through the valley of the shadow, and I
not there to take them by the hand.

"And was this--your daughter--what brought you to your present belief?"

"No," said he, "oh, no. I was a Socialist, as you might say, from youth
up. That is, I called myself a Socialist, but, comrade, I've learned
this here truth: that it ain't of so much importance that you possess a
belief, as that the belief possess you. Do you understand?"

"I think," said I, "that I understand."

Well, he told me his story, mostly in a curious, dull, detached way--as
though he were speaking of some third person in whom he felt only a
brotherly interest, but from time to time some incident or observation
would flame up out of the narrative, like the opening of the door of a
molten pit--so that the glare hurt one!--and then the story would die
back again into quiet narrative.

Like most working people he had never lived in the twentieth century at
all. He was still in the feudal age, and his whole life had been a blind
and ceaseless struggle for the bare necessaries of life, broken from
time to time by fierce irregular wars called strikes. He had never known
anything of a real self-governing commonwealth, and such progress as
he and his kind had made was never the result of their citizenship,
of their powers as voters, but grew out of the explosive and ragged
upheavals, of their own half-organized societies and unions.

It was against the "black people" he said, that he was first on strike
back in the early nineties. He told me all about it, how he had been
working in the mills pretty comfortably--he was young and strong then;
with a fine growing family and a small home of his own.

"It was as pretty a place as you would want to see," he said; "we grew
cabbages and onions and turnips--everything grew fine!--in the garden
behind the house."

And then the "black people" began to come in, little by little at first,
and then by the carload. By the "black people" he meant the people
from Southern Europe, he called them "hordes"--"hordes and hordes
of 'em"--Italians mostly, and they began getting into the mills and
underbidding for the jobs, so that wages slowly went down and at the
same time the machines were speeded up. It seems that many of these
"black people" were single men or vigorous young married people with
only themselves to support, while the old American workers were men with
families and little homes to pay for, and plenty of old grandfathers