The faith that meets Ten thousand cheats, Yet drops no jot of faith. However little the fact may have applied to the actual “problem of the unemployed,” it nevertheless was true, as shown in my own experience, that there was a striking contrast throughout the country between a struggle among men for employment and a struggle among employers for men. Early in the journey I began to note that every near approach to a considerable centre of population was immediately apparent in an increasing difficulty in finding work. I had never a long search in the country or in country villages, and I soon learned to avoid cities, unless I was bent upon another errand than that of employment. I could easily have escaped Chicago and its crowded labor market. Offers of places in the late autumn as general utility man on farms in northern Ohio and Indiana were plentiful as I passed, and I well knew, during a fortnight’s fruitless search for work in Chicago in early winter, that at any time a day’s march from the city, or two days’ march at most, would take me to regions where the difficulty would quickly disappear. The temptation to quit the experiment altogether, or, at least, to go out to the more hospitable country, was then strong at times; but I could but realize that, in yielding, I should be abandoning a very real phase of the experience of unskilled labor, that of unemployment, and that I should miss the chance of some contact with bodies of organized skilled workmen as well as with the revolutionaries who can be easiest found in our larger towns. So I remained, and for two weeks I saw and, in an artificial way, I felt something of the grim horror of being penniless on the streets of a city in winter, quite able and most willing to work, yet unable to find any steady employment. With the return of spring I went into the country again, drifting on with no more definite plan than that of going westward until I should reach the Pacific; and here at once was the contrast. Opportunities of work everywhere; with farmers, when one was on the country roads; in brick-kilns, when bad walking drove one to the railway lines. Farrell, a fellow-tramp for a day on the Rock Island Railway in Illinois, had, for seven weeks, been looking for work from Omaha to Lima and back again, he told me, and yet he got a job near Ottawa in response to his first inquiry; while a few miles farther down the line I, too, was offered work in a brick-kiln at Utica. I did not accept it, only because I had savings enough from my last job to see me through to Davenport.