about me, the everyday life in the shop was perhaps the deepest
cause of my growing revolt. The atmosphere of the frenzied factory is
well calculated to produce a spirit of sullen and smouldering rebellion
in the minds of its less hardened inmates. From the domineering boss
down to the smallest understrapper, the spirit of the jailer and turnkey
is dominant. Much worse than solitary confinement is it to be sentenced
to ten hours of silence and drudgery. The temptation to speak to the man
at your side is well nigh irresistible. But to speak means to be
marked, to have hurled at you a humiliating reprimand, or, as a last
resort, to be discharged.

"No lunching between meals is allowed, although it is a well-known fact
that few workers have the appetite at dawn to eat sufficient food to
last them till their cold lunch at noon. From this comes the terrible
habit, among the older toilers, of the eye-opener, a gulp of rot-gut
whiskey, taken to arouse the sleeping stomach and force sufficient food
on it to last till noon. As a convalescent victim of this proletarian
practice I am well aware of its ravages on body and mind. It is the
will-of-the-wisp of false whiskey followed by false hope, leading into
the fogs and bogs of the bourgeois and the quicksands of the capitalist.

"To be a moment late, means to be docked and to have it rubbed in by an
insult. To take a day off, well--death is taken as an excuse. There is
no such thing in a shop as social equality between boss and men. In my
last position as foreman I had charge of three hundred men. Many of them
were faithful comrades in many a brave strike, where starvation pressed
hard, whence they had emerged with hollow cheeks and undaunted hearts.
I soon came to know them all, personally, intimately, and liked them
all, though I felt most strangely drawn to those who worked for one
dollar a day. They all did their work faithfully, and there was no
complaint from the front office. One day, however, the owner charged me
with treating the hands as if they were my equals. I tried to make him
see the human justification of it, but he would have none of it. He was
a typical boss and also a millionaire banker.

"It was about this time that I discovered the deepest tonic my nerves
have ever known. The explosion of the Haymarket bomb found a responsive
chord, the vibrations of which will never cease in me, I hope. The
unconscious in me was at last released, and I held my mad balance o