But Joe’s books argued further and most dogmatically that this organization by the selfish few was a necessary step in progress, that when their work was finished the toilers, the millions, would arise and seize the organization and use it thereafter for the good of all.  Indeed, this was what Sally’s labor movement meant:  the enlightenment of the toilers as to the meaning of industrialism, and their training for the supreme revolution.

And out of all this arose the world-vision.  At such moments Joe walked in a rarer air, he stepped on a fairer earth than ordinarily obtains.  It was the beauty and loveliness of simple human camaraderie, of warm human touch.  And at such times Joe had no doubt of his life-work.  It lay in exquisite places, in chambers of jolly grandeur, in the invisible halls and palaces of the human spirit.  He was one with the toilers of earth, one with the crowded underworld.  It was that these lives might grow richer in knowledge, richer in art, richer in health, richer in festival, richer in opportunity, that Joe had dedicated his life.  And so arose that wonderful and inexpressible vision—­a picture as it were of the far future—­a glimpse of an earth singing with uplifted crowds of humanity, on one half of the globe going out to meet the sunrise, on the other, the stars.  He heard the music of that Hymn of Human Victory, which from millions of throats lifts on that day when all the race is woven into a harmony of labor and joy and home and great unselfish deeds.  That day, possibly, might never arrive, forever fading farther and farther into the sunlit distances—­but it is the day which leads the race forward.  To Joe, however, came that vision, and when it came it seemed as if the last drop of his blood would be little to offer, even in anguish, to help, even by ever so little, the coming and the consummation of that Victory.

He would awake in the night, and cry out in a fever: 

“By God, I’m going to help change things.”

The vision shook him—­tugged at his heart, downward, like the clutch of a convulsive child; seized him now and again like a madness.  Even unto such things had the “dead girls” brought him.

So, crammed with theories—­theories as yet untested by experience—­Joe became an iconoclast lusting for change.  He was bursting with good news, he wanted to cry the intimations from the housetops, he wanted to proselytize, convert.  He was filled with Shelley’s passion for reforming the world, and like young Shelley, he felt that all he had to do was to show the people the truth and the truth would make them free.

All this was in his great moments,... there were reactions when his human humorous self—­backed by ten years of the printery—­told him that the world is a complex mix-up, and that there are many visions; moments that made him wonder what he was about, and why so untrained a man expected to achieve such marvels.