right here.

For those interested in the details I'm going to give another
quotation from Ruth's note book. But to my mind these details aren't
the important part of our venture. The thing that counted was the
spirit back of them. It isn't the fact that we lived on from six to
eight dollars a week or the statistics of how we lived on that which
makes my life worth telling about if it _is_ worth telling about. In
the first place prices vary in different localities and shift from
year to year. In fact since we began they have almost doubled. In the
second place people have lived and are living to-day on less than we
did. I give our figures simply to satisfy the curious and to show how
Ruth planned. But no one could do as she did or do as we did merely by
aping her little economies, or accepting the result of them. Either
they would find the task impossible or look upon it as a privation and
endure it as martyrs. In this mood they wouldn't last a week. I know
that people who read this without at least a germ of the pioneer in
them will either smile or shrug their shoulders. I've met plenty of
this sort. I met them by the dozen down here. As I said, you can find
them in every bread line, in every Salvation Army barracks or the
Associated Charities will furnish you a list of as many as you want.
You'll find them in the suburbs or you'll find them marching in line
the next time there is a procession of the unemployed.

But give me true pioneers such as our own forefathers were, such as
the young men out West are to-day, such as every steamer lands here by
the hundreds from foreign countries every week and I say you can't
down that kind, you can't kill them. I don't say that it's right to
raise the price of necessities. I don't think it is, though I don't
know much about it. But I do say that if you double the cost of food
stuffs and then double it again, though you may cruelly starve out the
weaklings, you'll find the pioneers still on their feet, still
fighting.

It seems strange to me that men will go to Alaska and contentedly
freeze and dig all day in a mine--not of their own, but for wages--and
not feel so greatly abused or unhappy; that they will swing an axe all
day in a forest and live on baked beans and bread without feeling like
martyrs; that they will go to sea and grub on hard tack and salt pork
and fish without complaint and then will turn Anarchists on the same
fare in the East. It seems strange too that these