"During the teamsters' strike I witnessed a scene where the strikers hustled the scabs, overturned several huge wagons loaded with beef, in the centre of one of the poorest districts of Chicago, where the people were suffering from want of meat, but the wretches did not even have sense enough to help themselves from this plentiful store which was left on the street guarded only by one or two policemen. And there would have been no danger of arrest, for the policemen could easily have been swept aside by the rest of the mob. It made me mad. I felt like shouting at them, 'you fools, why don't you help yourselves?' How differently a hungry bunch of kids would have acted!" Terry, in his very different way, wrote on the same subject: "I never knew a sincere, not to say honest, labour leader, from business agent up. Poor proletaire! forever crucified between two sets of thieves--one rioting on his rights, the other carousing on his wrongs. Labour plods while plunder plays, thus runs the world away. But if he should take it into his thick head to be his own walking delegate some day!" This strange master of the "salon," this poetic interpreter of the philosophy of the man who has nothing, has, in spite of his pessimisms, a profound mystic hope. He wrote: "That toiling humanity--the labour movement--to me is a thing so vast, that whatever other movements try to exclude themselves from it, they must be swallowed up in it. All other things are but the shadows cast behind or before the ever-marching phalanx of the unconquerable, the imperishable proletaire. This is the hope which sends its thrill through us when nothing else can. At the bottom of my heart I know I am living but for one thing, and my life has been nothing but a preparation for this. Of and for myself I have accomplished nothing: for to be ever ready and alert is not accomplishment.... I see a profound hope in the proletaire, for to him is granted that intense, wistful awareness of his common lot and life with his fellows. His very crowding in factories and tenements, salons, unions, and brothels, brings it home to him. Yes, this very lack of space must remorselessly rub it in, even by dumb, physical close contact. The friction resulting from ten living in one room must make one of them phosphorescent--and capable of giving light to humanity. The tenement houses are harmless boxes of lucifers as long as none is ignited. The inhabitants are wofully benighted, but they possess wonderfully the quality of brotherhood, of oneness, hence arises their wonderful psychology and their aesthetics, so full and overflowing with pathos, so piercing, it carries one to that borderland where comic and tragic make marriage.