The club aimed at the immediate future, and labored solely for measures that had a fair promise of early success. Its members, wage-earners and non-wage-earners in almost equal numbers, were required to have “a deep active interest in the elevation of society, especially by the improvement of the condition of wage-earners.” Ernest Crosby, Tolstoian and reformer, was the first president, and the original membership comprised distinguished men and women, courageous thinkers who fully met the requirements of the society, and others, like myself, who were to gain enlightenment regarding methods and theories for the direct improvement of industrial and social conditions. Father Ducey, whose support of Father McGlynn[18] during his time of trial was then still referred to; Charles B. Spahr, and others no longer living were among the organizers. On the club’s weekly programmes can be read the names of men and women who were then and still are bearers of light for the community. Devoted members of the club testified to their indebtedness to the Knights of Labor as “a great educational force for social reform,” and a younger generation gained immeasurably from association with men and women who had given themselves unselfishly to the early labor movements in this country. It was at the time of excessive sweatshop abuses, and from the windows of our tenement home we could look upon figures bent over the whirring foot-power machines. One room in particular almost unnerved us. Never did we go to bed so late or rise so early that we saw the machines at rest, and the unpleasant conditions where manufacturing was carried on in the overcrowded rooms of the families we nursed disquieted us more than the diseases we were trying to combat. Our sympathies were ready for enlistment when working people whom we knew, and whose sobriety of habits and mind won confidence and esteem, discussed the possibility of improving conditions through organization. In another place I have told how the young girls first led us into the trades union movement, but now where the standard of the entire family was involved through the wage and working conditions of its chief wage-earner, it became to us a movement of greater significance. We were accorded a doubtful distinction by acquaintances who had no point of contact with working people when we acknowledged friendship with “demagogues” and “walking delegates” (terms which they used interchangeably), and, inexperienced though we were, it was possible for us, in a small way, to help build a bridge of understanding.