As an unskilled laborer I was not eligible to membership in any union, but I was admitted freely to the central meetings, to which I sometimes went in company with Socialists who were delegates of their respective orders. Under their tutelage, I was shown the operation of an exceedingly complex system, which, seen without guidance, would have appeared to me hopelessly chaotic. I was seeing it, I realized, from the point of view of the Socialists, and I was interested immediately in learning their attitude. They are, I found, most ardent supporters of the principle of organization among workingmen. They regard the fact of the organization of wage-earners as among the most significant developments in the evolution of a socialistic state. But they are very impatient of the slow rate of progress in Trades-Unionism. The ignorance of the great mass of workers of how to further their own interests is, to the Socialist, the most discouraging feature in labor-organization. “Why,” they ask, “when we working people already have so strong a nucleus of organization for economic ends, do we not direct it at once into the field of politics, and secure immediately, by our overwhelming numbers, the legislation which we need, and so inaugurate a co-operative commonwealth?” Nowhere have the walking-delegates and the general agitators of their class sincerer foes than among the Socialists who, more than to any other active cause, attribute the comparative ineffectualness of unionism to the influence of these men. Very readily they believe them purchasable, and that often they are little else than the paid agents of the capitalists. Their great influence over workingmen is used, the Socialists seem to believe, chiefly in their own interests and particularly for selfish political ends. This habit of mind serves to illustrate what eventually appeared to me to be highly characteristic of the general attitude of Socialists. The key to their mental processes in considering things social, lies, I am quite sure, in the idea of existing conditions as being maintained by a vast capitalistic conspiracy. At all events this clew has cleared up for me the mystery which at first I found in many of their ways of thinking.