“And not one of them was a free agent,” he said.  “They were all tied to the merciless industrial machine.  And the pathos of it and the tragedy is that they are tied by their heartstrings.  Their children—­always the young life that it is their instinct to protect.  This instinct is stronger than any ethic they possess.  My father!  He lied, he stole, he did all sorts of dishonorable things to put bread into my mouth and into the mouths of my brothers and sisters.  He was a slave to the industrial machine, and it stamped his life out, worked him to death.”

“But you,” I interjected.  “You are surely a free agent.”

“Not wholly,” he replied.  “I am not tied by my heartstrings.  I am often thankful that I have no children, and I dearly love children.  Yet if I married I should not dare to have any.”

“That surely is bad doctrine,” I cried.

“I know it is,” he said sadly.  “But it is expedient doctrine.  I am a revolutionist, and it is a perilous vocation.”

I laughed incredulously.

“If I tried to enter your father’s house at night to steal his dividends from the Sierra Mills, what would he do?”

“He sleeps with a revolver on the stand by the bed,” I answered.  “He would most probably shoot you.”

“And if I and a few others should lead a million and a half of men* into the houses of all the well-to-do, there would be a great deal of shooting, wouldn’t there?”

* This reference is to the socialist vote cast in the United States in 1910.  The rise of this vote clearly indicates the swift growth of the party of revolution.  Its voting strength in the United States in 1888 was 2068; in 1902, 127,713; in 1904, 435,040; in 1908, 1,108,427; and in 1910, 1,688,211.

“Yes, but you are not doing that,” I objected.

“It is precisely what I am doing.  And we intend to take, not the mere wealth in the houses, but all the sources of that wealth, all the mines, and railroads, and factories, and banks, and stores.  That is the revolution.  It is truly perilous.  There will be more shooting, I am afraid, than even I dream of.  But as I was saying, no one to-day is a free agent.  We are all caught up in the wheels and cogs of the industrial machine.  You found that you were, and that the men you talked with were.  Talk with more of them.  Go and see Colonel Ingram.  Look up the reporters that kept Jackson’s case out of the papers, and the editors that run the papers.  You will find them all slaves of the machine.”

A little later in our conversation I asked him a simple little question about the liability of workingmen to accidents, and received a statistical lecture in return.

“It is all in the books,” he said.  “The figures have been gathered, and it has been proved conclusively that accidents rarely occur in the first hours of the morning work, but that they increase rapidly in the succeeding hours as the workers grow tired and slower in both their muscular and mental processes.