowledge of a theologian on the authorship of the Pentateuch and
the question of the inerrancy of Scripture and the authenticity and
genuineness of the synoptic Gospels.

But I liked most of all to hear Hamilton as he would sit left ankle
crossing his right knee, his right foot tip-toe on the floor balancing
his tilted chair, and his guitar resting on his lap. Over the strings
his great strong fingers would pass, striking soft harmonies, and his
handsome, manly face would respond to the free play of emotion as in
his rich voice and with unconscious vividness of camp speech he would
talk of life and of its revelations to him throughout his varied
history.

“I have had every experience but that of death,” he said very quietly
to me one day, when we had come to know each other well. As I watched
him and saw his innate, thoughtful courtesy to women, and his strong,
tender-hearted love of little children, and the frankness of his life,
and his useful efficiency as a man, and his devotion to the truth, and
his utter hatred of all cowardice and hypocrisy, I began to understand
what royal possibilities there are in the men who prove best fitted to
survive in the struggle of the frontier.

It was Hamilton who introduced me to Price. Price shall stand for the
name of a prospector of a sort that is becoming rare at the West. The
son of an officer in an Irish regiment, he was brought to America
in his early boyhood and was reared on the Pacific coast. But the
strictures of high civilization were too much for him, and long before
he was out of his teens he was living the rough, fortuitous life of the
mining camps and cattle tracts of the Southwest. Price is about forty
now, and his range of occupation includes almost everything from a
“burro puncher” to a member of the Legislature of Arizona. He seems to
know, moreover, every trail in the two Territories and every soul along
them, to the very Indians and “greasers” of the youngest generation,
and he is just the sort who is looked upon out here as likely at any
time “to strike it rich.” So far, however, he has not struck it rich;
very much the reverse. In the spring he punched his burros up from
Phœnix to the Wagon Wheel Gap region and prospected there all summer,
but with no luck. When Hamilton introduced me to him, his burros were
in hock and so were his blankets and his very cooking utensils and
even his “gun,” and he was longing for the means to redeem them that
he might get out of the bitter cold of the mountains and down into the
balmy Indian summer of the Salt River Valley which was “God’s country”
to him.

No more ideal opportunity could have presented itself to me. It was
late in November and the problem of going alone westward through the
thinly settled country was a difficult one, and here, as by miracle,
was its perfect solution. Moreover, as it proved, Price was a good
fellow with a truly Irish sense of humor and a perfect adaptability
born of long habit. And withal he was patient with my inexperience.
He taught me the “diamond hitch,” and how to make a fire from next to
nothing, and tea out of water that was thick and green on the surface,
how to cook “spuds” and fry bacon and make gravy and bake bread in a
saucepan. He tried to make a burro puncher of me, but his patience gave
out there, and he declared that I’d “never be worth my salt at that
until I learned to swear.” Then suiting the action to the word he would
take a hand himself at this point, and fairly dancing in a frenzy of
rage, would rip the air with uncouth, fluent curses, and the stubborn
beasts would meekly take the ford or cease their aimless wandering and
quicken their pace along the trail.

I had been working for two dollars and a half a day, the highest wages
I had ever received; I soon got Price’s animals and gun and camping
outfit from the pawn-shop, and, on the morning of November 20th, we set
out together to cross some five or six hundred miles of the frontier
from Créede to central Arizona.

Ours was rather a typical prospecting outfit, I thought, for Price had
an old, gaunt Indian pony which he rode, and our blankets and cooking
utensils and provisions were made fast to packing saddles on the backs
of two burros, one of which was called California and the other,
Beecher. I was free to ride, when I chose, another burro, an uncommonly
big one, which Price called Sacramento; but I generally preferred to
walk, for the pace was slow, and, besides the three which I have named,
there were two little burros, California’s foals, and punching five, I
soon found, was best accomplished on foot.

We camped that night far up among the head waters of the Rio Grande,
and next day with much difficulty we began the toilsome journey of the
Winnemonche Pass. It was hard work crossing the “divide.” For many
miles the trail lay through nearly three feet of snow. There was no
driving the animals ahead; we were obliged to take turns in breaking
a way ourselves, and then leading the animals through. Very soon we
were drenched with sweat and with the snow that melted in the heat
of our bodies, and all the while we were assailed by mountain winds
which seemed to cut to the marrow in one’s bones. But we always found a
sheltered place in which to camp, where wood and water were plenty, and
where after a good supper, we slept gloriously, huddled close together
on our bed of canvas and gunny sacks, our blankets drawn up snugly over
our heads.

With what a sense of keen relief did we begin the descent and pass
swiftly into warmer regions, where the snow became thinner and
gradually disappeared, and the sun warmed us with mild rays, and we
came upon a settler’s cabin here and there and had speech once more
with our fellow-men!

Price had promised me Indian summer when once we should get so far
on our way as Durango, and most amply was his promise fulfilled, for
we passed through the town on a day when the sun shone from clear,
cloudless blue, and the horizon was a _sierra_ in sharp lines, and
the twigs of distant trees stood clean-cut against the sky, and the
withering, dusty earth reflected the glory of the sun, and the cool,
buoyant air seemed almost vocal of a solemn ecstasy.

We camped that night in a wilderness region to the south of Durango,
where we could see the smoke rising from encampments of Ute Indians,
many of whom we met on the next day’s march with droves of fine
Indian ponies, which they were raising for the market. Our course was
southward now across the San Juan River and through a section of the
Navajo reservation in northern New Mexico.

The trail led us then through a dreary desert, where at times it was
with great difficulty that we got fodder for our burros and wood
enough to cook our meals and water enough to drink. After days of such
marching and camping, there was immense delight in coming eventually to
some cedar grove, where living water flowed and grass grew thick and we
could build a huge campfire at night of well-seasoned cedar boughs.

The only sign of habitation that we saw for days together was an
occasional trader’s post, about which we usually found a considerable
company of Navajos. Price could speak their language, and the young
braves occasionally passed us on the march. Now and then one joined
us in camp, shared a meal with us, and, after a long talk with Price,
rolled himself in his blanket and slept beside our fire.

[Illustration: PRICE COULD SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE, AND NOW AND THEN ONE
JOINED US IN CAMP.]

At last we came out upon the Santa Fé Railway, not far from Fort
Wingate, and followed the line to Gallup, where, in a grove on the hill
above the village, we went into camp for the night. As a matter of
fact we remained there nearly a week. Quite buried under a soft, wet
snow we awoke on the first morning to find ourselves lying in melting
slush, and the trail so obstructed that we could not get on. Then a
bitter cold set in, and, in a region where I imagined the whole winter
like a balmy spring, the thermometer sank to ten and twelve degrees
below zero every night until we had nearly perished from the cold.

But the wave passed over us at last, and on December 10th we set out
again, really none the worse for the touch of Arctic weather. Following
the line of the Santa Fé Railway we crossed into Arizona, and, from a
point due north of it, we cut down to the Petrified Forest and on down
to a Mormon settlement called Woodruff on the Little Colorado River. It
was two days’ march thence to another Mormon settlement, Heber by name,
among the Mogollon Mountains.

All this time Indian summer had utterly failed us, and had been
succeeded by a season of lowering days wherein light snow-falls were
frequent. Price hated snow as he hated nothing else in nature. It got
upon his nerves and drove him to a species of madness. Frequently in
the course of the journey from Gallup to Heber snow fell at night.
Price was usually the first to stir in the morning. We had knowledge
of a snow-fall in the added weight upon us when we woke, and it was
something memorable to see Price throw back the blankets and the
heavy tarpaulin which were drawn over our heads, and lift himself on
his elbow in the gray dawn, and gaze about with fierce anger in his
black eyes upon a pure, white, flawless world, with soft snow clinging
to every twig in the still morning air, and delicate crystal prisms
beginning to form in the warmth of the coming sun, and hear him growl,
in deep disgust,

“This is hell!”

But Heber marked nearly the last stage of that phase of our journey. We
spent Sunday, the 18th December, there with an old Mormon elder and his
son; worked for them on Monday for our keep and then renewed the march
on Tuesday morning. It was a long, hard day’s pull up the northern
side of the mountain to the “rimrock,” in deep snow through a vast
primeval forest of spruce and pine. Then a wonderful thing happened,
for we made a sharp descent on the south side and, in the space of a
little more than a day, reached a country where there was no snow,
and the sun shone warm, and the cotton-wood was in full bloom along
the water-courses, and the cedar and live-oak stood green against the
winter brown of the grass-grown hills.

We had Indian summer once more, and the softest, balmiest Indian summer
has accompanied us thence all the way to Phœnix. We had hardships to
endure, for the way was long and our provisions sometimes ran out. Once
we lost our way for a time in a maze of “box cañons” and had nothing
to eat for twenty-four hours, until, late on Christmas afternoon, we
came out upon the ranch of a Virginian settler, whom Price knew well,
and whose wife gave us a royal dinner of “hog and hominy,” which I have
heard lightly spoken of as a dish, but which I shall always remember as
a most satisfying delicacy.

On we went then over the mountains to the Tonto Basin and through
the Reno Pass to the Verde River. We were encamped there over Sunday
on January 1st in the former reservation of the now deserted Fort
McDowell, and early on Monday morning we started for Phœnix. By a
forced march of thirty miles we entered the city at ten o’clock the
same evening and had a huge supper in a Chinese restaurant; then,
while our animals were eating their fill of fresh alfalfa in a corral
attached to a livery-stable, we slept deeply near by on a heap of
hay, glad to have reached the end of our six weeks’ march across the
narrowing frontier.

       *       *       *       *       *

                                      SAN FRANCISCO, CAL.,
                                          February 1, 1893.

Not the most interesting nor profitable and certainly not the most
adventurous of the many miles which I have walked in a slow progress
across the continent has been this last stage of the journey up through
California. And yet the remembrance of it will always have a place
apart. Work was plenty, but I made no long stops, pressed on at the
rate of thirty miles a day, impelled by the delight of walking in so
glorious an air through the marvellous beauty of this Pacific slope.

Fresh from the dusty plains I was soon in the midst of the
orange-groves heavily laden with ripe fruit all about Colton and
Riverside, where the hills were terraced as in the Riviera and the
sky was the deep, unfathomable blue of Italy. It was January, and
the first, fresh green of the new year was upon the fields and had
touched with infinite delicacy the rugged sides of the mountains whose
summits flashed white in places from melting snow. The early mornings
were frosty, but mid-day warmed to a gentle glow, and the cool of the
evening came with the declining sun.

Many a time, on the plains or in the mountains, in the presence of
some Mexican Pueblo of adobe huts in a strangely foreign setting of
cedar-trees, with threads of water apparently flowing up hill along
the irrigation ditches to scant fields reclaimed from the desert, it
had been difficult to realize that one was still in America. Here again
was strongest suggestion of the foreign, in the houses which survive
from the Spanish period, and especially the old Mission churches, where
dwells the dignity of age and one can pass completely into the very
atmosphere of Spain.

It was on the third day’s march, I think, from Los Angeles that I found
myself nearing San Buenaventura. It was late in the afternoon, and the
road ahead was an easy upward slope for several miles. Just at sunset
I reached the summit. The town of San Buenaventura lay below me, with
its long main street curving through rows of houses of widely various
kind, and the Mission church standing on an elevation to the left, with
its stucco walls bathed in sunset light, making a strange contrast with
the modern town. And beyond, with the sun’s red disc a half circle on
the horizon line, lay the peaceful sea, with a tongue of living flame
across it turning to black coals the islands in its wake. In a moment
the sun was gone, the shadow of the evening was upon the ocean, and
over the town had fallen the transfiguration light which rests after
sunset in spring-time upon Naples.

Three thousand miles away, and a year and a half in point of time
for me, was Long Island Sound. I recalled the last glimpse of it as
I looked back from Greenfield Hill in the early morning of my start,
and saw it radiant in the sunshine of a midsummer day. And here again,
after many months and many leagues of land journey, was the sea.
Θἁλαττα! Θἁλαττα! I called aloud, for there was no one near enough to hear.

It was a rare moment, worth living for, that first unexpected glimpse
of the Pacific. But strangely enough the feeling which it bred was no
harbinger of an eager willingness to end my long experiment. Many a
time when work was hard, and far more ardently when there was no work
and the physical conditions of life seemed well-nigh unendurable, had
I looked with longing to a return to normal living. And yet, as I
neared my journey’s end I found possessing me a strange indifference
to the idea of return. I do not attempt to analyze the feeling, I
simply note it as a fact; but in some degree I recognize in it a vague
unwillingness to have done with a phase of experience which for me
has opened avenues of useful knowledge. Among them all there rises
clearest at this moment the way of added knowledge of my country.
I may have travelled it to little purpose, but I am conscious at
least of a new-born sense of things which comes of actual contact
with the soil and with the primal struggle for existence among men.
One stands awestruck before the vastness of our great domain and its
quick redemption from the wilderness. But most of all it is contact
with the people which breeds in one the strongest patriotic feeling.
Local conditions and the presence of large numbers of yet unassimilated
foreign elements and rapid changes in economic relations and native
weaknesses and vagaries are responsible for awful sores upon the body
politic, while the power of aggregated wealth grows apace, and fierce
antagonisms and sectional differences arise. Yet beneath the troubled
surface of events one comes to know of the great body of a nation
whose unity has been purchased and made sure by such a cost of blood
and treasure as was never poured out upon the altar of a nation’s life
before, and one sees a people intelligent, resourceful, and hugely
vital, having much to learn and surely learning much, assimilating
foreign elements with miraculous swiftness and growing stronger
thereby, living laborious days wherein the rewards are to thrift and
energy and enterprising skill, knowing no defeat and unacquainted with
the sense of fear, and awakening year by year to a fuller consciousness
of national life and of the glorious mission of high destiny. And with
increasing knowledge the love of country grows until all thought of
worth in her is merged and lost in reverence, and love of her becomes a
summons to live worthy of the name and calling of an American.


                              THE END.




        _Transcriber’s Notes_

A number of typographical errors have been corrected silently.

Archaic spellings have been retained.

Cover image is in the public domain.

Variations in spelling of hyphenated words have been normalized to a
single form when there either was a preponderance of one version or
the first version to appear was used.

The snip of Greek "Θἁλαττα!" translates to "The Sea!" in English.