For example, “Strawberry” Curran—­named for his red hair and innumerable freckles—­an Irish boy with the face of a choir-singer, and eyes that must have been taken straight out of the blue vault of Heaven.  This lad told about a “free speech fight” in a far Western city, and how the chief of police had led the clubbing, and how they had got back at him.  “We bumped him off all right,” said “Strawberry”; it was a favourite phrase of his—­whenever anybody got in his way, he “bumped him off”.  And then “Flathead Joe”, who came from the Indian country, was moved to emulation, and told how he had put dynamite under the supports of a mine-breaker, and the whole works had slid down a slope into a canyon a mile below.  And then a lame fellow, “Chuck” Peterson, told about the imprisonment of two strike-leaders in the hop-country of California, and of the epidemic of fires and destruction that had plagued that region for several years since.

All such things these men talked about quite casually, as soldiers would talk about the events of the last campaign.  This class-war had been going on for ages, and had its own ethics and its own traditions; those who took part in it had their heroisms and sublimities, precisely like any other soldiers.  They would have been glad to come into the open and fight, but the other side had all the guns.  Every time the “wobblies” succeeded in organizing the workers and calling a big strike, all the agencies of capitalist repression were called in—­they were beaten by capitalist policemen, shot by capitalist sheriffs, starved and frozen in capitalist jails, and so their strike was crushed and their forces scattered.  After many such experiences, it was inevitable that the hot-headed ones should take to secret vengeance, should become conspirators against capitalist society.  And society, forgetting all the provocations it had given, called the “wobblies” criminals, and let it go at that.  But they were a strange kind of criminal, serving a far-off dream.  They had their humours and their humanities, their literature and music and art.  Among them were men of education, graduates of universities both in America and abroad; you might hear one of the group about these camp-fires telling about slave-revolts in ancient Egypt and Greece; or quoting Strindberg and Stirner, or reciting a scene from Synge, or narrating how he had astounded the family of some lonely farm-house by playing Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude” on a badly out-of-tune piano.

Also you met among them men who had kept their gentleness, their sweetness of soul, men of marvellous patience, whose dream of human brotherhood no persecution, no outrage had been able to turn sour.  They clung to their vision of a world redeemed, made over by the outcast and lowly; a vision that was brought to the world by a certain Jewish Carpenter, and has haunted mankind for nineteen hundred years.  The difference was that these men knew precisely how they meant to