As a slogan it enjoyed a long life. It even went into our politics. There are persons who claim that it was for the purpose of changing that habit of thought that Theodore Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party. Be that as it may, the working people, having changed it somewhat, adopted it for their own use. “Capital be damned!” shouted the working people, and like the author of the slogan they forgot that they cursed the very thing that put bread and butter into their dinner-pails. That was the condition when I entered the underbrush that November morning way back in 1916. The four most eventful years in the history of this world have passed since then. In no field has the change been so great as with the working people, working men and working women. When I stepped out of the underbrush, during the last few months of my work and life in the tenements, that slogan had been scrapped, thrown into a waste-basket and forgotten. “We must have our share” had taken its place with the working man and the working woman. “We will have our share.” “There ain’t no use of ’em telling us to look at Russia,” a boss carpenter told me about three months before I left New York City. “We are looking at Russia, looking at it close and constant. That’s the reason we workers in the United States is bound to win out. We see the mistakes made in Russia, and we’re going to avoid them.” I glanced at his wife and saw that she was nodding her head in silent approval. Standing over the roasting-hot cook-stove she was serving her man and their five children their lunch, after having placed a plate for herself in compliment to a woman visitor. That visitor chanced to be myself, an inspector of dog licenses. During the war, when good food was so hard to get in even high-priced restaurants, I formed the habit of taking my own lunch. In a little while I realized that this habit had another value besides that of insuring me pure, cleanly prepared food—it enabled me to accept invitations to meals with tenement-dwellers without embarrassment to them or myself. The day to which I refer on entering their flat I found the family in the act of sitting down to their midday meal. This was not my first meal with the mother and school-children, though it was with the father of the family. Being at work on a building near his home he had come in to lunch. “Do you think wages can remain at their present level?” I questioned. He shook his head—his mouth being filled for the time being by boiled potato and roast beef. “And I ain’t saying that we wanter keep ’em as high as they are,” he added, as soon as he could speak. “Things can’t go down as long as wages are as high as they are. We wants things to go down. It’s ridicklus the prices we has to pay for the things we eat and wear when we’re not at war. Food and clothes oughter be plentiful and cheap, but that don’t mean that wages has got to be what they was before the war.”