n the
crater's edge and gazed into it. Hereafter, I was to live on dangerous
ground, at least in thought. No more doubt, no more shuffling now. I
must try the chords of my heart, the sympathy of my soul, in open
rebellion. The iniquities of civilisation had ruined a fine barbarian in
me, and almost made of me a maudlin miscreant, willing to hang upon the
skirts of a false society. The Haymarket bomb made me strip again and
for a nobler fray.

"Of what avail was it, I reflected, to raise one's voice in the
wilderness of theories? How do any good by a social enthusiasm merely
expressed in theory? Such thin cerebral structures are shattered to
pieces in the ordeal of life. Ah, but this anonymous Avatar, this man
with the bomb! His instinct was right, but how far short it fell, and
must always fall. He had settled the strife within him and become
definite to himself: that was all he had done. I too must settle the
strife within me. I was plunged into prolonged dreams from which I was
aroused by hunger, hunger of many kinds, and driven into my former
haunt, the shop.

"But now, when I stripped for work in the factory and donned my
vestments of toil, I stood forth without falsehood. I knew, if not what
I was, at least what I wanted, rather what I did not want. I did not
want this, this society!

"Each morning as I took my place in the shop I had the feeling of my
boyhood--as if I were celebrating a High Mass before the sacrifice of
another day. There was much of the Pontifical in me, for I was a rapt
radical. Each morning on my way to Commercial Calvary I saw another
sacrifice; I overtook small shrivelled forms, children they were, by the
dim dawn. How their immature coughings racked my heart and gave me that
strange tightening of the chest! I could not keep my eyes from the
ground whence came the sound of small telltale splashes, after each
cough. Many times I stopped to hold a child who was vomiting.

"Here was a woe too deep for tears; and I must look with dry eyes or I
should fail to see. Have you ever noticed the searching dry gaze of the
poor? It is like the seeing, wistful look of a child--which few can bear
without flinching. I had no need to read Dante's imaginary 'Inferno.' I
was living in a real one which made all imagination seem trivial. 'The
short and simple annals of the poor' seems like poetry, but only
superficially, for it is not truth, but a fiction. It is false, for the
annals of the aristocracy are n