=The Vagabond Workers.= One night in Seattle I saw a large group of men gathered on a street corner and singing at the top of their voices. The strange chorus was led by a young fellow who was standing on a soap box. The song he was teaching was mere doggerel; the refrain of it being “Oh, Mr. Block, you take the cake. You make me ache.” The leader would pronounce a line, then say, “Now, fellow workingmen, all sing and sing with all your might. Let us show them what we can do.” And the motley crowd shouted out the words of the song which told the story of a poor “blanket stiff”--a fellow who has to carry his blankets when he goes looking for a job--who got through work in one place, went into an employment agency to ask for a new job and was told that if he would put up the money he could get the job. He paid two dollars and was sent out into the woods. When he got off the train there was no job in sight. He came back and made his complaint, but nothing could be done because that was the method by which the employment agency made its money. He then applied to Samuel Gompers of the Federation of Labor, but all he got from Gompers was “sympathy.” This man’s name was “Block,” and to accentuate the significance of the name the leader would hold up his hand, stop the crowd from singing, and then tapping on his head would say, “What was his name?” and they would reply “Block.” “What was it made of?” and they shouted “wood.” It was amusing to listen to this crowd but in the midst of the grotesquery of the leader and the raucous howling of the song there was a moral quality and a spiritual earnestness that even a casual listener could feel. These men had just come in from the woods. They were laborers who had been lumbering all through the winter, and now at the end of the season were thrown on the city with nothing to do. The Industrial Workers of the World, that revolutionary organization that was formed in Colorado early in this century, had found a fertile soil in the minds of these men and had not been slow to sow the seed. I stood with one of the group and listened. My friend was an elderly man who had just reached the city from the mines in Alaska. In his youth he had been a miner in Wales. Said he, “This carries me back to the days of my boyhood. The Welsh sang as these men do, and the discontent of the miners in our district gathered headway under the leadership of the local Methodist preacher. The men sang and from their singing began an enthusiasm that rolled throughout the whole region in a wave of protest against the bitter conditions under which we were forced to work. We got results. If these men keep on singing, some day they are going to make their message heard.” The main reason for the I. W. W. and similar organizations is that nothing has been done for the laborer who is at the bottom of the industrial ladder. He is considered a tramp, pushed into the out-of-the-way places, forced to do the hardest, most perilous