He was assailed terribly in the press, in long and abusive editorials, for his anarchy, and hints were made of mental breakdown on his part.  This behavior, on the part of the capitalist press, was nothing new, Ernest told us.  It was the custom, he said, to send reporters to all the socialist meetings for the express purpose of misreporting and distorting what was said, in order to frighten the middle class away from any possible affiliation with the proletariat.  And repeatedly Ernest warned father to cease fighting and to take to cover.

The socialist press of the country took up the fight, however, and throughout the reading portion of the working class it was known that the book had been suppressed.  But this knowledge stopped with the working class.  Next, the “Appeal to Reason,” a big socialist publishing house, arranged with father to bring out the book.  Father was jubilant, but Ernest was alarmed.

“I tell you we are on the verge of the unknown,” he insisted.  “Big things are happening secretly all around us.  We can feel them.  We do not know what they are, but they are there.  The whole fabric of society is a-tremble with them.  Don’t ask me.  I don’t know myself.  But out of this flux of society something is about to crystallize.  It is crystallizing now.  The suppression of the book is a precipitation.  How many books have been suppressed?  We haven’t the least idea.  We are in the dark.  We have no way of learning.  Watch out next for the suppression of the socialist press and socialist publishing houses.  I’m afraid it’s coming.  We are going to be throttled.”

Ernest had his hand on the pulse of events even more closely than the rest of the socialists, and within two days the first blow was struck.  The Appeal to Reason was a weekly, and its regular circulation amongst the proletariat was seven hundred and fifty thousand.  Also, it very frequently got out special editions of from two to five millions.  These great editions were paid for and distributed by the small army of voluntary workers who had marshalled around the Appeal.  The first blow was aimed at these special editions, and it was a crushing one.  By an arbitrary ruling of the Post Office, these editions were decided to be not the regular circulation of the paper, and for that reason were denied admission to the mails.

A week later the Post Office Department ruled that the paper was seditious, and barred it entirely from the mails.  This was a fearful blow to the socialist propaganda.  The Appeal was desperate.  It devised a plan of reaching its subscribers through the express companies, but they declined to handle it.  This was the end of the Appeal.  But not quite.  It prepared to go on with its book publishing.  Twenty thousand copies of father’s book were in the bindery, and the presses were turning off more.  And then, without warning, a mob arose one night, and, under a waving American flag, singing patriotic songs, set fire to the great plant of the Appeal and totally destroyed it.