to develop? Can the common man, or
the uncommon men who are allied with him, devise such a law? Or have
they already devised one? And if so, what is it?

HOW I BECAME A SOCIALIST

It is quite fair to say that I became a Socialist in a fashion somewhat
similar to the way in which the Teutonic pagans became Christians--it was
hammered into me. Not only was I not looking for Socialism at the time
of my conversion, but I was fighting it. I was very young and callow,
did not know much of anything, and though I had never even heard of a
school called "Individualism," I sang the paean of the strong with all my
heart.

This was because I was strong myself. By strong I mean that I had good
health and hard muscles, both of which possessions are easily accounted
for. I had lived my childhood on California ranches, my boyhood hustling
newspapers on the streets of a healthy Western city, and my youth on the
ozone-laden waters of San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. I loved
life in the open, and I toiled in the open, at the hardest kinds of work.
Learning no trade, but drifting along from job to job, I looked on the
world and called it good, every bit of it. Let me repeat, this optimism
was because I was healthy and strong, bothered with neither aches nor
weaknesses, never turned down by the boss because I did not look fit,
able always to get a job at shovelling coal, sailorizing, or manual labor
of some sort.

And because of all this, exulting in my young life, able to hold my own
at work or fight, I was a rampant individualist. It was very natural. I
was a winner. Wherefore I called the game, as I saw it played, or
thought I saw it played, a very proper game for MEN. To be a MAN was to
write man in large capitals on my heart. To adventure like a man, and
fight like a man, and do a man's work (even for a boy's pay)--these were
things that reached right in and gripped hold of me as no other thing
could. And I looked ahead into long vistas of a hazy and interminable
future, into which, playing what I conceived to be MAN'S game, I should
continue to travel with unfailing health, without accidents, and with
muscles ever vigorous. As I say, this future was interminable. I could
see myself only raging through life without end like one of Nietzsche's
_blond-beasts_, lustfully roving and conquering by sheer superiority and
strength.

As for the unfortunates, the sick, and ailing, and old, and maimed, I
mu