ckson's arm, the more shaken I was. I was
confronted by the concrete. For the first time I was seeing life. My
university life, and study and culture, had not been real. I had learned
nothing but theories of life and society that looked all very well on
the printed page, but now I had seen life itself. Jackson's arm was a
fact of life. "The fact, man, the irrefragable fact!" of Ernest's was
ringing in my consciousness.

It seemed monstrous, impossible, that our whole society was based
upon blood. And yet there was Jackson. I could not get away from him.
Constantly my thought swung back to him as the compass to the Pole. He
had been monstrously treated. His blood had not been paid for in order
that a larger dividend might be paid. And I knew a score of happy
complacent families that had received those dividends and by that much
had profited by Jackson's blood. If one man could be so monstrously
treated and society move on its way unheeding, might not many men be so
monstrously treated? I remembered Ernest's women of Chicago who toiled
for ninety cents a week, and the child slaves of the Southern cotton
mills he had described. And I could see their wan white hands, from
which the blood had been pressed, at work upon the cloth out of which
had been made my gown. And then I thought of the Sierra Mills and the
dividends that had been paid, and I saw the blood of Jackson upon my
gown as well. Jackson I could not escape. Always my meditations led me
back to him.

Down in the depths of me I had a feeling that I stood on the edge of
a precipice. It was as though I were about to see a new and awful
revelation of life. And not I alone. My whole world was turning over.
There was my father. I could see the effect Ernest was beginning to have
on him. And then there was the Bishop. When I had last seen him he had
looked a sick man. He was at high nervous tension, and in his eyes there
was unspeakable horror. From the little I learned I knew that Ernest had
been keeping his promise of taking him through hell. But what scenes of
hell the Bishop's eyes had seen, I knew not, for he seemed too stunned
to speak about them.

Once, the feeling strong upon me that my little world and all the world
was turning over, I thought of Ernest as the cause of it; and also I
thought, "We were so happy and peaceful before he came!" And the next
moment I was aware that the thought was a treason against truth, and
Ernest rose before me transfigured, the