I discussed “Men and Steel” and Pittsburgh with Mary Heaton Vorse, she had seen the beauty and the grandeur of the mills as I had. I said that I thought the basis of the labor trouble here was that Labor is alien and can be not only exploited, but any attempt of alien Labor to rebel is not tolerated. When I asked in Pittsburgh whether Labor had gained anything by its Steel Strike in 1919, I was told emphatically “No”--to which I replied that the English working man gains something every time he strikes! The argument I was given was this: “They haven’t got to work in the mills if they don’t want to----.” “No,” I said, “But can you do without them?” “No----.” Mary Vorse says, however, that I am wrong about its being alien Labor that is exploited. She says that the American farmer in the west is not treated any better. They all admitted, however, that no such poverty or bad living conditions existed in Pittsburgh, for example, as in London, Hull, New Castle, etc. The English slums are probably the most tragic in the world. After lunch I went with Barry and Durant to his office. The feeling was at once Moscow! I know so well the type of clerk in those offices. I met all the staff, and saw some proofs which are publications in the next number of the Magazine, SOVIET RUSSIA. It is interesting that an old Philadelphia family belonging to Rittenhouse Square should produce Kenneth: an ascetic Bolshevik with an archaic face. A face that belongs to the woods, and a soul that belongs to the world’s workers. It is not always working people and worker’s conditions that produce revolutionaries and world reformers. Reaction produces them. The intellectual free-thinker and free-observer is driven out of his own sphere in spite of himself--human sympathy, a sense of justice, added to a revulsion against the narrow prejudice, the intense dullness of a social bourgeois class. A society that’s purely social and not intellectual is dull all the world over. In some countries its monotony is varied by its vice. In this country it is less vicious (apparently) and more dull, less intellectual, and more overwhelmingly conventional. No one with imagination or spirit could help reacting from it. Kenneth and I are reactionaries!