Opening directly upon the black rot of crumbling pavements were the steep descents to dark cellars which undermine these reeking hovels. From many of them, as we passed, came the hot breath of furnaces laden with the wholesome smell of baking bread. These were the underground bakeries of the region, and down their wooden steps, whose surfaces were buried under layers of hardened filth, were ranged the great round loaves of dark bread on which this population largely lives. While through the open doors, which admitted freely the floating germs from off the putrid streets, we caught glimpses of baking-tins full of soft muffins ready for the oven, and bakers in white dress who moved about in the gloomy, fetid air over floors strewn with ashes and the crumpled shells of eggs and crumbs of unbaked dough. Mingling in the squalid crowds upon the streets were other figures peculiar to the scene. Women they were for the most part, with ragged, faded shawls tied round their heads and falling over their shoulders, and limp skirts, dangling about their legs and brushing the surface slime of the pavements. Some upon their shoulders, and others in Oriental fashion upon their heads, they bore large bundles of clothing which had been cut at the great dealers’ shops, and which they were taking now to be made up in the sweaters’ dens. [Illustration: RETURNING WORK FROM SWEAT SHOPS.] The Unionist was talking rapidly, almost vehemently, at my side, with the swift, nervous gesticulation of his race, for he was a young Polish Jew, of short, sturdy figure, with wiry black hair, and eyes which were like burnished coals. The scenes about us, which were far more interesting to me, concerned him not at all in contrast with the delight he felt in picturing the outcome of political change. Like so many of the Socialists whom I met, he was an admirable workman, and thoroughly practical in his views of life, and hugely energetic and efficient in the organization of his trades-union; but yet he was possessed, as most of them are, of a strange faculty of living intensely at times in dreams of a fulfilment of preconceptions of another social order. He was hard at it now, and was completely blind to the significant facts about us. With an amazing acquaintance with contemporaneous political history, he had been sketching for me what he regarded as a great economic revolution in America. The drift of what he said was simply that in this country, from colonial days to the present, the middle-class, who are the small owners of land and capital, have been the main support of the society in which we have lived, and that the chief strength of the middle-class has been the farmer.