Dear Joe,—­Can’t I help you? 
  Myra.

He had to fight a whole afternoon before he replied: 

  Not yet—­later. 
  Joe.

And back he went into the whirlwind of the world-vision, a stupendous force upsetting, up-rooting, overturning, demolishing, almost erasing and contradicting everything that Joe had taken for granted, and in the wake of the destruction, rising and ever rising, a new creation, the vision of a new world.

He had taken so much for granted.  He had taken for granted that he lived in a democracy—­that the Civil War had once for all made America a free nation—­a nation of opportunity, riches, and happiness for all.  Not so.  Literally millions were living in abject poverty, slaves to their pay-envelopes; to lose a job meant to lose everything, there being more laborers than jobs, or if not, at least recurrent “panics” and “hard times” when the mills and the mines shut down.  And these wage slaves had practically no voice in one of the chief things of their life—­their work.  So millions were penned in places of danger and disease and dirt, lived and toiled in squalor, and were cut off from growth, from health, from leisure and culture and recreation; and worse, millions of women had to add the burden of earning a living to the already overwhelming burden of child-bearing and home-making; and, still worse, millions of children had been drafted into the service of industrialism.

He proved the case for himself.  He began making tours of the city, discovering New York, laying bare the confusion and ugliness and grime and crime and poverty of a great industrial center.  He poked into the Ghetto, into Chinatown, Greenwich Village, and Little Italy; he peered into jails, asylums, and workhouses; he sneaked through factories and hung about saloons.  Everywhere a terrific struggle, many sinking down into the city’s underworld of crime, men becoming vagrants or thieves, women walking the streets as prostitutes.

And over this broad foundation of the “people” rose the structure of business and politics, equally corrupted—­or so it seemed to Joe, as it does to every one who is fresh to the facts.  Men at the top gathering into their hands the necessities of life:  oil, meat, coal, water-power, wool; seizing on the railroads, those only modern means of social exchange; snatching strings of banks wherein the people’s money was being saved; and using their mighty money-power to corrupt legislation, to thwart the will of the voters, to secure new powers, to crush opposition.  So had arisen a “Money Power” that was annuling democracy.

And Joe’s books argued that all this change had been wrought by the invention of machinery, that only through steam, steel, and electricity could world-wide organization take place, that only through these arose the industrial city, the modern mill.  The very things that should have set man free, the enormous powers he snatched from nature and harnessed to do his work, powers with the strength of a nation of men—­these very things had been seized by a few for their own profit, and had enslaved the majority.  Over and over again could the race be fed, clothed, housed, and enriched by these powers, and that with lessened hours of toil and more variety of work.