.

And just then, as luck would have it, I found an employer that was of the
same mind. I was willing to work, and he was more than willing that I
should work. I thought I was learning a trade. In reality, I had
displaced two men. I thought he was making an electrician out of me; as
a matter of fact, he was making fifty dollars per month out of me. The
two men I had displaced had received forty dollars each per month; I was
doing the work of both for thirty dollars per month.

This employer worked me nearly to death. A man may love oysters, but too
many oysters will disincline him toward that particular diet. And so
with me. Too much work sickened me. I did not wish ever to see work
again. I fled from work. I became a tramp, begging my way from door to
door, wandering over the United States and sweating bloody sweats in
slums and prisons.

I had been born in the working-class, and I was now, at the age of
eighteen, beneath the point at which I had started. I was down in the
cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery about which
it is neither nice nor proper to speak. I was in the pit, the abyss, the
human cesspool, the shambles and the charnel-house of our civilization.
This is the part of the edifice of society that society chooses to
ignore. Lack of space compels me here to ignore it, and I shall say only
that the things I there saw gave me a terrible scare.

I was scared into thinking. I saw the naked simplicities of the
complicated civilization in which I lived. Life was a matter of food and
shelter. In order to get food and shelter men sold things. The merchant
sold shoes, the politician sold his manhood, and the representative of
the people, with exceptions, of course, sold his trust; while nearly all
sold their honour. Women, too, whether on the street or in the holy bond
of wedlock, were prone to sell their flesh. All things were commodities,
all people bought and sold. The one commodity that labour had to sell
was muscle. The honour of labour had no price in the marketplace.
Labour had muscle, and muscle alone, to sell.

But there was a difference, a vital difference. Shoes and trust and
honour had a way of renewing themselves. They were imperishable stocks.
Muscle, on the other hand, did not renew. As the shoe merchant sold
shoes, he continued to replenish his stock. But there was no way of
replenishing the labourer's stock of muscle. The more he sold of his
mu