Perhaps Governor Altgeld was willing to forego any “credit” for an act, which, however necessary to the preservation of order, demanded so many lives. I do not know as to that, but I do recall the expression which clouded his face that afternoon we arrived at Lemont, during the strike at the drainage canal. It occurred a year before the railway strike, and the Governor had gone to Lemont himself to make an investigation. He had asked Lieutenant Baker and me to go with him, and when we got off the train at Lemont, on the afternoon of a cheerless day, the crowds were standing aimlessly about, watching with a sullen curiosity the arrival of the militia. The soldiers were just then going into camp on the level rocks by a bridge across the canal and the Desplaines River--the bridge, according to the military scientists, was, I believe, considered, for some mysterious reason, to be a strategic point. The picture was one for the brush of Remington--those young blue-clad soldiers (it was before the days of our imperialism, and of the khaki our soldiers now imitate the British in wearing)--and Baker and I stood and gazed at it a moment, affected by the fascination there always is in the superficial military spectacle; and then, suddenly, we were aware that there was another and more dramatic point of interest, where a group stood about the body of a workman who had been shot in the riots of that morning. He was a foreigner, the clothes he wore doubtless those he had had on when he passed under the Statue of Liberty, coming to this land with what hopes of freedom in his breast no one can ever know. The wife who had come with him was on her knees beside him, rocking back and forth in her grief, dumb as to any words in a strange land whose tongue she could not speak or understand. The reporters from the Chicago newspapers were there, and among them Eddie Bernard, an old Whitechapeler, who told us that the man had reached Lemont only a few days before, and had been happy in the job he had so promptly found in the new land of promise. And now, there he lay, shot dead. Bernard looked a moment, and then in the irony of a single phrase he expressed the whole drama as he said: “The land of the free and the home of the brave!” That was fundamental, anyhow, and politics were not going deeply into the question, except as such men as Altgeld did so, and even they were criticized sharply for attempting it. And one might well be disgusted with politics, then and always, and think of something that has the consolation of literature. The traffic of politicians, as Mr. George Moore somewhere says, is with the things of this world, while art is concerned with the dreams, the visions and the aspirations of a world beyond this. Though literature must some day in this land concern itself with that very question of labor, since it is with fundamental life that art must deal, and be true in its dealing. XVII