I recall the indignation of a young man, just graduated from one of our universities, when chance took him into an East Side hall where a well-known anarchist was addressing a large and attentive audience and reading selections from Thoreau. Without any obvious provocation the police jumped upon the platform, arrested the woman and those who sat with her, refused them permission to call a cab, and drove them in the patrol wagon to the police station. At the time there was no limit to which this man would not have gone to show his resentment against the injustice of the proceeding, and it was some relief to his chivalrous spirit to testify against the police and to use the settlement’s experience in giving publicity to the occurrence. Something of this menace to cherished American institutions lay in the occurrences at Lawrence, Massachusetts, during the winter of 1912. Unsatisfactory labor conditions gave the Industrial Workers of the World an opportunity to capture the loyalty and devotion of the discontented operatives. Reports of the unwarranted action of police and militia during a strike that ensued, the imprisonment of the strike leaders, and the difficulty of securing for them an impartial hearing were incidents too serious to be lightly dismissed from the mind. I went to Lawrence at that time, and came away reflecting with sadness on the manifestations there of how slight is our hold upon civilization, how insecure our reliance upon the courts for justice when feelings run high. The operatives’ story had not reached the general public, and I offered the House on Henry Street as one medium for informing people in New York who had no link with the working people. A participant in the strike came to us to tell the story, and her presentation, on the whole, seemed fair and reasonable. It was no less an indictment of the leaders of the established labor organizations for failure to unionize the workers, and thereby secure better wages and shorter hours, than of the capitalist, who, the speaker thought, should be held responsible for creating the conditions. The reaction of the audience was definite—that the workers should have tangible assurance of the existence of an American sentiment for justice, and money came spontaneously to the settlement to be sent to the strikers and toward the cost of the defense of the prisoners. The New York press, on the whole, gave fair interpretation of the causes of discontent and the disturbing consequences to society of what appeared to some observers to be anarchistic methods on the part of those in authority. * * * * * The Social Reform Club, organized in 1894, was a factor in helping to stimulate a more general public interest in matters of social concern.