At that time (nine or ten years ago), because I made a stand in my
native town for municipal ownership of public utilities, I was
branded a "red-shirt," a "dynamiter," and an "anarchist"; and really
decent fellows, who liked me very well, drew the line at my
appearing in public with their sisters.

But the times changed. There came a day when I heard, in my native
town, a Republican mayor publicly proclaim that "municipal ownership
was a fixed American policy." And in that day I found myself
picking up in the world. No longer did the pathologist study me,
while the really decent fellows did not mind in the least the
propinquity of myself and their sisters in the public eye. My
political and sociological ideas were ascribed to the vagaries of
youth, and good-natured elderly men patronized me and told me that I
would grow up some day and become an unusually intelligent member of
the community. Also they told me that my views were biassed by my
empty pockets, and that some day, when I had gathered to me a few
dollars, my views would be wholly different,--in short, that my
views would be their views.

And then came the day when my socialism grew respectable,--still a
vagary of youth, it was held, but romantically respectable.
Romance, to the bourgeois mind, was respectable because it was not
dangerous. As a "red-shirt," with bombs in all his pockets, I was
dangerous. As a youth with nothing more menacing than a few
philosophical ideas, Germanic in their origin, I was an interesting
and pleasing personality.

Through all this experience I noted one thing. It was not I that
changed, but the community. In fact, my socialistic views grew