ch a man suffered, he too would be full of
wrath and class hatred.

Sometimes, of course, men rose from the pit. Foremen became managers,
managers became superintendents, superintendents became owners, owners
became rich, and society replied--"Look, it is easy for a man to rise."
Once at lunch time, sitting in the shaft house, Nathan Perry with his
hands in his dinner bucket said something of the kind, when Tom
Williams, the little Welsh miner, who was a disciple and friend of Grant
Adams, cried:

"Yes--that's true. It is easy for a man to rise. It was easy for a slave
to escape from the South--comparatively easy. But is it easy for the
class to rise? Was it easy for the slaves to be free? That is the
problem--the problem of lifting a whole class--as your class has been
lifted, young fellow, in the last century. Why, over in Wales a century
ago, a mere tradesman's son like you--was--was nobody. The middle
classes had nothing--that is, nothing much. They have risen. They rule
the world now. This century must see the rise of the laboring class; not
here and there as a man who gets out of our class and then sneers at us,
and pretends he was with us by accident--but we must rise as a class,
boy--don't you see?"

And so, working in the mine, with the men, Nathan Perry completed his
education. He learned--had it ground into him by the hard master of
daily toil--that while bread and butter is an individual problem that no
laborer may neglect except at his peril, the larger problems of the
conditions under which men labor--their hours of service, their factory
surroundings, their shop rights to work, their relation to accidents and
to the common diseases peculiar to any trade--those are not individual
problems. They are class problems and must be solved--in so far as labor
can solve them alone, not by individual struggle but by class struggle.
So Nathan Perry came up out of the mines a believer in the union, and
the closed shop. He felt that those who would make the class problem an
individual problem, were only retarding the day of settlement, only
hindering progress.

Rumor said that the truce in the Wahoo Valley was near an end. Nathan
Perry did not shrink from it. But Market Street was uneasy. It seemed to
be watching an approaching cyclone. When men knew that the owners were
ready to stop the organization of unions, the cloud of unrest seemed to
hover over them. But the clouds dissolved in rumor. Then they gathered
ag