The commissioner told me he had
five hundred more anarchists than he had roofs to shelter.

"Have these anarchists been duly convicted?" I asked.

He said they had been, and were awaiting deportation.

I told the commissioner not to worry about finding lodging for his
guests; they would be on their way before bedtime.

"But there is no ship sailing so soon," he said. "They will have to have
housing till a ship sails."

Now this country has a shortage of houses and a surplus of ships. There
aren't enough roofs to house the honest people, and there are hundreds
of ships lying idle. Let the honest people have the houses, and the
anarchists have the ships. I called up the Shipping Board, borrowed a
ship, put the Red criminals aboard and they went sailing, sailing, over
the bounding main, and many a stormy wind shall blow "ere Jack come home
again."

On the other hand I discovered a family that had just come to America
and was about to be deported because of a technicality. The family
consisted of a father and mother and four small children. The order
of deportation had been made and the family had been put aboard a
ship about to sail. I learned that the children were healthy and
right-minded; the mother was of honest working stock with a faith in God
and not in anarchy. I had been one of such a family entering this port
forty years ago. Little did I dream then that I would ever be a member
of a President's Cabinet with power to wipe away this woman's tears
and turn her heart's sorrowing into a song of joy. I wrote the order of
admission, and the family was taken from the departing ship just
before it sailed. I told the mother that the baby in her arms might be
secretary of labor forty years hence.

CHAPTER VII. HARD SLEDDING IN AMERICA

It had been our plan to go from New York to Pittsburgh, but the mill
that father was working in had shut down. And so he had sent us tickets
to Hubbard, Ohio, where his brother had a job as a muck roller--the man
who takes the bloom from the squeezer and throws it into the rollers.
That's all I can tell you now. In later chapters I shall take you into
a rolling mill, and show you how we worked. I believe I am the first
puddler that ever described his job, for I have found no book by a
puddler in any American library. But I wanted to explain here that a
muck roller is not a muck raker, but a worker in raw iron.

When we boarded the train for Ohio, mother had nothing to look af