My first move in a factory was to study the processes of the particular industry. Machines were not devils to me as they were to some of my reforming friends, particularly that splendid old warrior Florence Kelley, then in the thick of her fight for “ethical gains through legislation.” To me machines freed from heavy labor, created abundance. That is, I started out free of the inhibition that hate of a machine puts on many observers. I think because of this I was better able to judge the character of a factory, to see its weak as well as its good points. I was able to understand what the enemy of the machine rarely admits: that men and women who have arrived at the dignity of steady workers not only respect, but frequently take pride in, their machines. Again, I gave myself time around these factories. The observer who once in his life goes down for half a day into a mine or spends two or three hours walking through a steel mill, naturally revolts against the darkness, the clatter, the smoke, the danger. As a rule he misses the points of real hardship; he also misses the satisfactions. As my pilgrimage lengthened, I became more and more convinced that there is no trade which has not its devotee. “Once a miner, always a miner.” “Once a sailor, always a sailor.” One might go through the whole category. “Why,” I now and then asked miners, “do you stay by the mine?” “I was brought up to it.” “I like it.” “Nobody bothers you when you are working with a pick.” “Nice and quiet in the mines.” “But the danger!” “No worse than railroading.” “My brother got killed by a horse last week.” In the end I came to the conclusion that there was probably no larger percentage of whose who did not like the work they were doing than there is in the white-collar occupations. In the heavy industries particularly, I found something like the farmer’s conviction that they were doing a man’s job. It made them contemptuous of white-collar workers. I spent quite as much time looking at homes as at plants. The test I made of the industrial villages and of company houses was whether or no, if I set myself to it, I could make a decent home in them. I found even in the most barren and unattractive company districts women who had made attractive homes. There was the greatest difference in home-making ability, in the training of women for it. The pride of the man who had a good housekeeper as a wife, a good cook, was great. I do not remember that a man ever asked me to come to his house unless he considered his wife a good housekeeper. I remember one so proud of his home that he took me all over it, showing with delight how his Sunday clothes, his winter overcoat, the Sunday dress of his little girl, were hung on hangers with a calico curtain in front to keep them clean. His housekeeper, in this case a mother-in-law, confided to me in talking things over that night that in her judgment the reason so many men drank was that the women did not know how to keep house.