I had been born in the working-class, and I was now, at the age of eighteen, beneath the point at which I had started.  I was down in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery about which it is neither nice nor proper to speak.  I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the shambles and the charnel-house of our civilization.  This is the part of the edifice of society that society chooses to ignore.  Lack of space compels me here to ignore it, and I shall say only that the things I there saw gave me a terrible scare.

I was scared into thinking.  I saw the naked simplicities of the complicated civilization in which I lived.  Life was a matter of food and shelter.  In order to get food and shelter men sold things.  The merchant sold shoes, the politician sold his manhood, and the representative of the people, with exceptions, of course, sold his trust; while nearly all sold their honour.  Women, too, whether on the street or in the holy bond of wedlock, were prone to sell their flesh.  All things were commodities, all people bought and sold.  The one commodity that labour had to sell was muscle.  The honour of labour had no price in the marketplace.  Labour had muscle, and muscle alone, to sell.

But there was a difference, a vital difference.  Shoes and trust and honour had a way of renewing themselves.  They were imperishable stocks.  Muscle, on the other hand, did not renew.  As the shoe merchant sold shoes, he continued to replenish his stock.  But there was no way of replenishing the labourer’s stock of muscle.  The more he sold of his muscle, the less of it remained to him.  It was his one commodity, and each day his stock of it diminished.  In the end, if he did not die before, he sold out and put up his shutters.  He was a muscle bankrupt, and nothing remained to him but to go down into the cellar of society and perish miserably.

I learned, further, that brain was likewise a commodity.  It, too, was different from muscle.  A brain seller was only at his prime when he was fifty or sixty years old, and his wares were fetching higher prices than ever.  But a labourer was worked out or broken down at forty-five or fifty.  I had been in the cellar of society, and I did not like the place as a habitation.  The pipes and drains were unsanitary, and the air was bad to breathe.  If I could not live on the parlour floor of society, I could, at any rate, have a try at the attic.  It was true, the diet there was slim, but the air at least was pure.  So I resolved to sell no more muscle, and to become a vendor of brains.

Then began a frantic pursuit of knowledge.  I returned to California and opened the books.  While thus equipping myself to become a brain merchant, it was inevitable that I should delve into sociology.  There I found, in a certain class of books, scientifically formulated, the simple sociological concepts I had already worked out for myself.  Other and greater minds, before I was born, had worked out all that I had thought and a vast deal more.  I discovered that I was a socialist.