So that was the way Hal seemed to the “G. F. C.”! He had come here intending to be a spectator, to stand on the deck of the steamer and look down into the ocean of social misery. He had considered every step so carefully before he took it! He had merely tried to be a check-weighman, nothing more! He had told Tom Olson he would not go in for unionism; he had had a distrust of union organisers, of agitators of all sorts--blind, irresponsible persons who went about stirring up dangerous passions. He had come to admire Tom Olson--but that had only partly removed his prejudices; Olson was only one agitator, not the whole lot of them! But all his consideration for the company had counted for nothing; likewise all his efforts to convince the marshal that he was a leisure-class person. In spite of all Hal’s “tea-party manners,” the marshal had said, “You agitators!” What was he judging by, Hal wondered. Had he, Hal Warner, come to look like one of these blind, irresponsible persons? It was time that he took stock of himself! Had two months of “dirty work” in the bowels of the earth changed him so? The idea was bound to be disconcerting to one who had been a favourite of the ladies! Did he talk like it?--he who had been “kissing the Blarney-stone!” The marshal had said he was “long-winded!” Well, to be sure, he had talked a lot; but what could the man expect--having shut him up in jail for two nights and a day, with only his grievances to brood over! Was that the way real agitators were made--being shut up with grievances to brood over? Hal recalled his broodings in the jail. He had been embittered; he had not cared whether North Valley was dominated by labour unions. But that had all been a mood, the same as his answer to his brother; that was jail psychology, a part of his summer course in practical sociology. He had put it aside; but apparently it had made a deeper impression upon him than he had realised. It had changed his physical aspect! It had made him look and talk like an agitator! It had made him “irresponsible,” “blind!” Yes, that was it! All this dirt, ignorance, disease, this knavery and oppression, this maiming of men in body and soul in the coal-camps of America--all this did not exist--it was the hallucination of an “irresponsible” brain! There was the evidence of Hal’s brother and the camp-marshal to prove it; there was the evidence of the whole world to prove it! The camp-marshal and his brother and the whole world could not be “blind!” And if you talked to them about these conditions, they shrugged their shoulders, they called you a “dreamer,” a “crank,” they said you were “off your trolley”; or else they became angry and bitter, they called you names; they said, “You agitators!” SECTION 24.