on the dial undoubtedly points to him.  At this moment a young man and woman come to a settee near me.  The young woman asks her companion:  “Who is that monument to?” “Douglas,” he answers in staccato.  “Who was Douglas?” “A Senator or something from Illinois.  But why change the subject?  You have kept putting this off, and I have six hundred dollars saved now, and prospects are good.  I would like to be ...” the rest is borne away by the wind.  But I know it is the old theme.  Soon his arm encircles her shoulders over the back of the settee.  She looks at him and smiles.  It is April!  The men are repairing the mortar between the stones of Douglas’ tomb.  Two are masons, two are negro helpers.  The negroes are as free as the whites; the whites are no freer than the negroes.  They are all wanderers, looking for jobs without settled places, paying board as I do, or living in rented places.  One of them may own his house.  Some laborers do, not many.  They are like the factory workers, the whole breed of workers throughout the land.  The Civil War did not make them prosperous, or change their real status.  It seems that the God of nature still rules, and that Darwin is his best prophet.  These men are free to work or to starve.  Some things have changed.  It is no longer against the law to send abolition literature through the mail.  But it is against the law to incite laborers to strike, whether they are white or black, and it is against the law for laborers, white or black, to organize themselves into unions.  The slave owners were pretty well organized once, both financially and politically, but now the corporations are much better organized than the slave owners were.  The negro did not dare to rebel against his master.  And now the law prevents the laborer from organizing against the corporation.  We have freedom now, but of a different quality.  It has changed its base, but is there more of it?

A freight train goes by nearly a mile long.  It is laden with coal, oil, iron.  I can’t believe that the soil is free.  Coal and oil and iron have too much of it.  I think of the banners borne in the campaign of 1860, when Baron Renfrew stood that night on the balcony of his hotel.  He will soon be king of England and emperor of India.  And some one—­either the men who carried those banners or their sons—­some one now has a complete overlordship of this United States.

Why did not these banners make free men and a free soil?  I suspect that the banner of protection to American industries was as influential at least as the free soil banner.  It was easy after the war to force the XIV Amendment on the country, to give citizenship to the negro so far as his color had kept him out of it.  It remained for the courts to call the corporations citizens and to fit to their backs the coat of equal protection of the laws, which they told us was cut and sewed for the negro.  Hence this long freight train with coal, oil, and iron—­all very well, but where are the free men and the free soil that Reverdy’s son died for?