mes attractive at but slight
expense, nor about the annual medical examination of the children, nor
about the company dentists who charge their patients only for the cost
of gold actually used, nor about the fine company store at Edgewater
Mine, nor about the excellent meats supplied by the company butchers,
nor about the low prices of supplies, nor about the effort to
discourage employees from buying cheap furniture at high prices on the
installment plan, nor, above all, about the clean, decent, happy look of
the families we chanced to see.

Even had I the space in which to tell of these things, it is perhaps
wiser that I refrain from doing so. For I am aware that in speaking
anything but ill of a great corporation I have scandalously outraged
precedent. Nor does it argue well for my powers of observation, or those
of my companion. I feel confident that where our limited visions
perceived only prosperity and contentment, certain of my brother
writers, and his brother illustrators would, in our places, have rent
the thin, vaporish veil of apparent corporate kindliness, and found such
foul shame, such hideous malignity, such grasping, grubby greed, such
despicable soul-destroying despotism, as to shock the simple nature of a
chief of the old-time Russian Secret Police.

It shames me to think what my friend Lincoln Steffens could have done
had he but enjoyed my opportunities. It shames me to think what John
Reed or other gifted writers for "The Masses" could have done. And I
should think that Wallace Morgan would writhe with shame. For, where Art
Young would have seen heavy-jowled, pig-eyed Capital, in a silk hat and
a checked suit, whirling a cruel knout over the broad and noble (but
bent and shuddering) back of Labor--where Boardman Robinson would have
found a mother, her white, drawn face half hidden by the shoddy shawl
of black, to which cling the hands of her emaciated brood--what has
Wallace Morgan seen?

A steel-plant in operation. A company steel-plant! A _corporation_
steel-plant! A TRUST steel-plant.

Yet never so much as a starving cat or a pile of garbage in the
foreground!

CHAPTER XL

THE ROAD TO ARCADY

Before we saw the train which was to take us from Birmingham to
Columbus, Mississippi, we began to sense its quality. When we attempted
to purchase parlor car seats of the ticket agent at the Union Station
and were informed by him that our train carried no parlor car, it seemed
to us that h