me the two men i had had received forty the poet dollars each per month i was the work of both for thirty dollars per month this employer worked me nearly to death a man may love but too many will him toward that particular diet and so with me too much work me i did not wish ever to see work again i fled from work i became a tramp begging my way from door to door wandering over the united states and bloody in and i had been bom in the working class and i was now at the age of eighteen beneath the point at which i had started i was down in the cellar of society down in the depths of misery about which it is neither nice nor proper to speak i was in the pit the abyss the human the and the house of our civilization this is the part of the edifice of society that society chooses to lack of space me here to it and i shall say only that the things i there saw gave me a terrible scare the author reflected and decided that it was better to sell brains than muscle then began a frantic pursuit of knowledge i returned to and opened the books while thus myself to become a brain merchant it was inevitable that i should into there i foimd in a certain class of books the simple i had already worked out for myself other and greater minds before i was bom had worked out all that i had thought and a vast deal more i discovered that i was a the were inasmuch as they struggled to overthrow the society of the present and out of the material to build the society of the future i too the cry for justice was a and a i joined the groups of working class and intellectual and for the first time came into intelligent living here i found keen and brilliant wits for here i met strong and alert withal handed s of the working class too wide in christianity for any congregation of professors broken on the wheel of university to the ruling class and flung out because they were quick with knowledge which they strove to apply to the affairs of mankind here i foimd also warm faith in the human sweetness of and � all the splendid things of the spirit here life was clean and alive here life itself became wonderful and glorious and i was glad to be alive i was in touch with at souls who exalted flesh and spirit over dollars and cents and to whom the thin wail of the starved child meant more than all the pomp and circumstance of commercial and world empire all about me were of i ur and heroism of effort and my days and nights were sunshine and all fire and dew with before my ever burning and blazing the holy christ v the warm human long suffering and but to be rescued and saved at the last as a rain merchant i was a success society opened its to me i entered right in on the parlor floor and my proceeded rapidly i sat to dinner with the masters of society and with the wives and daughters of the masters of society the women were beautifully i admit but to my surprise i discovered that they were of the same clay as the poet all the rest of the women i had known down below in the cellar the colonel s lady and o were sisters under their skins � and gowns it was not this however so much as their that shocked me it is true these beautifully beautiful women sweet little and dear little but in spite of their the dominant key of the life they lived was and they were so selfish they assisted in all kinds of sweet little and informed one of the fact while all the time the food they ate and the beautiful clothes they wore were bought out of stained with the blood of child labor and labor and of itself when i mentioned such facts expecting in my innocence that these sisters of o would at once strip os their blood and jewels they became excited and angry and read me about the lack of the drink and the innate that caused all the misery in society s cellar when i mentioned that i couldn t quite see that it was the lack of the and the of a half starved child of six that made it work twelve hours every night in a southern cotton mill these sisters of o attacked my private life and called me an � as though that settled the argument nor did i fare better with the masters themselves i had expected to find men who were clean noble and alive whose were clean noble and alive i went out amongst the men who sat in the high places the the the business men the professors and the i ate meat with them drank wine with them with them and studied them it is true s the cry for justice i found many that were dean and but with exceptions they were not alive i do believe i could count the exceptions on the of my two hands where they were not alive with with life they were merely the dead � dean and noble like well preserved but not alive in this connection i may especially mention the i met the men who live up to that ideal the pursuit of i met men who the name of the prince of peace in their against war and who put in the hands of with which to shoot down in their own i met men with indignation at the of prize fighting and who at the same time were parties to the of food that killed 