I spent most of the morning in the newspaper-room of the public library, writing impossible applications for impossible posts—­I remember that among other things of the sort I offered my services to a firm of private detectives, a sinister breed of traders upon base jealousies now happily vanished from the world, and wrote apropos of an advertisement for “stevedores” that I did not know what the duties of a stevedore might be, but that I was apt and willing to learn—­and in the afternoons and evenings I wandered through the strange lights and shadows of my native valley and hated all created things.  Until my wanderings were checked by the discovery that I was wearing out my boots.

The stagnant inconclusive malaria of that time!

I perceive that I was an evil-tempered, ill-disposed youth with a great capacity for hatred, but—­

There was an excuse for hate.

It was wrong of me to hate individuals, to be rude, harsh, and vindictive to this person or that, but indeed it would have been equally wrong to have taken the manifest offer life made me, without resentment.  I see now clearly and calmly, what I then felt obscurely and with an unbalanced intensity, that my conditions were intolerable.  My work was tedious and laborious and it took up an unreasonable proportion of my time, I was ill clothed, ill fed, ill housed, ill educated and ill trained, my will was suppressed and cramped to the pitch of torture, I had no reasonable pride in myself and no reasonable chance of putting anything right.  It was a life hardly worth living.  That a large proportion of the people about me had no better a lot, that many had a worse, does not affect these facts.  It was a life in which contentment would have been disgraceful.  If some of them were contented or resigned, so much the worse for every one.  No doubt it was hasty and foolish of me to throw up my situation, but everything was so obviously aimless and foolish in our social organization that I do not feel disposed to blame myself even for that, except in so far as it pained my mother and caused her anxiety.

Think of the one comprehensive fact of the lock-out!

That year was a bad year, a year of world-wide economic disorganization.  Through their want of intelligent direction the great “Trust” of American ironmasters, a gang of energetic, narrow-minded furnace owners, had smelted far more iron than the whole world had any demand for. (In those days there existed no means of estimating any need of that sort beforehand.) They had done this without even consulting the ironmasters of any other country.  During their period of activity they had drawn into their employment a great number of workers, and had erected a huge productive plant.  It is manifestly just that people who do headlong stupid things of this sort should suffer, but in the old days it was quite possible, it was customary for the real blunderers in such disasters, to shift nearly