d suicide coolly, as a Greek philosopher might. My regret was
that there were too many dependent directly upon me for food and shelter
for me to quit living. But that was sheer morality. What really saved
me was the one remaining illusion--the PEOPLE.

The things I had fought for and burned my midnight oil for had failed me.
Success--I despised it. Recognition--it was dead ashes. Society, men
and women above the ruck and the muck of the water-front and the
forecastle--I was appalled by their unlovely mental mediocrity. Love of
woman--it was like all the rest. Money--I could sleep in only one bed at
a time, and of what worth was an income of a hundred porterhouses a day
when I could eat only one? Art, culture--in the face of the iron facts of
biology such things were ridiculous, the exponents of such things only
the more ridiculous.

From the foregoing it can be seen how very sick I was. I was born a
fighter. The things I had fought for had proved not worth the fight.
Remained the PEOPLE. My fight was finished, yet something was left still
to fight for--the PEOPLE.

But while I was discovering this one last tie to bind me to life, in my
extremity, in the depths of despond, walking in the valley of the shadow,
my ears were deaf to John Barleycorn. Never the remotest whisper arose
in my consciousness that John Barleycorn was the anodyne, that he could
lie me along to live. One way only was uppermost in my thought--my
revolver, the crashing eternal darkness of a bullet. There was plenty of
whisky in the house--for my guests. I never touched it. I grew afraid
of my revolver--afraid during the period in which the radiant, flashing
vision of the PEOPLE was forming in my mind and will. So obsessed was I
with the desire to die that I feared I might commit the act in my sleep,
and I was compelled to give my revolver away to others who were to lose
it for me where my subconscious hand might not find it.

But the PEOPLE saved me. By the PEOPLE was I handcuffed to life. There
was still one fight left in me, and here was the thing for which to
fight. I threw all precaution to the winds, threw myself with fiercer
zeal into the fight for socialism, laughed at the editors and publishers
who warned me and who were the sources of my hundred porterhouses a day,
and was brutally careless of whose feelings I hurt and of how savagely I
hurt them. As the "well-balanced radicals" charged at the time, my
efforts were so st