st confess I hardly thought of them at all, save that I vaguely felt
that they, barring accidents, could be as good as I if they wanted to
real hard, and could work just as well. Accidents? Well, they
represented FATE, also spelled out in capitals, and there was no getting
around FATE. Napoleon had had an accident at Waterloo, but that did not
dampen my desire to be another and later Napoleon. Further, the optimism
bred of a stomach which could digest scrap iron and a body which
flourished on hardships did not permit me to consider accidents as even
remotely related to my glorious personality.

I hope I have made it clear that I was proud to be one of Nature's
strong-armed noblemen. The dignity of labor was to me the most
impressive thing in the world. Without having read Carlyle, or Kipling,
I formulated a gospel of work which put theirs in the shade. Work was
everything. It was sanctification and salvation. The pride I took in a
hard day's work well done would be inconceivable to you. It is almost
inconceivable to me as I look back upon it. I was as faithful a wage
slave as ever capitalist exploited. To shirk or malinger on the man who
paid me my wages was a sin, first, against myself, and second, against
him. I considered it a crime second only to treason and just about as
bad.

In short, my joyous individualism was dominated by the orthodox bourgeois
ethics. I read the bourgeois papers, listened to the bourgeois
preachers, and shouted at the sonorous platitudes of the bourgeois
politicians. And I doubt not, if other events had not changed my career,
that I should have evolved into a professional strike-breaker, (one of
President Eliot's American heroes), and had my head and my earning power
irrevocably smashed by a club in the hands of some militant
trades-unionist.

Just about this time, returning from a seven months' voyage before the
mast, and just turned eighteen, I took it into my head to go tramping.
On rods and blind baggages I fought my way from the open West where men
bucked big and the job hunted the man, to the congested labor centres of
the East, where men were small potatoes and hunted the job for all they
were worth. And on this new _blond-beast_ adventure I found myself
looking upon life from a new and totally different angle. I had dropped
down from the proletariat into what sociologists love to call the
"submerged tenth," and I was startled to discover the way in which that
subme