I suppose Steffens had heard of the Golden Rule, but I am certain he had never thought about it as a practical scheme for improving society. It seemed to me, at the time, that it came to him as an illumination, and for some years he held tight to it, preaching it to political bosses, to the tycoons of Wall Street, the Brahmins of Boston, confronting them with amazing frankness and no little satisfaction with their open disregard of its meanings. He became greatly disillusioned finally by discovering that men were quite willing to let their opponents act upon the Golden Rule but much less so to be governed by it themselves. My first realization that Steffens was struggling with the problem which confronted us all—that is, whether we should stick to our profession or become propagandists—was one day when I looked up suddenly to find him standing by my desk more sober, less certain of himself than I had ever seen him. “Charles Edward Russell has gone over to the Socialist party,” he said. “Is that not what we should all be doing? Should we not make _The American Magazine_ a Socialist organ?” I flared. Our only hope for usefulness was in keeping our freedom, avoiding dogma, I argued. And that the _American_ continued to do. In the years that were to come, wars and revolutions largely occupied Steffens. Wherever there was a revolution you found him. He wrote many brilliant comments on what was going on in the world. When he came back from Russia after the Kerensky revolution he was like a man who had seen a long hoped-for vision. “I have looked at the millennium and it works,” he told me. It was to be the practical application of that Golden Rule he had so long preached. But to my mind the Russian Revolution had only just begun. The event in which he saw the coming of the Lord I looked on as only the first of probably many convulsions forced by successive generations of unsatisfied radicals, irreconcilable counterrevolutionists. When I voiced these pessimistic notions to Steffens he called me heartless and blind. But there were other forces working against the type of journalism in which we believed. We were classed as muckrakers, and the school had been so commercialized that the public was beginning to suspect it. The public is not as stupid as it sometimes seems. The truth of the matter was that the muckraking school was stupid. It had lost the passion for facts in a passion for subscriptions.