and clean street car
service, honest gas, pure water, plenty of good schools--that first of
all. The "reform crowd"--the Citizens' Alliance--like every reform
party of the past, proposed to do practically the same things. But the
League met this with: "Why should we elect an upper class government to
do for us what we ought to do for ourselves? And how can they redeem
their promises when they are tied up in a hundred ways to the very
people who have been robbing and cheating us?"

There were to be issues of the New Day; there were to be posters and
dodgers, public meetings in halls, in squares, on street corners. But
the main reliance now as always was this educated "army of
education"--these six thousand missionaries, each one of them in
resolute earnest and bent upon converting his neighbors on either side,
and across the street as well. A large part of the time the leaders
could spare from making a living was spent in working at this army, in
teaching it new arguments or better ways of presenting old arguments,
in giving the enthusiasm, in talking with each individual soldier of it
and raising his standard of efficiency. Nor could the employers of
these soldiers of Victor Dorn's complain that they shirked their work
for politics. It was a fact that could not be denied that the members
of the Workingmen's League were far and away the best workers in Remsen
City, got the best pay, and earned it, drank less, took fewer days off
on account of sickness. One of the sneers of the Kelly-House gang was
that "those Dorn cranks think they are aristocrats, a little better
than us common, ordinary laboring men." And the sneer was not without
effect. The truth was, Dorn and his associates had not picked out the
best of the working class and drawn it into the League, but had made
those who joined the League better workers, better family men, better
citizens.

"We are saying that the working class ought to run things," Dorn said
again and again in his talks, public and private. "Then, we've got to
show the community that we're fit to run things. That is why the
League expels any man who shirks or is a drunkard or a crook or a bad
husband and father."

The great fight of the League--the fight that was keeping it from
power--was with the trades unions, which were run by secret agents of
the Kelly-House oligarchy. Kelly and the Republican party rather
favored "open shop" or "scab" labor--the right of an American to let