Long-Beard dipped into the bear-carcass and sucked with toothless gums at a fist of suet.

“Some day,” he said, wiping his hands on his sides, “all the fools will be dead and then all live men will go forward.  The strength of the strong will be theirs, and they will add their strength together, so that, of all the men in the world, not one will fight with another.  There will be no guards nor watchers on the walls.  And all the hunting animals will be killed, and, as Hair-Face said, all the hill-sides will be pastured with goats and all the high mountain valleys will be planted with corn and fat roots.  And all men will be brothers, and no man will lie idle in the sun and be fed by his fellows.  And all that will come to pass in the time when the fools are dead, and when there will be no more singers to stand still and sing the ‘Song of the Bees.’  Bees are not men.”

SOUTH OF THE SLOT

Old San Francisco, which is the San Francisco of only the other day, the day before the Earthquake, was divided midway by the Slot.  The Slot was an iron crack that ran along the centre of Market Street, and from the Slot arose the burr of the ceaseless, endless cable that was hitched at will to the cars it dragged up and down.  In truth, there were two slots, but in the quick grammar of the West time was saved by calling them, and much more that they stood for, “The Slot.”  North of the Slot were the theatres, hotels, and shopping district, the banks and the staid, respectable business houses.  South of the Slot were the factories, slums, laundries, machine-shops, boiler works, and the abodes of the working class.

The Slot was the metaphor that expressed the class cleavage of Society, and no man crossed this metaphor, back and forth, more successfully than Freddie Drummond.  He made a practice of living in both worlds, and in both worlds he lived signally well.  Freddie Drummond was a professor in the Sociology Department of the University of California, and it was as a professor of sociology that he first crossed over the Slot, lived for six mouths in the great labour-ghetto, and wrote The Unskilled Labourer—­a book that was hailed everywhere as an able contribution to the literature of progress, and as a splendid reply to the literature of discontent.  Politically and economically it was nothing if not orthodox.  Presidents of great railway systems bought whole editions of it to give to their employees.  The Manufacturers’ Association alone distributed fifty thousand copies of it.  In a way, it was almost as immoral as the far-famed and notorious Message to Garcia, while in its pernicious preachment of thrift and content it ran Mr. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch a close second.