man's
club!--when in gay carousal we tried to forget what we were. Even in the
saloon and dance-hall we told tales of the shop! Oh, the irony of it!
Was there no escape from the madness of the mart, no surcease from the
frenzy of the factory or the shibboleth of the shop!

"Yes! How well I recall the gay transformation in my shop-mates when the
whistle blew on Saturday night. The dullest and most morose showed
intelligence then. The prospect of rest, be it ever so remote--even in
the hereafter--roused them from their lethargy. How alert and cheerful
we were on holidays, even the prolonged holiday of a strike brought its
pinched joys. Quite a number of my ancient comrades of industry looked
forward to the Poor House with a hopefulness born of thwarted toil. The
luckiest ones out of the thousands whom I knew were those few who,
overcome at last, could find some sheltering fireside and keep out of
the way until nature laid them off for good; the living envied the dead.

"I took part in the famous bread riots of '77, when I had to fly from
the shop, before an infuriated mob armed with sticks, stones, pikes, and
pitchforks. In the same year I saw from a distance the great battle of
the viaduct, when the mob, armed as in the bread riots, faced the
federal troops and were shot down and dispersed. It was about this time,
too, that I stood by as the 'Lehr und Wehr Verein' in their blue blouses
of toil and shouldered rifles strode ominously onward. These men were
the first fruits in America of Bakunin's ideals and work in Europe.
They, too, were put down, by an act of legislature.

"These proletarian protagonists whipped me into a fury. My father, too,
had his rifle, and when drunk he invoked it, as it hung on the wall,
thus: 'Come down, my sweet rifle, how brightly you shine! What tyrant
dare stifle that sweet voice of thine.' But my father was only a Fenian
revolutionist; and as it was only a step for me from Ireland to
Internationalism, I was soon beyond his creed.

"We had come to America during war times, with the spirit of revolt
already germinating within us; and although we were against slavery, our
sympathies were with the South. We were natural as well as political
democrats, and even when the mob was in the wrong, I always became one
of it. How finely elemental, how responsive to the best and the worst,
is the mob when the crisis comes!

"Although my thoughts were forming through my readings and the larger
events