id face, decorated with gray side whiskers.
He was the kindest-hearted man that ever lived, and the
liveliest--inexhaustible in his enthusiasm, and talking Socialism all
day and all night. He was a great fellow to jolly along a crowd, and
would keep a meeting in an uproar; when once he got really waked up, the
torrent of his eloquence could be compared with nothing save Niagara.

Tommy Hinds had begun life as a blacksmith's helper, and had run away
to join the Union army, where he had made his first acquaintance with
"graft," in the shape of rotten muskets and shoddy blankets. To a
musket that broke in a crisis he always attributed the death of his only
brother, and upon worthless blankets he blamed all the agonies of his
own old age. Whenever it rained, the rheumatism would get into his
joints, and then he would screw up his face and mutter: "Capitalism, my
boy, capitalism! 'Ecrasez l'infame!'" He had one unfailing remedy for
all the evils of this world, and he preached it to every one; no matter
whether the person's trouble was failure in business, or dyspepsia, or
a quarrelsome mother-in-law, a twinkle would come into his eyes and he
would say, "You know what to do about it--vote the Socialist ticket!"

Tommy Hinds had set out upon the trail of the Octopus as soon as the war
was over. He had gone into business, and found himself in competition
with the fortunes of those who had been stealing while he had been
fighting. The city government was in their hands and the railroads were
in league with them, and honest business was driven to the wall; and
so Hinds had put all his savings into Chicago real estate, and set out
singlehanded to dam the river of graft. He had been a reform member
of the city council, he had been a Greenbacker, a Labor Unionist, a
Populist, a Bryanite--and after thirty years of fighting, the year 1896
had served to convince him that the power of concentrated wealth could
never be controlled, but could only be destroyed. He had published a
pamphlet about it, and set out to organize a party of his own, when a
stray Socialist leaflet had revealed to him that others had been
ahead of him. Now for eight years he had been fighting for the
party, anywhere, everywhere--whether it was a G.A.R. reunion, or a
hotel-keepers' convention, or an Afro-American business-men's banquet, or
a Bible society picnic, Tommy Hinds would manage to get himself invited
to explain the relations of Socialism to the subject in