n," he was
too young to know the history of the Knights, he had never heard of a
philosophy of labour, or of Sorel or Pouget, but the West he had heard
of,--the home of lawlessness, of bloodshed, rape, and murder. For
obvious reasons he did not betray this opinion, but for him the I.W.W.
was born in the West, where it had ravaged and wrecked communities. His
article was guardedly respectful, but he ventured to remind his readers
that Mr. Antonelli had been a leader in some of these titanic struggles
between crude labour and capital--catastrophes that hitherto had seemed
to the citizens of Hampton as remote as Kansas cyclones....

Some of the less timorous of the older inhabitants, curious to learn
what doctrine this interloper had to proclaim, thrust their way that
evening into the City Hall, which was crowded, as the papers said, "to
suffocation." Not prepossessing, this modern Robespierre; younger than
he looked, for life had put its mark on him; once, in the days of severe
work in the mines, his body had been hard, and now had grown stout. In
the eyes of a complacent, arm-chair historian he must have appeared one
of the strange and terrifying creatures which, in times of upheaval,
are thrust from the depths of democracies to the surface, with gifts to
voice the longings and passions of those below. He did not blink in the
light; he was sure of himself, he had a creed and believed in it; he
gazed around him with the leonine stare of the conqueror, and a hush
came over the hall as he arose. His speech was taken down verbatim,
to be submitted to the sharpest of legal eyes, when was discovered the
possession of a power--rare among agitators--to pour forth in torrents
apparently unpremeditated appeals, to skirt the border of sedition and
never transgress it, to weigh his phrases before he gave them birth, and
to remember them. If he said an incendiary thing one moment he qualified
it the next; he justified violence only to deprecate it; and months
later, when on trial for his life and certain remarks were quoted
against him, he confounded his prosecutors by demanding the contexts.
Skilfully, always within the limits of their intelligence, he outlined
to his hearers his philosophy and proclaimed it as that of the world's
oppressed. Their cause was his--the cause of human progress; he
universalized, it. The world belonged to the "producer," if only he had
the courage to take possession of his own....

Suddenly the inspirer