fine ambition and the reduction of excellence to a dead level of indifferent mediocrity. They deliberately surrendered individual liberty and all its possibilities and became the bondmen of a tyrannous dictator which they set up. I was familiar with the loafer and the shirker. He is incident to humanity. He exists in every calling and rank of life. But it was novel to me to find an entire class deliberately loafing and shirking and slurring on principle. I saw gangs of workmen waiting around, shivering in the wind, for the hour to come when they might take up the tools which lay at hand with which they might have warmed themselves. I saw them on the stroke, drop those tools as though the wave of sound had paralyzed their arms. I saw them leave the stone half set, the rivet half driven, the bar half turned; the work, whatever it was, half done. I saw bright, alert, intelligent men, whose bodies were twice and their brains ten times as active as their fellows', do double work in the same time as the latter and then dawdle and loaf and yawn empty-handed beside the unfinished work with which they might readily have doubled their income. I asked some of my friends why it was and the answer was always the same: "the Union." A strike was going on on the other side of the town, but the direct results were not yet felt among us, and as the enterprises there where the trouble existed were in conflict with those on our side, and therefore our rivals, it did not appear likely that we should be affected except possibly to our advantage. The population of our section, therefore, looked on and discussed the troubles with the placid satisfaction of men who, secure on land, discuss and commiserate those tossed by storms far off, whose existence is known only by the long surges that with spent force roll against their shore. They enjoyed their own good fortune, rejoiced in the good times, and to a considerable extent spent their earnings like children, almost indifferent as to the future. XXVIII THE WALKING DELEGATE