ectly self-possessed. As we sat at table, Dr. Leete amused himself
with looking over the paper I had brought in. There was in it, as in
all the newspapers of that date, a great deal about the labor
troubles, strikes, lockouts, boycotts, the programmes of labor
parties, and the wild threats of the anarchists.

"By the way," said I, as the doctor read aloud to us some of these
items, "what part did the followers of the red flag take in the
establishment of the new order of things? They were making
considerable noise the last thing that I knew."

"They had nothing to do with it except to hinder it, of course,"
replied Dr. Leete. "They did that very effectually while they lasted,
for their talk so disgusted people as to deprive the best considered
projects for social reform of a hearing. The subsidizing of those
fellows was one of the shrewdest moves of the opponents of reform."

"Subsidizing them!" I exclaimed in astonishment.

"Certainly," replied Dr. Leete. "No historical authority nowadays
doubts that they were paid by the great monopolies to wave the red
flag and talk about burning, sacking, and blowing people up, in order,
by alarming the timid, to head off any real reforms. What astonishes
me most is that you should have fallen into the trap so
unsuspectingly."

"What are your grounds for believing that the red flag party was
subsidized?" I inquired.

"Why simply because they must have seen that their course made a
thousand enemies of their professed cause to one friend. Not to
suppose that they were hired for the work is to credit them with an
inconceivable folly.[4] In the United States, of all countries, no
party could intelligently expect to carry its point without first
winning over to its ideas a majority of the nation, as the national
party eventually did."

"The national party!" I exclaimed. "That must have arisen after my
day. I suppose it was one of the labor parties."

"Oh no!" replied the doctor. "The labor parties, as such, never could
have accomplished anything on a large or permanent scale. For purposes
of national scope, their basis as merely class organizations was too
narrow. It was not till a rearrangement of the industrial and social
system on a higher ethical basis, and for the more efficient
production of wealth, was recognized as the interest, not of one
class, but equally of all classes, of rich and poor, cultured and
ignorant, old and young, weak and strong, men and women, that ther