And the strikes in the other plants were settled or compromised, or wore themselves out, or in some way got themselves ended, though not the largest and most ominous of them, that in the automobile works, until my friend Mr. Marshall Sheppey and I had worked seventy-two hours continuously to get the leaders of the opposing sides together. It was an illuminating experience for both of us, and not without its penalties, since thereafter we were called upon to arbitrate a dozen other strikes. We found both sides rather alike in their humanness, and one as unreasonable as the other, but we found too that if we could keep them together long enough, their own reason somehow prevailed and they reached those fragile compromises which are the most we may expect in the present status of productive industry in this world. The old shop of Golden Rule Jones had its strike with the rest of them, and yet a strange and significant fate befell it. Alone of all the other shops and factories in the city involved in that strike, it was not picketed by the strikers, they did not even visit it, so far as I know. There were no guards and no policemen needed. And when I asked one of the labor leaders to account for this strange oversight, this surprising lack of solidarity and discipline in their ranks, he said, as though he must exculpate himself: “Oh well, you know--Mayor Jones. We haven’t forgotten him and what he was.” LIV It was because of this attitude toward workingmen, and their cause, that I was accused, now and then, by those who knew nothing about Socialism, of being a Socialist; by those who did know about it I was condemned for not being one. Our movement indeed had no opponents in the town more bitter than the Socialists, that is the authentic and orthodox Socialists of the class-conscious Marxist order, and they opposed me so insistently that I might as well have been the capitalist class and had done with it. I do not intend to confuse myself with the movement of which I, for a while, was but the merest and weakest of human instruments; I speak in that personal sense only because the opposition was of a personal quality so intense that it could hardly have been expected of an attitude that was always insisted upon as so entirely impersonal, the cold and scientific attitude of minds that had comprehended the whole of human history, analyzed the whole amazing complexity of human life, and reduced its problems to that degree in which they were all to be solved by a formula so brief that it could be printed on a visiting card. The complaint these scientists made of our movement was that its ameliorations in city life were retarding that evolution of which they were the inspired custodians and conservators; some of them spoke of it as though it were but a darkling part of that vast conspiracy against mankind in which the capitalists were so shamelessly engaged. If we had only let things alone, it was