So the new life started, started in full swing.  Joe worked late that very night putting his plans on paper, and the next morning there was plenty of activity for everybody.  Joe bought a rebuilt cylinder press for fifteen hundred dollars and had it installed in the basement.  Then he had the basement wired, and got an electric motor to furnish the power.  John Rann and his family were moved down to a flat farther west on Tenth Street, and a feeder, a compositor, and a make-up man were hired along with him.  In the press-room (the basement) was placed a stone—­a marble-top table—­whereon the make-up man could take the strips of type as they came from the compositors, arrange them into pages, and “lock them up” in the forms, ready to put on the presses.

Then Joe arranged with a printery to set up the type weekly; with a bindery to bind, fold, bundle, and address the papers; and with Patrick Flynn, truckman, to distribute the papers to newsdealers.

Next Joe made a tour of the neighborhood, spoke with the newsdealers, told them that all they would have to do was to deliver the papers to the addresses printed upon them.  He found them willing to thus add to their income.

Thus he made ready.  But he was not yet prepared to get subscriptions (one dollar a year or twenty-five cents a quarter), feeling that first he must have a sample paper to show.

The labor on that first number was a joy to him.  He would jump up in the middle of the night, rush into the office, light the gas, and get to work in his nightgown.  He was at it at all hours.  And it proved to be an enormous task.  Eight pages eight by twelve do not read like a lot, but they write like a very great deal.  There was an editorial, “Greetings to You,” in which Joe set forth in plain words the ideas and ideals of the paper, and in which he made clear the meaning of the phrase “nine-tenths.”  Then he found that there were two great strikes in progress in the city.  This amazed him, as there was no visible sign of such a condition.  The newspapers said nothing of it, and peace seemed to brood over the city’s millions.  Yet there were thousands of cloak-makers out, and over in Brooklyn the toilers in the sugar refineries were having little pitched battles with strike-breakers in the streets.  Three men had been killed and a score wounded.

Joe dug into these strikes, called at the union headquarters, spoke with the men, even called on some of the cloak-makers’ bosses and learned their grievances.  Then he wrote accounts of the strike without taking sides, merely reporting the facts as fairly as he could.

In this way, and with the aid of clippings, and by printing that poem by Lowell which was his mother’s favorite, wherein was the couplet already quoted,

  “They are slaves who dare not be
  In the right with two or three,”

he made up a hodge-podge of a magazine.

Up in the corner of the editorial page he ran the following, subject to change: