and big output by labor before she
will be strong enough to reabsorb into her system every muscle in
America.

That's my belief. That's my gospel. I did not make this gospel. It is
God's law and we can not alter it. If I were asked to write the BIBLE
OF LABOR, this chapter would be the law and the prophets. And from these
truths I would advise each man to write his own Ten Commandments.

CHAPTER XXX. BREAKING INTO THE TIN INDUSTRY

I decided to leave Birmingham as soon as my stomach had got used to
regular meals and my pocket knew what real money felt like again.

The dry years had ended and once more the northern farms were yielding
mammoth crops. But the country was so sick that it couldn't sit up and
eat as it ought to. So the farmers were selling their crops at steadily
falling prices. This drove some of them frantic. They couldn't pay
interest on their mortgaged farms, and they were seeking to find "the
way out" by issuing paper money, or money from some cheap metal with
which they could repudiate their debts. Banks could not collect their
loans, merchants could not get money for their goods, manufacturers were
swamped by their pay-rolls and had to discharge their men. Coxey was
raising a great army of idle men to march on Washington and demand that
the government should feed and clothe the people.

All my savings had long since gone, and from the high life in the Pie
Boarding-House I had descended to my days of bread and water. All men
were in a common misery. If a hobo managed to get a steak and cook it in
the bushes by the railroad track, the smell of it would draw a score of
hungry men into the circle of his firelight. It was a trying time, and
it took all the fortitude I had to look hopefully forward toward a day
when things would begin picking up and the wheels of industry would
whirl again. The idle men who had camped by the railroads had drunk
their water from, and cooked their mulligan stews in, tomato cans.
The tin can had become the badge of hoboing. The tin trade was new in
America and I foresaw a future in the industry, for all kinds of food
were now being put up in tin, whereas when I was a child a tin can was
rarely seen. I decided that two trades were better than one, and I would
learn the tin plate trade. I went to Elwood, Indiana, and found a place
there in a tin mill. My knowledge of puddling, heating and rolling,
occasionally working in a sheet mill similar to a tin mill, prepared me