be Ibsen actresses and one budding playwright
who had had two Broadway failures and one Berkeley Lyceum success. But
were they talking of plays? Not at all. They talked of the Russian
Revolution. It had died down in the last few years, and they wanted to
help stir it up again by throwing some more American money into the
smoldering embers. To do this they planned to whip into new life "The
Friends of Russian Freedom."

That was it, I told myself, these people were all friends of
revolutions. Vaguely as I watched them now I felt I was seeing the
parlor side, the light and fluffy outer fringe, of something rather
dangerous. I thought again of that parade and my impression of mass
force. No danger in that, it was dressy and safe. But some of these
youngsters did not stop there, they went in for stirring up people in
rags, mass force of a very different kind. Here was a sculptor socialist
who openly bragged that he'd had a hand in filling Union Square one day
with a seething mass of unemployed, and then when some poor crazed
fanatic threw a bomb, our socialist friend, as he himself smilingly put
it, never once stopped running until he reached his studio.

It was this kind of thing that got on my nerves. For I pitied the
unwieldy poor, the numberless muddle-headed crowds down there in the
tenements, and it seemed to me perfectly criminal that a lot of these
young high-brows should be allowed to stir them up. Their own thinking
was so muddled, their views of life so out of gear.

I a radical? No chance!

While they chattered on excitedly, I thought of my trip uptown on the
"El" that afternoon, a trip that I had made hundreds of times. Coming as
I usually was from some big man or other, whose busy office and whose
mind was a clean, brilliant illustration of what efficiency can be, I
would sit in the car and idly watch the upper story windows we passed,
with yellow gas jets flaring in the cave-like rooms behind them. There I
had glimpses of men and girls at long crowded tables making coats,
pants, vests, paper flowers, chewing-gum, five-cent cigars. I saw
countless tenement kitchens, dirty cooking, unmade beds. These glimpses
followed one on the other in such a dizzying torrent they merged into
one moving picture for me. And that picture was of crowds, crowds,
crowds--of people living frowzily.

This was poverty. And it was like some prodigious swamp. What could you
do about it? You could pull out individuals here and ther