rged tenth was recruited.

I found there all sorts of men, many of whom had once been as good as
myself and just as _blond-beast_; sailor-men, soldier-men, labor-men, all
wrenched and distorted and twisted out of shape by toil and hardship and
accident, and cast adrift by their masters like so many old horses. I
battered on the drag and slammed back gates with them, or shivered with
them in box cars and city parks, listening the while to life-histories
which began under auspices as fair as mine, with digestions and bodies
equal to and better than mine, and which ended there before my eyes in
the shambles at the bottom of the Social Pit.

And as I listened my brain began to work. The woman of the streets and
the man of the gutter drew very close to me. I saw the picture of the
Social Pit as vividly as though it were a concrete thing, and at the
bottom of the Pit I saw them, myself above them, not far, and hanging on
to the slippery wall by main strength and sweat. And I confess a terror
seized me. What when my strength failed? when I should be unable to work
shoulder to shoulder with the strong men who were as yet babes unborn?
And there and then I swore a great oath. It ran something like this:
_All my days I have worked hard with my body_, _and according to the
number of days I have worked_, _by just that much am I nearer the bottom
of the Pit_. _I shall climb out of the Pit_, _but not by the muscles of
my body shall I climb out_. _I shall do no more hard work_, _and may God
strike me dead if I do another day's hard work with my body more than I
absolutely have to do_. And I have been busy ever since running away
from hard work.

Incidentally, while tramping some ten thousand miles through the United
States and Canada, I strayed into Niagara Falls, was nabbed by a
fee-hunting constable, denied the right to plead guilty or not guilty,
sentenced out of hand to thirty days' imprisonment for having no fixed
abode and no visible means of support, handcuffed and chained to a bunch
of men similarly circumstanced, carted down country to Buffalo,
registered at the Erie County Penitentiary, had my head clipped and my
budding mustache shaved, was dressed in convict stripes, compulsorily
vaccinated by a medical student who practised on such as we, made to
march the lock-step, and put to work under the eyes of guards armed with
Winchester rifles--all for adventuring in _blond-beastly_ fashion.
Concerning further details