s flux of society something is about to crystallize. It is
crystallizing now. The suppression of the book is a precipitation. How
many books have been suppressed? We haven't the least idea. We are in
the dark. We have no way of learning. Watch out next for the
suppression of the socialist press and socialist publishing houses. I'm
afraid it's coming. We are going to be throttled."

Ernest had his hand on the pulse of events even more closely than the
rest of the socialists, and within two days the first blow was struck.
The Appeal to Reason was a weekly, and its regular circulation amongst
the proletariat was seven hundred and fifty thousand. Also, it very
frequently got out special editions of from two to five millions. These
great editions were paid for and distributed by the small army of
voluntary workers who had marshalled around the Appeal. The first blow
was aimed at these special editions, and it was a crushing one. By an
arbitrary ruling of the Post Office, these editions were decided to be
not the regular circulation of the paper, and for that reason were
denied admission to the mails.

A week later the Post Office Department ruled that the paper was
seditious, and barred it entirely from the mails. This was a fearful
blow to the socialist propaganda. The Appeal was desperate. It devised
a plan of reaching its subscribers through the express companies, but
they declined to handle it. This was the end of the Appeal. But not
quite. It prepared to go on with its book publishing. Twenty thousand
copies of father's book were in the bindery, and the presses were
turning off more. And then, without warning, a mob arose one night,
and, under a waving American flag, singing patriotic songs, set fire to
the great plant of the Appeal and totally destroyed it.

Now Girard, Kansas, was a quiet, peaceable town. There had never been
any labor troubles there. The Appeal paid union wages; and, in fact,
was the backbone of the town, giving employment to hundreds of men and
women. It was not the citizens of Girard that composed the mob. This
mob had risen up out of the earth apparently, and to all intents and
purposes, its work done, it had gone back into the earth. Ernest saw in
the affair the most sinister import.

"The Black Hundreds* are being organized in the United States," he said.
"This is the beginning. There will be more of it. The Iron Heel is
getting bold."

* The Black Hundreds were reactionary mobs organi