"To be a moment late, means to be docked and to have it rubbed in by an insult. To take a day off, well--death is taken as an excuse. There is no such thing in a shop as social equality between boss and men. In my last position as foreman I had charge of three hundred men. Many of them were faithful comrades in many a brave strike, where starvation pressed hard, whence they had emerged with hollow cheeks and undaunted hearts. I soon came to know them all, personally, intimately, and liked them all, though I felt most strangely drawn to those who worked for one dollar a day. They all did their work faithfully, and there was no complaint from the front office. One day, however, the owner charged me with treating the hands as if they were my equals. I tried to make him see the human justification of it, but he would have none of it. He was a typical boss and also a millionaire banker. "It was about this time that I discovered the deepest tonic my nerves have ever known. The explosion of the Haymarket bomb found a responsive chord, the vibrations of which will never cease in me, I hope. The unconscious in me was at last released, and I held my mad balance on the crater's edge and gazed into it. Hereafter, I was to live on dangerous ground, at least in thought. No more doubt, no more shuffling now. I must try the chords of my heart, the sympathy of my soul, in open rebellion. The iniquities of civilisation had ruined a fine barbarian in me, and almost made of me a maudlin miscreant, willing to hang upon the skirts of a false society. The Haymarket bomb made me strip again and for a nobler fray. "Of what avail was it, I reflected, to raise one's voice in the wilderness of theories? How do any good by a social enthusiasm merely expressed in theory? Such thin cerebral structures are shattered to pieces in the ordeal of life. Ah, but this anonymous Avatar, this man with the bomb! His instinct was right, but how far short it fell, and must always fall. He had settled the strife within him and become definite to himself: that was all he had done. I too must settle the strife within me. I was plunged into prolonged dreams from which I was aroused by hunger, hunger of many kinds, and driven into my former haunt, the shop. "But now, when I stripped for work in the factory and donned my vestments of toil, I stood forth without falsehood. I knew, if not what I was, at least what I wanted, rather what I did not want. I did not want this, this society!