"I took part in the famous bread riots of '77, when I had to fly from the shop, before an infuriated mob armed with sticks, stones, pikes, and pitchforks. In the same year I saw from a distance the great battle of the viaduct, when the mob, armed as in the bread riots, faced the federal troops and were shot down and dispersed. It was about this time, too, that I stood by as the 'Lehr und Wehr Verein' in their blue blouses of toil and shouldered rifles strode ominously onward. These men were the first fruits in America of Bakunin's ideals and work in Europe. They, too, were put down, by an act of legislature. "These proletarian protagonists whipped me into a fury. My father, too, had his rifle, and when drunk he invoked it, as it hung on the wall, thus: 'Come down, my sweet rifle, how brightly you shine! What tyrant dare stifle that sweet voice of thine.' But my father was only a Fenian revolutionist; and as it was only a step for me from Ireland to Internationalism, I was soon beyond his creed. "We had come to America during war times, with the spirit of revolt already germinating within us; and although we were against slavery, our sympathies were with the South. We were natural as well as political democrats, and even when the mob was in the wrong, I always became one of it. How finely elemental, how responsive to the best and the worst, is the mob when the crisis comes! "Although my thoughts were forming through my readings and the larger events about me, the everyday life in the shop was perhaps the deepest cause of my growing revolt. The atmosphere of the frenzied factory is well calculated to produce a spirit of sullen and smouldering rebellion in the minds of its less hardened inmates. From the domineering boss down to the smallest understrapper, the spirit of the jailer and turnkey is dominant. Much worse than solitary confinement is it to be sentenced to ten hours of silence and drudgery. The temptation to speak to the man at your side is well nigh irresistible. But to speak means to be marked, to have hurled at you a humiliating reprimand, or, as a last resort, to be discharged. "No lunching between meals is allowed, although it is a well-known fact that few workers have the appetite at dawn to eat sufficient food to last them till their cold lunch at noon. From this comes the terrible habit, among the older toilers, of the eye-opener, a gulp of rot-gut whiskey, taken to arouse the sleeping stomach and force sufficient food on it to last till noon. As a convalescent victim of this proletarian practice I am well aware of its ravages on body and mind. It is the will-of-the-wisp of false whiskey followed by false hope, leading into the fogs and bogs of the bourgeois and the quicksands of the capitalist.