labour and spends it on luxuries, on automobiles and fine houses and
women, on food he can't eat, while you are hungry. Yes, you are slaves,"
he cried, "because you submit like slaves."

He waited, motionless and scornful, for the noise to die down. "Since I
have come here to Hampton, I have heard some speak of the state, others
of the unions. Yet the state is your enemy, it will not help you to gain
your freedom. The legislature has shortened your hours,--but why? Because
the politicians are afraid of you, and because they think you will be
content with a little. And now that the masters have cut your wages, the
state sends its soldiers to crush you. Only fifty cents, they say--only
fifty cents most of you miss from your envelopes. What is fifty cents to
them? But I who speak to you have been hungry, I know that fifty cents
will buy ten loaves of bread, or three pounds of the neck of pork, or six
quarts of milk for the babies. Fifty cents will help pay the rent of the
rat-holes where you live." Once more he was interrupted by angry shouts
of approval. "And the labour unions, have they aided you? Why not? I will
tell you why--because they are the servile instruments of the masters.
The unions say that capital has rights, bargain with it, but for us there
can be only one bargain, complete surrender of the tools to the workers.
For the capitalists are parasites who suck your blood and your children's
blood. From now on there can be no compromise, no truce, no peace until
they are exterminated. It is war." War! In Janet's soul the word
resounded like a tocsin. And again, as when swept along East Street with
the mob, that sense of identity with these people and their wrongs, of
submergence with them in their cause possessed her. Despite her ancestry,
her lot was cast with them. She, too, had been precariously close to
poverty, had known the sordidness of life; she, too, and Lise and Hannah
had been duped and cheated of the fairer things. Eagerly she had drunk in
the vocabulary of that new and terrible philosophy. The master class must