One of these men had pamphlets issued by a strike-leader in Lawrence, urging violence against the mill-owners; clippings from a Chicago paper which told of deplorable conditions in the districts inhabited by steel-workers of Pittsburgh and outlining a plan for improvement. But in reading the clipping, the Siberian overlooked entirely the fact that bad conditions were described for the purpose of guarding against reproducing them, and to take some action to correct the evils. He read with understanding only those paragraphs which stated that conditions were deplorable, and were soon to be eradicated. And this paper, fighting editorially against exploitation, he described as part of our “capitalistic press.” He interpreted its printed protests as mutterings before a coming revolution. The editor, undoubtedly striving to aid and uplift the working men, perhaps never dreamed that what he printed would be used as propaganda to prove his paper part of a “capitalistic press.” Another clipping from a radical sheet printed in the middle west, described the mounted constabulary of Pennsylvania, as “Cossacks, organized and supported by capitalists, to cut down the workers.” This man did not know that this state police force is maintained and supported by the state--he read the caption literally and believed that it was a private punitive force in the hire of the mill-owners. He also believed they were Cossacks! Freedom of the press, and freedom of speech, are two of our greatest liberties. But when Russians who have been to the United States, can return to Siberia and tell the population that we are worse than Russia, and that we are going to have a revolution, and read to the people sensational statements and half-baked and distorted information, at the same time that we are in that country trying to prove our friendship for them and asserting that the United States is a free country, something is wrong. That is the state of affairs which confronted us from the first in Siberia. I do not maintain that our systems are perfect. I have much sympathy for the “working classes,” having begun life as a boy in a factory, served in the ranks of the army and before the mast in ships. “Ah!” said a Siberian to my interpreter, waving his hand in the direction of vacant ground near a small river, “If the Americans would only build a factory here for us, and make jobs.” “But you are opposed to capitalism,” I said. “Yes,” he nodded. “We are fighting it.” “If an American built a factory here, it would take money-capital.” “Oh, yes,” he said. “The Russians have burned a lot of factories.” “Yes.” “If a factory were built here would you burn it?” “Maybe we would.” “Then how can you expect a man with money, which is capital, to come here and build a factory, if it is likely it would be burned?” He pondered this. “We might only take it away from him,” he decided.