Soap-boxers are “free lances” most of the time. Either they are out of harmony with all organizations or no organization has been willing to adopt them. Those who make street speaking a profession are a great deal like the ancient sophists. They are able to plead one cause today and a different cause tomorrow. Their allegiance is to be had by any group that can make the proper bid. With some of them the inducement must be a financial one, while others are interested only in ideas. If the idea attracts them they will take up the new angle of the subject with the same enthusiasm that they did the old. In this respect they are influenced by public opinion. They love to harangue the crowds but they like to have the crowd on their side. EDUCATING THE PROLETARIAT Soap-boxers usually take themselves seriously, though their audiences do not always do so. They take themselves seriously in spite of their frequent and often abrupt changes in positions on the issues they discuss. They are usually made to explain these changes, and these explanations, if not always logical, are usually sincere. They invariably give their best thoughts on the subject they discuss. Whatever they have gleaned from the available sources they are striving to express in language that is live and understandable to the man on the street. These efforts to clear the issues, to spread propaganda or whatever it may be called, is termed by the soap-boxers, “education.” Not all the “stem” intellectuals who assume the burden of educating the proletariat use the soap box. Many of them wield the pen. The latter are, in the main, free-lance writers, and most of their productions are tinctured with “red.” But they are generally able to catch the ear of the down-and-out, whether he is a hobo or not. The writings of these cloistered radicals, who are striving to bring the chaotic proletariat to a unity of the faith, provide the soap-box pulpiteer with facts and ideas which he interprets and passes on to his curbstone audience in the shape of poems, songs, articles, and essays. The writers provide, for them, an abundance of material out of which the orators build their castles. Most of these literary radicals are optimistic about the success of their efforts to “get the worker’s mind right,” and thus prepare him for the new order. The masses must be educated, but the soap-boxer, whose burden it is, must himself be educated, and that is the job of the writer who works behind the scenes.