of a voter, although still poor and hard-working, had already, by virtue of sheer industry and pluck, passed over to the class of wage-payers.  But they were not less ardent reformers after than before that transition.  Isaac at all events, was consistent and unchanged throughout his life in the political principles he adopted among the apprentices and journeymen of New York over half a century ago.  There was little room for vulgar self-conceit in a nature so frank and sincere as his.  What he had to learn, as well as what he had to teach, always dwarfed merely personal considerations to their narrowest dimensions in his mind.  Hence his impulsive candor, the clearness of his views, and the straightforward simplicity of his speech at once attracted notice, and although so young, he went speedily to the front in the local management of his party.  In the article already quoted from, he tells us that after 1834 the managers left all future engagements of lecturers to his brother John and himself.  It was doubtless this fact which led directly to that lasting and fruitful intimacy with Dr. Brownson which then began.  His was the strongest purely human influence, if we except his mother’s, which Isaac Hecker ever knew.  And these two were on planes so different that it is hardly fair to compare them with each other.

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CHAPTER III

THE TURNING-POINT

A BRIEF consideration at this point of a certain permanent tendency of Father Hecker’s mind will be of present and future value to the student of his life.  It has been said already that he never changed the principles he had adopted as a lad among the apprentices and journeymen of New York; principles which, for all social politics, he summarized in the homely expression, “I am always for the under dog.”  Thus, in the article quoted in the preceding chapter, he had the right to say of himself and his associates: 

“We were guileless men absorbed in seeking a solution for the problems of life.  Nor, as social reformers at least, were we given over to theories altogether wrong.  The constant recurrence of similar epochs of social agitation since then, and the present enormous development of the monopolies which we resisted in their very infancy, show that our forecast of the future was not wholly visionary.  The ominous outlook of popular politics at the present moment plainly shows that legislation such as we then proposed, and such as was then within the easy reach of State and national authority, would have forestalled difficulties whose settlement at this day threatens a dangerous disturbance of public order.”