and it seemed to me that, between the two of us, Nodelman and I had hit upon the whole Darwinian doctrine. Later, however, when I dipped into Social Statics, I was over-borne by the wondrous novelty of the thing and by a sense of my own futility, ignorance, and cheapness. I felt at the gates of a great world of knowledge whose existence I had not even suspected. I had to read the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man, and then Spencer again. I sat up nights reading these books. Apart from the purely intellectual intoxication they gave me, they flattered my vanity as one of the "fittest." It was as though all the wonders of learning, acumen, ingenuity, and assiduity displayed in these works had been intended, among other purposes, to establish my title as one of the victors of Existence

A working-man, and every one else who was poor, was an object of contempt to me—a misfit, a weakling, a failure, one of the ruck.

CHAPTER XV

IT was August. In normal times this would have been the beginning of the great "winter season" in our trade. As it was, the deadlock continued. The stubbornness of the men, far from showing signs of wilting under the strain of so many weeks of enforced idleness and suffering, seemed to be gathering strength, while our own people, the manufacturers, were frankly weakening.

The danger of having the great season pass without one being able to fill a single order overcame the fighting blood of the most pugnacious among them.

One was confronted with the risk of losing one's best customers. The trade threatened to pass from New York to Philadelphia and Chicago. If you called the attention of a manufacturer to the unyielding courage of the workmen, the reply invariably was, first, that it was all mere bravado; and, second, that, anyhow, the poor devils had nothing to lose, while the manufacturers had their investments to lose

The press supported the strikers. It did so, not because they were working-people, but because they were East-Siders. Their district was the great field of activity for the American University Settlement worker and fashionable slummer. The East Side was a place upon which one descended in quest of esoteric types and "local color," as well as for purposes of philanthropy and "uplift" work. To spend an evening in some East Side café was regarded as something like spending a few hours at the Louvre so much so that one such café, in the depth of East Houston