o before. It
was thick and heavy and very austerely bound. It surprised her to see
that it was new. He seldom sent her new books. She glanced idly through
the pages before she happened to note the title. Then her whole manner
changed. It was as if someone had spoken to her sharply. The words
burned themselves into her consciousness. The small gilt letters shouted
like live things. "Proceedings of the Congressional Committee of Inquiry
into the Conditions Obtaining in the Algoma Mine Fields."

As she went on from the title to the contents, her indolent apathy
changed rapidly to intent immersion. Occasionally her fingers clinched
involuntarily and her eyebrows knitted. Once she even dropped the book
and covered her eyes with her hands. It was a terrible narrative which
unfolded itself before her, made more terrible by the emotionless
dispassion of the telling. It was a story of bribery and corruption, of
murder begetting murder, with the stupid folly of more murder as its
cure, of the weakest and most helpless paying the price, of race hatred,
of greed,--the whole nauseous catalogue of human frailties was laid
before her, with less feeling than the Homeric catalogue of ships.

As her imagination took fire, it seemed to her that the poison of
selfishness, festering in a far-away hole in the ground, had oozed out
and over the land, marking its slimy trail in legislatures, in churches,
in the homes of the highest, until, finally, it had reached her own
library. She grew sick and faint as the pestilential tale expanded, and
horror was piled upon horror.

The indictment made one thing clear. Algoma was not a mere morbid
growth, to be extirpated by force, but an evidence of disease: and a
disease, not of individuals or of classes, but of a civilisation. The
roots of that disease were not, as a circular from a mine manager had
said, in the "tyrannous labour unions." They went far deeper than that.
They were in her own heart and brain. They were in the hearts and brains
of every man and woman in the world.

It was the explanation of the mine owners, she knew, that they fought
for "the right of the American workman to work for whom, what and when
he pleased." It was the defence of the miners that they fought for the
power of organisation.

Both quarrels were just, she felt with a terrible sense of hopelessness:
both demanded the right to rule. Both would fight to the death for that
right. It was folly to hope for an equal div