The way American society was moving in 1886 was the way to death.  The great majority, the major key in the weird symphony of American life, was not of society.

We had no masses really, although we borrowed the term from Europe and used it busily to describe our working people, who were massive enough as a body of men, but they were not the masses.  Neither were they the mob, which was a term some were fond of using in describing the destruction of property on railroads in the spring of 1886.  The labouring men had nothing to do with these injuries.  They were done by the desperadoes who lurked in all big cities.  I made a Western trip during this strike, and I found the labouring men quiet, peaceful, but idle.  The depots were filled with them, the streets were filled with them, but they were in suspense, and it lasted twenty-five days.  Then followed the darkness and squalor—­less bread, less comfort, less civilisation of heart and mind.  It was hard on the women and children.  Senator Manderson, the son of my old friend in Philadelphia, introduced a bill into the United States Senate for the arbitration of strikes.  It proposed a national board of mediation between capital and labour.

Jay Gould was the most abused of men just then.  He was denounced by both contestants in this American conflict most uselessly.  The knights of Labour came in for an equal amount of abuse.  We were excited and could not reason.  The men had just as much right to band together for mutual benefit as Jay Gould had a right to get rich.  It was believed by many that Mr. Gould made his fortune out of the labouring classes.  Mr. Gould made it out of the capitalists.  His regular diet was a capitalist per diem, not a poor man—­capitalist stewed, broiled, roasted, panned, fricaseed, devilled, on the half shell.  He was personally, as I knew him, a man of such kindness that he would not hurt a fly, but he played ten pins on Wall Street.  A great many adventurers went there to play with him, and if their ball rolled down the side of the financial alley while he made a ten strike or two or three spares, the fellows who were beaten howled.  That was about all there really was in the denunciation of Jay Gould.

I couldn’t help thinking sometimes, when the United States seemed to change its smile of prosperity to a sudden smile of anger or petulance, that we were a spoiled nation, too much pampered by divine blessings.  If we had not been our own rulers, but had been ruled—­what would America have been then?  We were like Ireland crying for liberty and abusing liberty the more we got of it.

Mr. Gladstone’s policy of Home Rule for Ireland, announced in April, 1886, proposed an Irish Parliament and the Viceroy.  It should remain, however, a part of England.  I fully believed then that Ireland would have Home Rule some day, and in another century I believed that Ireland would stand to England as the United States stands to England, a friendly and neighbouring power.  I believed that Ireland would some day write her own Declaration of Independence.  Liberty, the fundamental instinct of the most primitive living thing, would be the world’s everlasting conflict.